by Linda Seed
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Well, I don’t suppose that salad is going to make itself.” Sandra gestured toward a collection of lettuce and other vegetables that had been set out on the table. Gen grinned and got to work.
Dinner consisted of a pot roast with potatoes and carrots, collard greens, a bulgur wheat dish with olives and tomatoes for Ryan, and Gen’s green salad. When Sandra called everyone to the table, there was a flurry of hand-washing, glass-filling, and seat-finding during which Breanna had to gently scold the boys more than once.
Gen found the general disarray of things, the noise and the chaos, to be reassuring and somehow comforting. In her own home when she’d been growing up, there’d been no such happy disorganization, since she was an only child, and her mother was more occupied with the task of finding another husband than she was with Gen. Then there had been New York, where children had rarely been a part of her world. She might have expected this kind of noise and disorder to be intimidating or distasteful, but instead, she felt a warmth inside her that was wholly surprising.
Ryan took her hand and led her to a seat at the table next to his own. Her anxieties melted away, and it was as though she’d always been here, had always been a part of the loud, squirming organism that was this family.
She dug into the pot roast and potatoes as Orin talked about his day and about the business of the ranch. Redmond groused about the game he’d been watching, and Breanna chatted with the boys about an outing they were planning for the following day. Sandra asked Gen about the gallery and about “that artist you got living in our guest house,” and Gen talked about Kendrick and about how she’d come to live in Cambria after her time in New York.
When dinner was done, including Gen’s pie, Michael and Lucas took Gen by the hand and pulled her into the living room, where they insisted that she play a game of Sorry! with them. At only five years old, Lucas needed help reading the cards and counting spaces, but his brother, two years older, seemed to enjoy showing off his own more advanced abilities.
At first, it felt strange and awkward to Gen sitting on the floor playing with small children. She’d had such limited experience with kids that it felt like they were small aliens come to take her to their own strange and miniature-sized planet. But she was charmed by how quickly they had warmed to her, how readily they accepted her as a playmate. Before long, all three of them were laughing and exclaiming over the twists and turns of the game, yelling “Sorry!” when someone got bumped back to start.
Gen was surprised and touched when, during a rare quiet moment in the game, Lucas leaned over and rested his head against her side.
Ryan watched from the kitchen doorway as Gen threw up her hands in triumph and shouted “Sorry!” to Michael as his game piece was sent back to Start. He saw Lucas lean his head against Gen, saw her put her arm around him and rub his small back with her palm.
Sandra came and stood next to Ryan and watched with him for a while.
“If you don’t hang on to this one, you’re an idiot,” she said in her usual blunt, Sandra way. “And I didn’t raise any idiots.”
“Well, I plan to hang on to her,” he said mildly. “But it’s not just my choice, is it? She’s still talking about moving back East.”
Sandra waved a hand and made a scoffing sound. “That’s not what she wants. She thinks it is, but it’s not.”
Ryan raised his eyebrows. “You seem awfully sure.”
“You wait and see,” she said.
“Well.” He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. “I hope you’re right.”
“Wait and see.”
At the end of the evening, Ryan walked her to her car. When they arrived, she leaned back against the driver’s side door, and he kissed her.
“That was really nice,” Gen murmured, her mouth still close to his.
“The kiss, or the dinner?”
“Mmm. Both.”
The evening air was mild, with a light mist from the ocean softening everything, like a photo blurred at the edges.
“They like you,” Ryan said.
“I like them.”
He nodded. “It showed.”
“Your mom …” she began.
“Aw, don’t worry about her. She puts on a big show of being all gruff and crusty, but …”
“I love your mom,” Gen assured him.
He grinned. “You do?”
“Oh, God, yes. Coming from New York, I know so many people who are all sweet and charming to your face, but then cut you down the minute you turn your back. Your mom is refreshing.”
He chuckled. “Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone describe her as refreshing. But she’s genuine. If she doesn’t like you, you’ll know it. And if she does, well, that’s that. Once the decision is made, she sticks to it.”
“And she likes me?”
“She does.” He kissed her again, gently.
“That’s … well. I’m honored.” And she meant it. Tears came to her eyes suddenly, and as hard as she tried to blink them away, a few spilled down her cheeks. She quickly swiped at them with the backs of her hands.
“What’s wrong?” Ryan sounded alarmed.
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. It’s just … Tonight was really nice.”
He held her, rubbing a hand in gentle circles on her back. “I’d like to meet your family sometime.”
“Oh.” She gave a shaky laugh. “I don’t think you’d like it as much as you think.”
“Why not?”
“My family … they’re not like yours. My mother’s been divorced four times. My father sends cards at Christmas and on my birthday. When he remembers.”
“That’s rough.”
“It is.” She looked up at him and into his liquid brown eyes. “You’re lucky, Ryan. You’re so lucky.”
“I feel pretty lucky right now,” he said. They kissed, and it was a long, warm kiss that made Gen feel cherished and protected. It made her feel safe.
Chapter Twenty-Six
A day or two later, Gen got a text on her phone while she was busy opening the gallery. It was Ryan:
You should come out here. It’s Kendrick.
What about Kendrick? Was he packing up to leave again? On a drunken bender? Having some kind of wild artist party and tearing up the guest cottage? Frustratingly, Ryan offered no clues. She wrote back:
What? What’s wrong with Kendrick?!
He responded:
Just come and see for yourself.
She got to the ranch late that morning. The sun was warm, and the day was clear and bright. A light breeze tickled her skin as she got out of her car at the guest cottage. The smell of the ocean permeated the air.
Kendrick wasn’t at the guest house. She knocked on the door, but she already knew there was no one inside. The cottage had the feel of emptiness.
Knowing that she was in for some tromping around on the rough paths of the ranch, she went back to her car and traded her spike heels for her track shoes. Properly shod, she followed the dirt path to the old barn, the site of such lovely erotic memories.
The barn, like the guest cottage, was empty. Kendrick’s easel was gone.
The last time she’d seen Kendrick working outside, he’d been set up next to the creek. Gen headed that way, the low buzz of the insects in the grass providing musical accompaniment to her walk.
She didn’t know what she’d find when she found Kendrick. A feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach warned her that there was likely to be a crisis she’d have to fix, a dilemma she’d have to solve.
She followed the path toward the creek, rounded a bend past a grove of trees, and saw him.
Gen was prepared for him to be drunk. She was prepared for him to be neurotic, panicking, possibly angry, or ranting about leaving. She was not prepared for what she actually found.
Gordon Kendrick was standing at his easel, calmly dabbing paint on a canvas, humming something that she identified as Beethoven. And th
e painting he was working on made her stop short and catch her breath.
“Oh my God,” she said, quietly, to avoid disturbing him.
He turned to look at her. “What do you think?”
“It’s … it’s …” She was sputtering, but she couldn’t gather her thoughts.
“It’s different than my other work,” he concluded for her.
“Yes. Very.”
She came closer carefully, as though she were trying to avoid startling a small woodland animal. As she approached, Kendrick stepped back from the painting so she could see.
Kendrick’s previous paintings had been purely abstract—slashes of color that Gen had found appealingly raw and expressive. This one was abstract as well, with bursts of color creating the illusion that the paint had somehow exploded out from the canvas. But amid the chaotic colors, amid the riotous drips and splashes, she saw nature, she saw the world around him. The trees, the stream, the rocks and birds, the eternal blue sky. The painting wasn’t of those things—not exactly—but they were there all the same. The suggestion of them. The essence of them, if not their literal form.
“God, Gordon,” Gen said. It was the best she could do. She had no words for what she was seeing.
“It’s good, right?” He asked the question with none of his usual Kendrick ego or anxiety. He seemed calm, at peace.
“It’s better than good.” She turned to face him. “It’s a breakthrough.” She let out a laugh of pure joy, and impulsively threw her arms around him. He patted her lightly with the hand that wasn’t holding the brush.
“Oh. Ha, ha. Well,” he said.
She pulled back and appraised him, and she saw that his painting style wasn’t the only thing that had changed. It was as though the demon that had caused him to drink too much, worry too much, and obsess over ridiculous things like thread count and yogurt had fled his body, leaving him comfortable and at ease.
She imagined that she was going to like this Gordon Kendrick a whole hell of a lot better.
Gen was so giddy about the work Kendrick was doing that the happiness she was feeling spilled over into her relationship with Ryan. One clear benefit was that the sex was better than ever.
Since it would have been awkward for her to sleep at his place with his mother and father right down the hall, he usually came to her. Because of the absurdly early hours he kept, he was always gone by the time she woke up in the morning. Sometimes she heard him moving around in the pre-dawn darkness, showering and making coffee. He pressed a kiss to her forehead or her cheek and murmured his goodbyes before slipping out the door.
Over a period of a few weeks, Gen fell into a comfortable rhythm of working at the gallery, checking on Kendrick, spending time with Ryan and his family, and then sleeping beside him in the happy, warm cocoon of her bed.
On a day in early August, she decided it was time to make a move regarding Kendrick. He’d been working steadily, producing more paintings in the stunning new style he’d developed, and enough of his work was ready that she could present it to dealers and collectors. She knew she needed to handle it carefully to get not only the highest possible price for the work, but also the highest exposure for Kendrick. She had to think about the long game, not just the short-term profit.
The first part of her strategy had to be presenting a show of Kendrick’s work in New York. San Francisco would have been more convenient, and Chicago would have made sense since it was Kendrick’s hometown, but New York would lend the work a legitimacy, a cachet, that he would not get anywhere else.
After consulting with Kendrick, Gen settled on a gallery that she thought would be perfect: the Joan Whitley Gallery on 57th Street. She carefully drafted an e-mail to Joan Whitley, giving a brief history of Gordon Kendrick’s career, explaining what Gen believed to be the significance of Kendrick’s newly emerging style, and inquiring about the possibility of a showing of Kendrick’s work at the gallery. She attached high-quality images of Kendrick’s best new pieces.
When Gen didn’t hear back for a week, she called the Whitley Gallery to follow up. She didn’t get past Whitley’s assistant. The woman, who sounded as pinched and uptight as Gen used to be, dispatched Gen quickly and mercilessly: “Ms. Porter, I’m afraid Ms. Whitley’s schedule is completely full.”
Gen asked if she could speak to Ms. Whitley personally, and the assistant informed her that would not be possible.
Because of the time difference, it was still early—just past seven a.m.—when Gen finished the call. Ryan was already gone to start his workday at the ranch, and Gen was hanging out with Kate, having coffee upstairs at Kate’s place while Jackson made an early run to a produce supplier for the restaurant.
“Well, that’s just …” Gen plunked her cell phone down on the coffee table, frustrated. “I’ll bet she didn’t even show Whitley the photos. Shit.”
“So what are you going to do now?” Kate stood in her tiny kitchen in sweatpants and a T-shirt, stirring sugar into her second coffee of the day.
“I don’t know.” Gen shook her head.
“Try another gallery?” Kate suggested.
“It’s probably going to be the same everywhere,” Gen said. “The New York art people—they don’t know me anymore. I’m just a … a nobody who owns a souvenir shop out in the sticks.”
“So what are you going to do?” Kate asked again.
Gen got up from her seat on the sofa and paced around the room in her bathrobe and socks. “I need buzz,” she said.
“Buzz.”
“Yeah. I’ve got to get them talking about me, about Kendrick. Then they’ll know our names, and then we won’t be nobodies anymore.” She turned to Kate. “That’s how I get them to take my calls.”
“All right.” Kate nodded. “That sounds promising.”
“I need a collector. Somebody with some influence.”
“The McCabes?” Kate suggested.
Gen waved off the idea. “Nah. They’re all money and no taste. I need somebody who’s respected. I need a tastemaker.”
“A tastemaker.”
“Right.”
“Like Oprah,” Kate offered.
“What’s Oprah got to do with this?”
“You know art, I know books,” Kate said. “Back when Oprah still had her TV show and she was doing the book club thing, all she had to do was mention a book and it sold a gazillion copies.”
Gen snapped her fingers and pointed at Kate. “Exactly. Like Oprah.”
“Okay. So who’s like Oprah, but with art?”
Gen thought she knew the perfect person. But getting his attention wasn’t going to be much easier than getting Joan Whitley to answer her calls.
“David Walker.” Gen announced the name to Kendrick later that morning at the guest cottage. Kendrick was getting ready to head out to his spot by the creek. Gen had caught him just as he was packing up his supplies.
“What about him?” Kendrick inspected a brush before placing it in a sheath to take out to the creek.
“I’ve got to get him to buy one of your paintings.”
Kendrick gave her a look that was half amused, half incredulous. “Good luck with that.”
David Walker was a self-made multimillionaire who’d earned his fortune in the office supply industry. What had started as a single storefront selling staplers and paperclips had developed into a chain of stores that spanned the United States. Once success had hit, Walker had taken an interest in art, and had started a modest collection with the help of some astute advisers and his own uncanny eye.
The modest collection had grown over the years into one of the best—and most valuable—private collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. Walker was, indeed, like Oprah—a nod of approval from him could set off an avalanche of high-priced sales and publicity that could have Joan Whitley and her ilk approaching Gen, and not the other way around.
Kendrick’s skepticism about getting Walker’s attention was not misplaced. Walker was several rungs higher on t
he art-world ladder than Whitley, and that meant Gen would probably be getting a no not from Walker himself, or even from his assistant, but from the random guy who answered his mail.
“Hmm,” Gen mused as Kendrick continued to pack up his paints and brushes.
“You can’t just walk up to David Walker’s door and show him a painting,” Kendrick said.
“Huh.” She thought about that, and then thought about it some more. Walker lived in Palo Alto, just a few hours’ drive up the coast.
“Why not?” she asked Kendrick.
“Why not what?”
“Why can’t I just walk up to his door and show him a painting?”
Kendrick stopped what he was doing and looked at her.
“This should be interesting,” he said.
Gen made the three-and-a-half-hour drive up Highway 101 on the following Monday, a clear day with temperatures in the mid-70s. She’d asked Ryan to come with her, for the company and also so they could have a date in the Bay Area, but apparently it was time to castrate the bull calves—a prospect she decided she’d rather not think about—and he couldn’t afford to take the time off from the ranch.
She was hoping to come back the same day, but that was a best-case scenario. It was much more likely that she would have to stay in the Palo Alto area overnight, so she’d packed a small bag and put it in the trunk of her car.
She didn’t trust the painting in the trunk—her overnight bag or some of the other random items she kept back there might roll onto it—so she wrapped it carefully in a cotton sheet and put it on the front passenger seat of the car.
The drive was going to be long, so she got an early start—though not as early as Ryan. He’d already been gone from her apartment two hours before she took a quick inventory of her things, climbed into the car, and headed east on Route 46 toward Paso Robles, where she could get on Highway 101 north toward the Bay Area.
Gen didn’t know exactly how she was going to approach David Walker once she got to his house, but she had a lot of time to think about it during the drive. As she headed through places like San Miguel and Bradley, San Lucas and Greenfield, she pondered the various scenarios she might encounter.