by Lisa Samson
“This is better. I like it here, and I don’t need light.” She looks at her wrapped finger. “And this! I have no idea what I’m doing, so I will learn to do it this way. I won’t notice the difference. Maybe I can use my hand too, just a little. It’s only the pinkie that hurts.”
“You may not know how to paint, but you know all about photography.”
For the second time today, I see her blush. “Not everything. But yes, I used to love it, a long time ago. I filled albums full of pictures.”
“I would love to see them,” I say.
She gives me an appraising look, trying to gauge my sincerity, and like it did on the day she arrived, her face darkens and ages.
“Yes,” Aunt Bel says, her eyes clouded. “But they are all gone now.”
“You can take more, then. You can use my camera anytime. Maybe show me some things. I have a lot to learn.”
“If you would like that.”
“I would.”
From the foot of the stairs, Finn gives me an approving nod. We start tearing into the packaging, handing the paints to Aunt Bel, who organizes them by color. There’s an easel too, which I help Finn assemble, and a pair of blank stretched canvases. I place one of them on the stand.
“All you need now is a beret,” I say. “It looks like you’ll have to prep the canvas first.”
Aunt Bel shakes her head. “I had no idea.”
“Don’t worry.” Finn digs through his jeans pockets and produces his phone. “I bet there’s a video online explaining just how to do it.”
I love this man.
And I keep my mouth shut about gesso. Finn’s need to find things out is greater than my need, right now, to be a know-it-all.
9.
The Old Man
Holly is one of those people that you’re glad is rich. That’s because she knows how to be rich and still be nice. She knows how to have money without making you feel like you don’t.
For our meeting, she has brought us all coffees from Grove Street. You gotta love that.
Holly leans over the conference table, her pale-pink, manicured fingertips touching the tabletop, nodding her head again and again, a smile bursting across her face. “This is it,” she says, her blond hair curled and somehow looking longer than it did when it was straight, swiping either side of her face. “This is it. Just looking at it is giving me goose bumps.”
She holds up her arm and slides up her sleeve. Yep, they’re there.
“You like it?” I ask, already knowing the answer a hundred times over, still wanting to hear her say the words again. Why does Holly’s approval excite me so much? Maybe because of who she is. A woman who has it together, a woman with taste.
A woman who wears wigs. That’s it!
“I love it. Now—can we have the tri-fold printed before the event?”
On the opposite side of the counter, Huey beams with satisfaction. The logo Holly has chosen is the option he predicted she would, one of three concepts I came up with late last night after scrapping a week’s worth of lesser efforts. He gives me a nod—Good work!—then saunters over to the Iron Maiden, where Finn is struggling to attach the new rollers. And doing it so earnestly. I don’t know anybody with clearer, cleaner motives than Finn.
Unfinished projects be hanged, right?
I guide Holly over to my cubicle, pulling up artwork on the screen, my preliminary designs for the printed pieces. Now comes the hard part. Instead of the plain vanilla three-panel brochure she has in mind, I want to do something quite special.
The idea came to me as I watched Aunt Bel working on her canvas down in the basement. When somebody tells you they want to paint, you assume they know about painting. Not her. She scrapes paint onto the canvas with a palette knife, scratching up angles and ridges of haphazard color and then stepping back to stare at the result, sometimes smoking a cigarette (we decided to let the basement be the smoking section, which has kept me up at night wondering just how flammable oil paints are). Coming home laden with the stresses of the day, I find it soothing to watch my aunt’s experiments with paint. One night, frustrated with a sketch she’d made, she ripped the sheet out of the ring-bound sketchbook, crumpled it against her chest (unable to use her left hand), then threw it to the ground. The mashed sheet landed at my feet.
As I picked up the page and started to unfold it, inspiration struck. I ran upstairs to retrieve the paper contraption my mother made to wrap my grandmom’s ring for my birthday.
Holly wants a showstopper, I thought, and this would do it. Instead of a traditional corporate tri-fold, what if we folded the brochure in on itself, the panels interlocking like a camera’s aperture, or like an origami flower? I grabbed a sheet of paper from the printer and tinkered with the folds until I had something that worked. Eric Ringwald’s function is to bring the various pieces together. When you peel back those pieces, you find him underneath. The brochure would mimic this, each fold-over panel devoted to one of the charities he works with. As you open them up, at the bottom of them all—the foundation, so to speak—is the panel devoted to his work.
“That will be a nightmare to fold,” Finn had told me, brimming with excitement. He is drawn to nightmare projects, after all. “It’s brilliant.”
But I’m not sure whether Holly will feel the same way.
“This is going to be hard to visualize,” I say, “so I’m just going to have to show you.”
I open my desk drawer and remove the prototype, a big sheet of Twinrocker heavy text paper pre-folded and hand-lettered in ink, panel by panel. Taking the piece from my hand, Holly opens the panels one by one, as if plucking petals off a rose, breathing silently.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she says.
“We’ve never done anything like this either. No one who receives this is going to just throw it away, which is what happens to a lot of brochures.”
“No,” she says. “They’ll keep it. It’s like … a work of art.”
“So you like it?”
“When you pulled it out of the drawer, I got chills, Sara. I absolutely adore it. You have a gift, you know that? You take things and you make them … beautiful. I am in awe. Really, I am.”
No matter how old you get, no matter how far from the princess daydreams of childhood, there’s a part of you deep down that still thrills at being told you are beautiful. Finn says so from time to time, and while I don’t know that I believe it completely, it is nice to hear. Holly’s words affect me much differently: You make things beautiful. They pour over me like christening water, consecrating me to the task of beautification, or at least helping me recognize and put into words my inmost calling. Yes, yes. This is what I do, this is my greatest delight, to take things and make them beautiful.
“Thank you,” I say with a catch in my throat.
“You know what? You should come to the fund-raiser. When people see these for the first time, you should be there. It will be fun. You can get dressed up, enjoy the food and the music, and get to see the look on their faces when we put these into their hands. Come on, Sara. Say you’ll come.”
I’ve never been to a fancy fund-raising event, and the suggestion bewilders me. “I don’t know,” I say. “When is it?”
Holly laughs. “Sara, you made the invitation!”
“Oh, right. Okay. I’ll come.”
“Bring your whole team. I’ll introduce everybody to Eric, and I’m sure after they see this, plenty of people are going to want to meet you—so bring some business cards!”
After she’s gone, the whole studio is aglow. Diana comes over and Finn and Huey leave the Iron Maiden, all of them circling me for a blow-by-blow account. Did she like it? What did she say? And then what did she say? “And guess what?” I conclude. “We’re all going to a party.”
“Fun,” Diana says.
Finn nods slowly from his desk chair, tilted back at an alarming angle. “Righteous.”
Righteous?
“Party,” Huey says, bracing hi
s lower back with both hands, shaking his head. “When I want a party, I know where to find one. This sounds like work to me. I won’t be wearing a monkey suit, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“A monkey suit?” Finn rolls his eyes, getting up and heading back to the Maiden. “Who even says that anymore? Just wear what you’ve got on. Everybody’ll know your name.”
Following him, Huey glances down at his chest, where his name is embroidered onto his blue boiler suit, which is flecked with drops of a thousand different inks. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”
A couple of days later I see a man in an oversized olive raincoat through the studio’s big front window, cupping his hand to the glass to peer inside. A compact man, his thick salt-and-pepper hair sticking out from under a tweed cap, his boxy face belongs on a man twice his size. But somehow it makes for handsome.
“Daddy!” I yell, motioning him toward the door. Then I run around to the corridor to walk him inside.
I intercept him at the Firehouse entrance.
“It’s cats and dogs out there,” he says, removing his coat, water dripping all over the floor. Even his round wire glasses are beaded with water. “Hi, doll.” He kisses my cheek.
“Here, let me take that.” I take his coat. He looks as neat and tidy as his calligraphy in the camel blazer he’s had ever since I can remember and a pair of neatly pressed gray slacks. “You should have called! I had no idea you were coming.”
“Neither did I. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course I don’t mind. Come on in.”
“Hold on a sec,” he says, taking my arm. “Is Bel here?”
“No. She’s home, why?”
“Rita,” he says with a tone of disgust. “She wants to know what’s going on, but of course she can’t do it for herself. You getting along okay?”
“It’s okay. I mean, Aunt Bel is family. I don’t mind. It was awkward at first, but she’s kind of settled in.”
“I want to see her,” he says.
I nod. “Why don’t I call her and have her come over? It’s walking distance.”
“No,” he says, reaching to take his coat back. “If it’s nearby, let’s just go.”
“Don’t you want to come inside? Finn’s here, and we’ve rearranged things since the last time you came. And I’ve got some new prints …”
He pats my hand absently, considering his options. “All right. Show me what you got.”
“Come on.” I loop my arm in his, taking him inside.
I show him some of my new prints, let him yuk it up with Diana a little bit, after which we find Finn sitting cross-legged in a pile of cast iron. Dad jokes with my husband and even bends down to test his strength against the flywheel, feigning a back injury when he rises in defeat.
“You’ve seen a couple of these in your time—eh, Walt?” Finn asks him.
“In my time? You mean back in Civil War days? I’m not that old.” He steps away from Finn. “Huey. How are you?”
Huey comes over, wiping his hands on a clean-up rag.
“Still keeping the machines humming, I assume?”
“That’s about right,” Huey says, gracing me with a superior look.
“Let’s show him what we’re working on.” I take my dad by the hand, leading him over to the Vandercook, where Huey has spent two excruciating hours mounting the polymer plates for Eric Ringwald’s origami brochure (which is how we’re describing it), locking up the form and running test prints to scrutinize. “We’ll cut them along the guides—here and here—and then they fold up like this. See?”
He fiddles with the folds, then sets the proof aside. “Beautiful work, Sare,” he says. “Now let’s find Bel.”
Somehow, all these years later, my mom can still lead him around by the nose.
“Let’s have lunch first,” I say, tucking my arm in his.
“Did I hear you say lunch?” Finn calls from his spot on the floor.
When she comes up the stairs at the Grove Street Artisan, Aunt Bel sees my dad and stops cold. “Hello, Walter.”
“What happened to your hand?”
Finn supplies the details.
The lunch crowd has yet to disperse, so we have to squeeze around a table near the back. It is so tight that every time I scoot my chair, the woman at the table next to me gives an exaggerated grunt, like I’m squeezing her to death. Finn and I do most of the talking, leaving them to steal glances when they think the other isn’t looking. Finally, after pushing his plate away with his sandwich half eaten, Daddy asks Aunt Bel why she came back.
Blunt as that. “Bel, why did you come back? What happened over there? Rita wants to know, and so do I. Sara and Finn deserve to know too.”
My fork freezes in midair. “Dad …”
“I’m serious, doll.” He turns to look at Aunt Bel and takes her hand and squeezes. And I can see them when they were young. The older brother-in-law and the little sister. Divorce might have driven the spouses apart, but those two were family. Are family. Watching them together, it’s evident. “Really, Bel. We’ve given you a few weeks now. The mystery act is wearing a little thin, don’t you think?”
The left side of her mouth rises.
Next to me, Finn looks into his soup as if an oracle resides at the bottom of the bowl, holding very still, as if the slightest movement might derail her answer. Neither one of us has put the question to her directly, as much as we’d both like to. I can tell that, like me, Finn is straining to hear.
“It was time to come home, Walter, that’s all.”
“You have to do better than that,” Daddy says. “I’ve been thinking about it since you left the house. You had to have known your return would reopen—”
“Of course I did,” she says. “Do you think I haven’t lived with it every day? How could it have been any other way, Walter?”
“What are you two talking about?” I ask. “Lived with what every day?”
My father reaches into his pocket, pulls out a billfold, and lays a few tens on the table. “Bel, let’s take a little drive. There’s something I need to ask you in private.” He kisses my cheek. “I’ll see you in a bit, Sare.”
They depart. Finn, cheek resting in his hand, looks at me. “Well, that sure cleared things up.”
I smack my hand over my mouth and stifle a laugh. The lady behind me heaves an audible sigh.
An hour later Daddy drops by the studio. “We need to talk.” He rolls a chair over to my desk. “There’s a lot you don’t know about Aunt Bel and your mother. I was hoping if I came down, I could at least see if there was anything left of their relationship, at least on Bel’s end, to repair what happened.”
“What happened? You can’t just leave me hanging like that, Daddy.”
“It’s not for me to tell you, Sare.”
“Did she tell you anything just now?”
“Not really. Just that Kazakhstan was filled with a lot of trial and sadness.”
I click Save on my current design project and swivel to face him. “That’s evident. What happened between her and Mom?”
“Did your mother ever tell you when Bel was in high school she’d run away—you were just a baby—she disappeared for almost a month? They reported it to the police, everything. When she came back, they could hardly get anything out of her. No explanation at all, except that she was back, and suddenly it was Jesus this and Jesus that.”
I take comfort just then in the sound of Huey running the press like always.
“Bel was the wild one back before she first disappeared,” he says. “Then she found Jesus, and suddenly she was the favored daughter. But for your mother, the disappearance was a nightmare. When Bel went to Kazakhstan, it was like she was running away all over again. But it was missions this time, so …”
“Grandmom must have loved that.”
He nods. “Yep. I told them all when they let her go to Kazakhstan after the accident that she wasn’t coming back. Rita denies th
is, but I knew. There are some things you have to be an outsider to understand. The family … they knew her, they loved her, but they never understood her. Not that I did. But I knew enough to realize where it would end.”
“Wait. What accident are you talking about?”
“You’ll have to ask Aunt Bel or your mother. I said I’d never talk about it and I won’t. But I’m tired of keeping people’s secrets.” He reaches for my sleeve and tugs it. “I want to help her, doll.”
“What do you mean?” This man is too much.
“Aunt Bel can’t make a life in your basement.”
“That’s for sure.” Not with all that mess.
“She needs more resources. You’ll have to work with me, because I don’t want her knowing where it comes from. She’s gonna need money to get back on her feet. I don’t want her to know it’s coming from me. Can you make something up, some kind of story she’ll believe?”
“You want to give her money?”
He slides a hand into his trench coat pocket and pulls out a box of checks and a debit card. “If you’ll help me, yes. Rita’s not in the position to help her, and it isn’t your responsibility either. This is all I can do, but I’m determined to do it. I think this will solve a lot of problems for everyone.”
10.
Say Cheese!
“Families suck.”
The cracks in the ceiling stare down at me, lit by a chink in the blinds that lets the amber streetlights in. Next to me, Finn rolls over and rubs a hand over his face.
“You’re still awake? What time is it?”
“Families suck,” I say.
“Go to sleep, babe.”
He adjusts his pillow and settles in. After a while, from the regularity of his breathing I start to believe he’s out again. It’s not fair he can sleep and I can’t.
“Families suck.”
The sound of my voice startles him awake again. His head pops off the pillow. Gazing around the room through half-closed eyes, he remembers where he is, then scoots toward me, coiling his arms and legs around me, resting his chin against the top of my head.