by KT Morrison
“All right,” she said, and then pretended to crack her knuckles and stood up. “Let’s paint.”
Drawn
Sheba ate her can of slop at the depot because he wouldn’t want her to go hungry on late nights, but he waited till he got home to eat rather than stopping at a drive-thru. It was just an extra cost and something about it was like stepping out; your wife at the homestead making home-cooked meals and you’re out getting it on the side. Now it was almost eight, and he and Sheba were out of the warm pickup cab and shuffling the shoveled path between the snow-covered summer gardens, stepping up onto the wraparound porch. This is when he saw them.
Janie and Maceo ate together at the dining room table, the outside air around him a frigid, brittle blue, and his wife and their young, handsome house guest lit up in warm firelight amber. Right in front of him, like watching it all on a screen, a movie about a woman who looked just like his wife and she was out on a date. Their plates were half-finished, they each held gleaming forks and talked closely. Both of them had a glass of wine and there was a bottle on the table. Janie didn’t drink, but the bottle was clear glass, the wine white, and he could see there was very little remaining. Janie wore an old flannel of his, which was nice, the one she used sometimes when painting; the sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, showing off the fine grace of her arms. Most striking, and instantly alerting: she’d done her hair. She was beautiful. A new cut, her hair straight and silky, but somehow layered in gentle hanging locks; gone was the tangled farmer’s mane, the tortoise shell clips, the bun or horse’s tail. Now she wore it down and it fell in a heavenly frame around her perfect face. No longer was it the silvering blonde, now she’d returned to the bright gold of high school, what she called ‘champagne’ when she was seventeen.
She laughed now at something Maceo said, lighting up, her smile wide and showing off her white teeth. Her cheeks had blushed from the wine. His stomach twisted at the sight, but for some reason he smiled seeing her like that. A hard knot of intertwined threads tightened somewhere below his heart; jealousy, love, nostalgia... He could picture her in his old truck, the ancient Nissan he had in high school with its lift kit and fat tires, she was sitting in the passenger seat, correcting him with youthful charm and humor, the two of them just dumb kids, shaking her hair out and saying Platinum, John?—it’s called champagne, darling, then she giggled at her own theatrical haughtiness.
They saw him through the windows under the porch light now. Maceo smiled and waved, and Janie jumped up and wiped her mouth with a napkin. She met him at the door.
“I thought you were going to be later,” she cried, making a sad face for him. “We would’ve waited...”
He told her it was alright, and she asked him about the trailer and how the rest of his day went. He told her Rico was almost in tears but they finally let him off the hook. Said how Jason put the kid in a headlock and how he’d literally kicked the kid in the ass with his snowy boot. That was his punishment, not getting fired, they laughed, and told him fuck-ups were inevitable, but don’t make them frequent. Janie got a kick out of it, she liked Rico, and Maceo laughed along.
“Sit down, I’ll get your dinner,” she said and headed for the kitchen but he grabbed her arm.
“We’re not going to talk about this?” he said with a smile, darting his eyes up and around her new hair-do.
“Oh, I forgot,” she said, then smoothed her hands over her hanging hair. “Do you like it?”
“You look exactly like you did in high school.”
Drink had put a shine in her eyes and he could see them tremble for a moment like she might cry; her lips even tightened and wriggled. She said, “You don’t think it’s stupid?”
With unexpected force, his heart swelled in his chest. For a moment the hardworking, down-to-earth woman was wiped away, and he was face to face with the beautiful but unsure young high school girl he’d fallen in love with. “Stupid?—Janie, you look beautiful.”
“I told her,” Maceo said then sipped a glass of wine.
John said, “Did you guys go together?” Now he could picture this Italian kid in the Yukon with her today, seducing her and talking with his hands, telling her all the fashion in Rome and how the ladies were doing their hair this season.
Janie said, “No, I didn’t even know I was going to do it. Maceo was at the school and I went to the Costco—”
“They do hair there now?”
“No—remember the salon on Buffalo, across from the Walgreen’s?”
He shook his head no.
Now she admonished him with a look that said Men! and said, “In Chili, John... Well, anyway, that was where I used to go back when I lived there, and it was still open. I couldn’t believe it. Next thing I was pulling in and sitting in a chair.”
He nodded, his mind fixated on the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’: I lived there?—Janie, we lived there, we. But his smile came again, even after hearing his wife’s inadvertent statement of independence, because of Janie’s eyes. Glassy yet alive.
“I’m just not used to doing something like that,” she said, touching her hair again, lofting it with one hand and heading to the kitchen. “Have a seat, John, I’ll bring your plate.”
He sat across from Maceo, coming down heavy and tired in the creaking chair while Sheba trotted into the family room and curled up on her dog bed. “How was your day, Maceo?” he said and rubbed at his cheeks and eyes.
Maceo told him about his trip to the school and Janie returned with a plate of roast beef and carrots and potatoes and green beans. They finished eating, Maceo and Janie first, then waiting for him; Janie cleared the plates, and he took his work clothes to the mud room.
Maceo was behind him, pausing in the space by the pantry between the old house and the addition. “Do you want to see?” he asked.
“See what?”
“The painting...”
“Right,” he said and nodded drowsily—they’d told him they’d been painting in the afternoon.
Maceo led him into the addition; the lights were on the low setting of the dimmer and a fire had been made but now dulled to a bed of skeletal coals that hummed in orange. Maceo drew the lights up with the slider on the switch, and John followed him to his wife’s space that was filled now with two easels. On the left was a landscape, the painting on the right was obscured by obtrusive shine—the angle of the overhead halogens making a glare. The painting on the left was one of Janie’s, he was sure of it. Not the one she’d been working on the last few weeks, this was new, or at least new to him. New, but similar.
Behind him, Janie’s voice, timid yet anxious: “Hey, what are you two doing?”
“This yours?" he asked, looking over his shoulder to see her coming into the addition now, her brow furrowed.
“Yeah, you guys come in here without me?”
“You’re here now,” he said.
She came to stand beside him and he put his arm around her waist; she leaned her cheek against his chest. He kissed the top of her head and smelled that weird salon smell and the floral scent of conditioners overtop. “What’s it going to be?”
“I don’t know yet,” she sighed.
“Is it a barn?” he asked.
She shrugged.
The painting was unfinished, just a field of abstract shapes and the beginnings of a horizon line; above the horizon line, which was low on the canvas, a sky was taking shape and it looked like a doozy of a storm coming.
Janie said, “You should see what he did.”
“What did he do?”
Maceo waved his hand like this wasn’t supposed to be about him. Janie said, “Go, Maceo, show him,” then looking up, she said, “John, he is incredible.”
“Janie is the artist today, but this is what she talk about,” Maceo said, lifting the other canvas off the easel with one hand and holding it low so John could get a look at it.
He was instantly flabbergasted. For whatever reason, he’d expected a landscape, something like Ja
nie had done, but here he was presented with the unexpected. He stepped back as if in shock.
“Janie, that’s you...”
“Isn’t he amazing?” She hugged herself to him, admiring the kid’s painting of her along with him.
On the canvas was an incredibly real painting of his wife. It was her like he’d seen her today, with the new hair, but it was more: it was Janie of his memories. Young Janie, eyes alive, sparkling, he’d captured that mirth she put around herself like a cloak, this gentle emanating spirit, an endearing one, but one that also told you there’s more going on behind those eyes, a mystery; he’d captured the unsureness she had, the confidence overtop, a little pigtail girl still underneath clutching her grip to something stable while the world spun around her.
All he managed to say, in a soft whisper: “What...?”
“It’s all pastel,” Janie said. “Isn’t he amazing, John? Honestly...”
“He is,” John said absently, unable to break eye contact from the drawing of his wife.
But now a nauseous feeling grabbed the sheets and rolled over in his stomach, leaving him cold and uncovered. The way he’d seen them eating together like they were dating, the two of them alone all day, this drawing. Janie had posed for him sitting somewhere and smiling like that, showing him her truth with her eyes. “Did you... pose for him?”
She said, “No, I didn’t, he just...”
Maceo said, “No, it from memory.”
“She didn’t pose?”
“I was behind him when he drew it, just watching.”
“Are you kidding?”
Maceo said, “It simple, the drawing, but if she sit, I would like to paint her...”
“This is simple?” he said, hands pushed into his pockets to stop from reaching out and grabbing the painting.
Maceo said, “You like it?”
“Maceo, I, uh, I can’t believe it. Like it? I love it. I mean, look at her. That’s her. That’s Jane.”
Maceo thrust the canvas forward. “You like it, it yours.”
“Really?” His hands darted out of his pockets eagerly.
Maceo drew the canvas back against his body. “Leave it with me and I finish it.”
John said, “No, no, no way,” reaching forward and taking the canvas with both hands. Maceo surrendered it, and John held it out to admire. “It’s perfect the way it is. Perfect. I like the way it’s just her face, you’ve done it... I mean, that’s Jane. God, look at her.”
“Oh, John,” Janie sighed, exasperatedly, but rubbed her hand in a circle over his back.
He said, “You didn’t look at her?”
“No,” Maceo said.
“Her face is beautiful and then everything else around her is unfinished. I don’t know... I want it like this. Exactly like this...”
“It’s yours,” Maceo said, giving a polite head nod and smiling.
* * *
Afterward, John asked them if they wanted to paint some more while he watched TV, but they both said no. The brushes had been cleaned and their things put away. She had breakthroughs today, breakthroughs she didn’t even know she had in her, but now her creativity was like the open mouth of a cave after its dusk-time flock of bats had flickered their leathery wings into the night and left it yawning blankly. Nothing more would come. Tomorrow would be another day, and just doing what she’d done on that canvas already left her tired. She knew what she wanted to do—not on the canvas, but with the way she would approach it. She wanted to wait, and she would follow that intuition.
So John sat on his couch with his back to the painting side of the addition and watched the news. She joined him, sitting next to him on the other side of the couch. Maceo retired for the night, and they wished him well and said they’d see him in the morning. John dozed off, and she unfolded a blanket from the arm and draped it over his lap. She took the beer bottle from the side table and rinsed it out in the sink. Sometimes when he fell asleep on the couch, it was better to leave him than to rouse him and send him to bed. He claimed he got a good sleep there.
Upstairs, she stopped at Maceo’s door and listened. She could hear him in there talking, assumed he would be on the phone. Just his quiet voice, soft sounds of Italian behind her son’s door. She avoided the urge to push it open further and wish him a good night. Just leave him be, Janie.
She gathered up her knitting and took her spot in the Queen Anne’s chair, turned her lamp on and picked up where she’d left off. Fifteen minutes later, John emerged in the stairwell, flicking off the lights behind him, coming up into the sewing room. He was standing in front of the mirror that was still angled toward Maceo’s door, and she caught her eyes trying to work around her husband like she might miss something.
John said, “I’m getting in the shower. How about you come to bed?...”
She said, “No, I want to do some knitting. I’d like to finish these booties and a blanket this week,” she said, holding up the tangled wad of knitting from her lap and then patted the book on the side table, saying, “and I want to read my book. I’m not even tired.”
He looked at her strangely, cocking his head from side to side, said, “Alright, I’m going to get cleaned up.”
A minute later she heard doggie footsteps coming up the stairs and then Sheba joined her, passing by for a head scratch before retiring to their bed.
Maceo was quiet for a long while, then later she could hear him talking again. Who was he talking to? She did some quick math and figured it must be three o’clock in the morning in Rome. Who was still up there?—it would be Tuesday morning. Who was up at that time on a Tuesday morning? She supposed twenty-year-old Italian girls probably were. Especially to receive a phone call from handsome Maceo.
The master bedroom door opened again, John was in the doorway in his boxers and a loose T-shirt. One callused hand scratched at his chest. He said, “You sure you’re not coming to bed?”
“I will soon,” she said, “it’s early for me.”
John watched her for a moment, strangely again, maybe slyly. He said, “Good night, Janie. I love your hair.”
She said, “I’ll see you in the morning,” and John went to bed.
A light switched on in Maceo’s room, and her eyes were drawn up to the mirror but the crack was too narrow. She could see part of Evan’s Tyrod Taylor poster, could see the dark blue paint on his wall. A shadow moved, but she didn’t see Maceo.
She ignored it, returned to her knitting. Maceo was on his phone again and he must be walking around the room. She could hear the creaking of floorboards, could see the moving shadow in the gap of his open door reflected in the mirror. He was talking to someone in Italian. It must’ve been a girl because she could tell by his charismatic patter. A lot of Si, si, si, and he was using a low voice, a masculine voice. Now she was smiling, her knitting needles clicking away.
Maceo made an exasperated but comical groaning sound. Then: “In English, si, yes,” he said as if the girl he spoke to was admonishing him. Now he was speaking English to her. “I told you,” he said, “it’s a big place, the space is bright, the people nice....si, I go, no, she not there, but she there tomorrow....si....far,” then he laughed, “but they give me car, no, no, truck,” laughing again, “big truck...”
The bed springs squeaked as if he’d plunked himself down. His voice became a low murmur.
She set her knitting down on the sewing table, got herself quietly out of the chair and moved in her slipper socks toward Evan’s door, her eyes on the mirror. When she was close, she stopped to listen.
Maceo said, “We came back later....then I paint....No, the family where I’m staying, the wife she paint too...”
She cocked her head to angle her ear toward the gap in the open door.
Maceo said, “No, she paint good….Paints well, si…”
That made her smile.
“She’s very nice.…Oh, you think so?” Now he laughed. “She is very pretty.” He said this as though it was a warning to whom ever he was
talking to.
There was a long pause as he listened to the girl on the other line. Now he was laughing again, saying, “We’ll have to see, you be good to me, yes?”
Her heart was hammering, and she felt guilty. It was nice to hear him say sweet things about her and about his stay here, but she was definitely spying and she shouldn’t be. But now she was afraid to move away. Afraid that if she stepped back, the floor would creak and he would know she’d been eavesdropping.
There was more squeaking bed springs as if he was laying back. “She is....blonde, very pretty, beautiful....You jealous?” He laughed again. “She’s very nice, very good to me.” He made an exasperated sound, said something in Italian. More laughing, and he resumed speaking in Italian.
She stepped back, still listening, wanting to hear more, but she should get away while he wasn’t speaking English, anyway. Then she heard the traditional: ciao. She stopped where she stood. She was only two steps back from his door. The bed springs squeaked again, and she could hear him moving around. A drawer opened and closed, and a lightning fast urge to head down the stairs as if she’d got up from bed to go down to the kitchen to get a drink of water whipped through her, thighs flexing as she moved toward the top step, but the sliver in the gap of the open door went dark and she sighed relief.
As her muscles relaxed, and she exhaled silently, she instead eased herself backward, intending to return to her chair. The door opened and Maceo stood in the dim just two feet from her. He was completely naked. She jolted like an electric current passed through her but remained frozen in place, aware of her soft but heavy breaths scoring through her hung-open mouth; her fingers tingled and her palms had chilled with damp, a prickly sheet of shame creeped down her back.
