Romance in Color

by Synithia Williams

  Matt and Karen were hardly prepared for a houseguest, especially not a long-term one. As it was, they had to scramble to find sheets for the spare bed and run to the grocery store after work to pick up foods that met their oma’s strict dietary limitations: low sodium, no flavor. Matt drew the short straw and it was he who asked while they sat at the small kitchen table having toast, “Not to be rude, Oma, but what are you doing here?” Matt was absolutely exhausted. The fishery had been packed in the few days leading up to Christmas with people scoring seafood for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Chowan County was predominantly Protestant, but the Catholic population was just large enough that the demand for fish overwhelmed the supply once per year. The lines had been so backed up at the fisher monger counters that Matt had to put on a rubber apron himself and go on the floor to clean fish and ring up customers. It was better than sitting behind his desk trying to tally soggy receipts, but the amount of people visiting the fishery made the days long and grueling. He was glad to have a few days off.

  Grandmother Vogel had sipped her coffee primly and said, “You two children need guidance. Your parents were taken far too soon, and it shows.” Matt had tried to interject that he was grown and gone when the accident happened, but Oma didn’t want to hear it. “Look at you,” she said, pointing one arthritic finger toward Matt. “Middle-aged and no wife. No kids. I will find you a wife. You are the only Vogel male left.”

  Matt nearly sprayed his coffee through his nose. “No way.”

  Oma ignored him. Matt wasn’t the only Vogel male left, but certainly the only one she thought merited her attention. The rest were distant cousins, and they weren’t the beneficiaries of her will.

  “And you,” she said next, pointing to Karen. “What plans do you have for your life? You’ve really let yourself go. Why are you so pale and sickly looking?”

  Karen blinked a few beats and then cut her eyes sideways at Matt. Matt gave her an imperceptible headshake — silent code for “Keep it to yourself.”

  “I’m going to college next fall to start my nursing degree,” she said finally.

  “Not good enough. You should be taking classes now.” She pounded one of her small fists on the tabletop, and turned her steely gaze back to Matt. “I told you ten years ago to send Karen to me to raise. I would have made a lady out of her and put her on the right track.”

  Karen looked annoyed. “Oma, please. I would have been just as trapped in Lenora as I am here. At least here I can get to the beach in an hour.” Karen took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips.

  “Your priorities are in the wrong place. You should be worrying only about school, work, and church. When you’re done with school, then you can think about getting married before you get too old.”

  “Like Matt, huh?”

  Matt shot Karen a dirty look.

  “Yes. If he waits much longer, he will be in a nursing home by the time his children start kindergarten.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Matt said, standing up and pushing his chair back with more force than necessary.

  “Do not use that language around me. Have you no manners?”

  “Nope. Not a single one.” Matt stacked his breakfast dishes in the sink and then turned around to lean back against the countertop. “Me and Karen have been doing okay by ourselves all these years. I’m sorry we’re not performing certain feats at the pace you’d like, but really, Oma, my love life is my business.”

  “Are you a gay?” Grandmother Vogel asked, face blanker than a fresh pack of printer paper.

  “So what if I am?”

  She swirled her spoon around in her coffee cup and stared at him. “I hope at least that you’re the bolt and not the nut.”

  Matt’s face clouded with confusion at his grandmother’s odd metaphor and when he got it he slapped his hand over his eyes. “Jesus Christ! Oma, I am not gay. Even if I were it wouldn’t be your business. I love you, but please stay out of my personal life.”

  “I will not. If you expect to see a penny of inheritance from me … ”

  Karen interceded, looking somewhat panicked at the threat. Matt didn’t care about the inheritance, whatever it was, but Karen yearned to have someone bequeath to her what her parents did not. “Oma, he has a girlfriend. She lives next door,” Karen spat, and then stuffed an entire piece of toast into her mouth to stave off further conversation. Grandmother Vogel looked at Matt.

  “Is this so?”

  Matt said nothing and just stood there leaning against the counter with his arms crossed over his chest. Karen scrambled to the bureau and fetched a certain newspaper. She laid it in front of their grandmother, flattened the crease in the middle, and then pointed to the caption on the picture while grunting. Then she sat down and gave Matt a self-satisfied smirk. Matt made no movements at all and simply watched in silence while the elderly woman extracted her reading glasses from their case and pushed them up her narrow nose.

  “This is your girlfriend, Matthew?”

  Matt was tight-lipped.

  “Where is she now? Why is she not here? Are you ashamed? Is she pregnant?”

  Karen swallowed her bread and nearly choked on it. “Oh, she’s out of town doing business. She’s kinda famous for what she does.”

  “Oh yeah,” Matt said, piping up to defend himself finally. “Nora’s not the one you need to worry about being pregnant.” Then Matt walked away and locked himself inside his bedroom until dinner.

  The next morning, Grandmother Vogel convened a meeting. She sat perched at the edge of Matt and Karen’s overstuffed pea green sofa with her purse clamped on her lap in a business-like posture. “I’m going to stay right here until that baby is born and then I will be the nanny.”

  Karen opened her mouth to argue, but Grandmother Vogel cut her off: “No. You will not be able to support yourself and a baby on what you earn and your brother is not going to finance your lifestyle indefinitely. I will move in and watch the baby while you go to school.” Karen pursed her lips and appeared to at least be thinking about it. “You,” she stabbed her finger in Matt’s direction. He rolled his eyes. He really wasn’t in the mood to be berated by his old school, Old World grandmother. “You’re out of the will. I decided it last night.”

  Matt shrugged. “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Sure. Fine.” Matt tied the strings of his pajama pants draw cords into intricate knots.

  “Don’t you want to know why?”

  “You don’t have to justify your choices to me. I never expected anything from you or anyone.”

  Grandmother Vogel walked over to where Matt sat on the floor leaned against the base of his father’s old recliner with legs crossed lotus-style and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Of course it matters. Everything matters. Right now my will says that you are to receive my house and land in Lenora when I die. The land my husband’s family worked so hard to farm.”

  Matt raised a brow. Why would he be the recipient of that? Surely one of his aunts was a more ideal choice given their close proximity, and they actually cared about the place. Matt was happy where he was.

  “But I will sell it now and set up a trust for your children.”

  “My children? What if I don’t want kids?” The better question was “what if I can’t find anyone who wants to have kids with me?” but Matt kept that to himself.

  “I thought long and hard about this last night, you see. If you do not have children, then Karen’s children will have the money for college.”

  “Wow, that’s decent,” he said with absolute shock. His oma wasn’t the gushing type. Never had been, so the financial gesture caught him off guard. “Why now?”

  Oma flicked a hand at him dismissively and returned to her place on the sofa. “I’m an old woman. I can do what I want.”

  Matt narrowed his eyes at
the small woman.

  “And maybe I’m a little lonely.”

  “Lonely!” Karen exclaimed from the doorway she was leaning against. “I thought you had a boyfriend.”

  “Bah. It’s not the same as family. The girls only see me when it’s time for family photo ops. They put the pictures up on the Facebook and act like it absolves them of all other duties. I’d rather be near you two disrespectful creatures than those fake ones.”

  Matt and Karen were both stunned to silence.

  “Besides … ” She sighed and hung her head. “I treated your mother poorly when she was alive. I didn’t mean to run your parents out of Lenora, but they couldn’t take my meddling. I just wanted them to follow the old traditions, but they wanted to do it all their own way. I’d like to try to do better for their kids. It would soothe my conscience. Will you let me die without the guilt I’ve been carrying?”

  Karen groaned. Matt shrugged. Who was he to judge?

  Chapter Ten

  “I am so going to take you shopping for a new guest bed,” Bennie said, collapsing into the futon Nora had made up for her in her newly finished second floor. It was late the evening of January second, or early the morning of the third depending on how you looked at it, and the two had just gotten back to Chowan County from the airport. Chowan, a couple of hours south of Norfolk, was actually out of the way for Bennie, but she was going to hang out for a few days with Nora while she put the finishing touches on the parade painting and then personally escort it to the gallery.

  “I don’t know when you’re going to find time for that in between pimping me out to the highest bidder and trying to hook me up with sketchy actors whose very auras reek of syphilis.”

  “Oh, come on.” Bennie was facedown on the futon and talking into the cushion. “I was just trying to get you a vacay-lay. That dude totally had the hots for you.”

  Nora pulled a comforter down from the closet and shook it open to lay over her prone friend. “He had the hots, all right, but only the kind that you need antibiotics to fix. I don’t get much time to read the gossip rags, but what few I have seen that guy has hooked up with every young starlet in Hollywood and quite a few wannabes on the Jersey Shore. No thanks.”

  “Thought I’d try if you’re not going to hook up with the hot giant on the other side of the woods.”

  Nora sighed and shut off the light. “Bennie, I agreed to let you be my manager. I don’t need you to be my madam, too.”

  “Okay, chick,” Bennie said, and she started to snore.

  The next morning, Nora awoke to the smell of bacon frying in her kitchen and coffee perking. After washing her face and brushing her teeth, she made her way downstairs to find a small elderly white woman standing in front of her stove in a pink housecoat over tan pantyhose. She wore black tennis shoes on her feet and her hair in tight silver curls. Nora wondered if Bennie, who employed part-time household help because she was too lazy to cook and clean, had made good on her threat to hire someone. Nora was about to pad back upstairs to wake the gravid slumbering taskmistress, but when she stepped on the bottom stair it creaked and caused the woman to turn around.

  “Ah,” she said, waving her spatula at Nora. She walked closer and pushed her glasses up her nose. When she was about a foot from Nora she stopped and stared at her. “You look better in person.”

  “Huh?”

  The woman ignored her and returned to the stove. “I have bacon, fried eggs, oatmeal, and coffee,” she said in her hard-to-place accent. “I would have made grits and biscuits, but we don’t make those the way you like where I live, so they would have likely been botched.”

  “Um … where do you live?”

  “Kansas,” the woman said curtly, staring at Nora over the top of her glasses. Then she turned back to the stove to pile food onto a plate then set it on a placemat on the table. “Sit, eat. I will clean. Where is your vacuum?”

  “I actually don’t have one. I didn’t get a rug until last month.”

  “It’s fine, I will use a broom. Where is your iron? I need to press the things from the line.”

  “The line?”

  “Yes, yes. The clothesline. All the clothes from your suitcase — I washed them.”

  Nora’s eyebrows shot up. “I have a clothesline?”

  “You do now. Very simple thing.”

  “Isn’t it a bit cold to be hanging clothes outside?”

  “No. It’s never too cold. They freeze, it’s no big deal. You bring them in and perk them up with a hot iron while you watch Judge Judy. You young people do everything wrong.”

  Nora stared down into her coffee, suitably chastised. “The iron is under my bathroom sink.”

  “I will get it. You sit and eat,” the woman said before shuffling off.

  By the time Bennie made it downstairs, the ironing was done, the coffee cold, and bacon nearly gone. Grandmother Vogel had mopped the kitchen floor and left Nora to her devices. Nora was in the sunroom, adding her signature to the parade painting when Bennie poked her head in.

  “You cooked for me?”

  Nora shook her head. “Nope. Assistant came by this morning to make breakfast and clean up. I have to admit, she’s gruff but pretty darn handy.”

  “Hmm,” Bennie grunted in appreciation. “Told you so.” She pulled her head back into the kitchen to help herself to cold bacon. “So, what are our plans for today?” Bennie asked through a full mouth.

  “I was going to drive into town to meet with the gallery owner there about a show I probably won’t want to do then I have an actual sit-down interview with someone from the newspaper.” Nora dropped her brush into a cup and stood back to assess the overall work. She thought turning Gus’s headlight red as a nod to Rudolph had been a stroke of genius.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Those are totally things I can help with.”

  “It’s no big deal.” Nora climbed the steps up into the kitchen and refreshed her coffee. “They’re just things I have to do to not hurt peoples’ feelings.”

  “Still,” Bennie said, stabbing a toast triangle in Nora’s direction. “Any publicity is good publicity. You can never have enough publicity or money.”

  “You’re going to be a tiger mom, aren’t you?” Nora asked with a devilish grin.

  “Most definitely. Someone’s going to have to care for me in my old age. Might as well be this kid,” Bennie said, making a circular gesture with her hand in front of her belly.

  The Sandpiper Gallery on Edenton’s Broad Street was located in a twenty feet by twenty feet space wedged between a wine shop and a Christian bookstore. Its owner, Chantilly Askew, was an eccentric woman who reminded Nora of Mrs. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus books. Her cat-eye glasses were neon green with purple polka dots and she wore a skirt that looked to have been patched together from the contents of the remnants bin at the local fabric store. She wore gladiator sandals on her pale feet and each toenail was painted a different unseasonable color.

  “Welcome!” she said, sweeping an arm around at the entrance and nearly knocking over a white stone sculpture of Neptune. There was a definite theme to most of the art in the gallery. It all had to either do with the sea or the shore. Nora wondered where she would fit in.

  “Thanks for meeting with us,” Bennie said, holding out one of her small hands to shake and steering the conversation out of Nora’s control. “Nora keeps telling me how wonderful and welcoming everyone here in Chowan is. It almost tempts me to move down myself.” She giggled girlishly. Nora rolled her eyes.

  “I’m just so glad you could stop by,” Chantilly said, hugging a large book against her chest. Nora recognized it.

  “So, tell me what we can do for each other,” Nora said, walking away from the other women to examine a small lighthouse painting. It wasn’t bad, just not particularly creative.

  �
��I’m going to be blunt, Miss Fredrickson. I don’t make a lot of money at this. I get by mostly because I own the building and don’t have much overhead. I don’t get much foot traffic and out-of-town tourists really don’t flock to here for shopping excursions.”

  “I see that,” Nora said, looking around the otherwise empty room.

  “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought lately.” Chantilly picked her way through the cluttered displays and sidled up next to Nora’s side to look at the wood carving of a shark she was assessing. “This all started off as a hobby for me. I don’t have any background in art. I just buy whatever I think is pretty.”

  “Pretty is subjective,” Nora said gently, backing away from the shark.

  “I’m learning that more and more. This is the gallery’s fifth year. I’ve sold maybe sixty pieces to folks looking to decorate their living rooms or to have something to put on their dresser tops, but I don’t get a whole lot of folks in here who know much about art.”

  Nora gave Bennie a sideways look and resisted the urge to elbow her.

  “So, what’s your plan?” Bennie asked, swirling a sour green apple sucker in her mouth. She claimed the bacon grease had upset her stomach.

  “Well, there’s this artists’ lodge in Enfield I’ve been getting some ideas from. The landlords converted their building into a sort of residence hall for artists and musicians, and they all work right at the windows so folks on the street can watch them without disturbing them too much. See, look at this painting, will you? This is by one of their young men.” She directed them to a corner where a very photorealistic depiction of a mermaid avoiding a net underwater was hung. It had a “sold” sticker on its corner. Nora was annoyed to have lost out on it.

  “It’s lovely, but what of it?” Bennie pressed.

  “Oh! I got sidetracked. Well, because they have all these artist-types clamoring to live there, the downtown area is undergoing a bit of a revitalization. Small communities like Edenton lose a lot of young folks going off to college because there are no jobs for them to come back to. The ones who do find work here don’t stay long because there isn’t enough going on culturally. We need to breathe some life into this town, and I thought if we could bring art-lovers here, we’d get some hip new shops and restaurants downtown, too.”