“And you,” Griff agreed. He leaned over the rail again, and Chloe, knowing what he wanted, leaned the tiniest bit his way so he could ruffle her hair and then smooth it again.
“I wish I had a daddy like you,” she mumbled, looking down.
Griff looked at me for help.
I froze. Chloe had never talked about a daddy before. I blinked, my lashes flapping like one of Chloe’s butterflies had come to life, and I processed a useless answer with every blink. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that not only had Chloe noticed the lack of a father, but she had also put some thought into what she wanted in one. Another stress for Dani. Dang.
Griff cleared his throat while I sat silent, overcome by eye tics. “That’s lucky,” he said to Chloe. “Because someday I hope to have a girl like you.”
“Why you don’t?” Chloe asked.
“That’s not something we ask people,” I said, finding my voice and keeping it gentle.
“Why?”
Griff’s expression looked about what I imagined a fly in a spiderweb looked like while it was figuring out escape. I wished him the best because this was all kind of awkward to explain while he sat there, if “kind of” meant “excruciatingly.”
I did it anyway. “We don’t ask because the details of why people’s families are the way they are aren’t for us to know. People will tell us if they want us to know.”
“But Griff don’t tell us.”
“Maybe Griff doesn’t want to,” I said, trying to shoot him my best I’m sorry with my eyes.
“I guess I haven’t found the right person, sweet pea,” Griff said.
Chloe leaned toward him again, her eyes full of worry at this news.“You can be daddy here. You can come to my house and play with my dolls whenever you want.”
As much as I wanted to leap from the deck and run away with Chloe thrown over my shoulder, never to face Griff again, I couldn’t help pulling her in to squeeze every bone of her tiny, generous body. “That’s the bravest offer she could ever make, just so you know.”
Griff smiled despite his reddened cheeks. “I’m honored.”
“You welcome,” Chloe said quietly and bent back to her work.
“Sorry,” I said. “She doesn’t propose fatherhood to a lot of people.”
“It’s okay. I kind of feel like a rock star now.”
“Which is exactly what I think you should be, the way you play.”
He shook his head to dismiss the compliment. “I’ll tell you what. When you get your stuff in the Guggenheim, I’ll come play at the exhibit opening.”
I swallowed and struggled to give him a normal smile. I’d shown in the Guggenheim already, but I didn’t want to explain. “Deal,” I said and left it at that.
Griff glanced down at his watch. “I’m about to fire up the grill. Can I throw some extra on for you guys?”
It was an offer he’d made a few times before to be polite, and I’d always declined and then disappeared into the house so it wouldn’t be weird with me sitting there ignoring the smell of the food he’d offered, but I wanted to stay out and paint longer. “Sure. But let me make a salad.”
He grinned. “Perfect. I’ll be out in a minute.”
And somehow it worked okay. He grilled, and we chatted. I had a couple of false starts, but I reminded myself to think of it as talking to Dani or Tom, and the conversation got easier. When I went in to make the salad I’d promised, I didn’t dread going back out to find more things to say. And when I had to put Chloe to bed, I was sorry to bring that part of the night to an end.
Once she fell asleep, I spent more time researching Bethwell Academy and plotting how to crack it. I was torn between excitement that I had a solution to get Chloe in and stress about how we could pay for it. Even with tuition so high it made me dizzy to think of it, every now and then, a flashback to the evening with Griff surfaced, and a tiny burst of endorphins pushed the stress back, making me smile even though no one was there to see it.
Chapter 4
212. The numbers in my phone display were enough to summon the chest fist, this time with a helping of nausea. If my phone had suddenly morphed into a rattlesnake, it still would have spiked my adrenaline less than the Manhattan area code flashing at me.
Who was it? I rejected each guess as soon as I thought of it. None of those people would call me. Unless it was . . .
The alert on my phone announced a voice mail.
“Leandra, it’s Victoria.” I flinched at the use of my old-life name. “I know we haven’t talked in a while, but I’ve got an offer I don’t think you can refuse. Call me. And before you delete this message, remember you owe me. I fought for you, girl. Do me the courtesy of giving me a call back.”
I deleted the message. It had taken me way longer than it should have to figure out that exploding onto the New York art scene had everything to do with Donovan and the creepy tendrils of his Beckman family connections and not with my talent.
But Victoria had truly loved my work or had done a good job of convincing me she did. And I’d call her back infinity times for that alone, only . . . later. I wasn’t ready for a conversation with her.
Hm. Dramatic, much? Time to get over myself before I had to punch myself in the face. I hopped up to change into my running clothes, hollered at Dani that I was leaving, and hit my favorite trail at a slow jog. It was as empty as I’d hoped it would be for my late-morning start time. This was what had sent me straight back to Utah after working so hard to escape—these trails at the base of mountains that touched the sky. I grew bigger inside simply by looking at them, the view somehow making it easier to breathe, to put everything in my head in perspective.
I’d grown up as the artsy outsider, my hands always stained with whatever paint or pastel or drawing pencil I was experimenting with at the moment. The girls at school could all dance and sing or act. They knew how to dress and flirt. And I wandered around with strange pictures in my head that itched to come out of my fingertips. I never could figure out where I fit here with the girls and their Miss America talents. The only two times I felt like I belonged were when I had a sketchpad in my hand or when I was in the mountains. Being in New York had taken one of those things from me, which was probably why most of my work there had referenced the mountains here.
I slipped my phone out of my armband and called Dani. “Why’d I ever move away from here?” I demanded when she answered.
There was a long pause. “I still don’t know why you came back. New York has to be big enough for Donovan and you, right?”
“If it didn’t have you and Chloe in it, it would always be too empty. Be home soon. Love you, bye,” I said, hanging up before she could answer. I attacked the trail again. I’d escaped to New York and art school with the velocity of a human cannonball two days after high school graduation. I’d wanted to leave the loneliness behind.
I pushed that thought away and focused on the trail, pouring on speed. I ran for an hour before I found a head space where I could call Victoria.
I went home and showered and wondered what I would say. No, mainly. Over and over and over again.
Fresh out of art school, I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling the owner of the Van Exel gallery no. Given her ability to launch careers with a single show, no was a word she said a lot but rarely heard. But that had quit mattering to me three years ago, and the idea of telling her no now filled me with a sense of immature glee, like the satisfaction I saw on Chloe’s face every time she threw a shirt she didn’t like to the floor. I understood why she did it; it was a total rejection of someone else’s control—a hard feeling to resist.
I settled into my deck chair and pulled up my caller ID, staring at it for a long moment to remind myself the digits were a phone number and not the combination to unlock a demon portal. I was done with my demons. This was just a phone call.
The phone only rang twice before Victoria answered with my name. “Leandra.”
“It’s Lia now. Leandra’s gone
.”
“You better find her,” Victoria said, sounding unperturbed. “Because I’m about to make her a lot of money.”
I drew in a deep breath and spit out the word I’d practiced on my run. “No.”
“No?” She made it sound foreign.
“I meant no, thank you.”
“You don’t know what you’re turning down.”
“The specifics don’t matter,” I said. That thing that had driven me to paint before, to layer color after emotion after thought in thick oil paint across the huge canvases I’d loved, had burned out of me. I didn’t need to work out my place in New York through my paintings, didn’t need to solve the tension of having my roots deep in the Rockies while I reached up for the validation of the people who moved like absurdly powerful ants in the skyscrapers and penthouses around me. I didn’t belong there. I had nothing left to say about it with my brushes.
“Leandra—”
“Lia.”
“Lia,” she said, and her tone held a note I never thought I’d hear from her. It was the tone I used on Chloe to get her to abandon her toys for bedtime, a tone I’d heard Victoria use on other artists who were “difficult.” And that was the kindest description I could think of.
I sighed. I didn’t want to be one of them, the artists who took themselves so seriously that they lost touch with reality without knowing or caring. “Yes, Victoria?”
“The International Man of Mystery is back.”
I drew a sharp breath. That was her name for him. I’d called him Daddy Warbucks, like the billionaire in Annie, and if I’d had anything close to a patron, he was it. He’d bought over a dozen of my most expensive pieces over the four years Van Exel had carried my work. He’d done it anonymously, and since he worked through an assistant to buy the work, even Victoria didn’t know who he was. We’d spent a few idle lunches together speculating about his secret identity, but Victoria wasn’t interested in digging too deep as long he kept the checks coming, especially when they ended in a row of juicy zeros.
“I’m not painting anymore,” I said, pulling myself together. “Sorry to disappoint you both, but it’s not my thing.”
“Why not?” she asked, and I didn’t hear judgment in her voice. “Help me understand, Lia.”
If she had said Leandra, I probably would have ended the call. If she had sounded like she was looking for an explanation so she could pick apart its flaws and sell me on doing more work, I would have given her a polite good-bye and pushed the whole call out of my mind. But I heard concern, the same concern I’d heard in Dani’s voice when she’d coaxed Chloe into explaining why she didn’t want to go to her dance class when the kid loved dancing more than she loved Lucky Charms and cartoons combined. Relief had radiated from Chloe once she’d let the truth flood out: the other girls had sparkle leotards and satin tutus, and her plain black ones left her wanting fancier dance clothes like a housefly among fairies.
Dani had spent the next three nights embellishing Chloe’s outfits so they wouldn’t embarrass her. Chloe had lit up brighter than her newly bedazzled leotards when she’d seen them, but I suspected it was telling the truth to her mom that had made her feel better.
So I told Victoria the truth. She wouldn’t be able to fix what was wrong with me, but I wanted to push the weight of the truth off my chest. “I can’t paint. That’s all. It takes too much out of me. I spent a long time putting myself back together, and to be in the mental space it takes for me to do that work . . . I can’t. It would break me.”
A long silence. I wondered if she was rubbing her chin like she did when she was assessing her own reaction to a new artist’s work.
Her voice was thoughtful when she spoke. “Success has a way of breaking some people, but it’s not the same for everyone. A few people let it go to their heads, and what starts as talent becomes them echoing themselves, redoing versions of what they’ve already done. Buyers still fall all over themselves to worship it. But the work isn’t real anymore, not like it was when the artists started. I knew you would never be in that category.”
A rare hesitancy laced her tone, and I couldn’t stop myself from prompting her. “You expected the success to break me another way?”
She sighed. “Yes. I hoped I was wrong. But there are some people who paint purely for the joy of it or because that’s the only way to let the pain out. They don’t care about the business side of things other than as a means to earn enough to let them keep painting. That was you. When success comes, some of them are fine. But some of them . . . it breaks them to have what’s inside of them hung all over other people’s walls, in homes and galleries where people collect you because other people collect you and not because they get what you’re doing.”
I was glad I was sitting down. Such a naked, dead-on look inside of me made my knees buckle. “I’m one of the weak ones who couldn’t cut it, huh?”
“No. You’re one of the ones smart enough to save yourself before you became the first kind of artist. But you have to understand something: I wouldn’t have called you just to make a buck. You understand that, right?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Ouch.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you. But . . . why else would you call me?”
“I don’t need your work from a financial standpoint. This is one of those utterly bizarre situations in which I’m doing the right thing because it’s the right thing.”
That made me laugh. Victoria could be a shark, but she was an honest one. “I’ve never questioned your integrity,” I said. “Your tact, maybe. But not your integrity.”
“I bet you’ve also never questioned my healthy self-interest. And believe me, there’s so much money riding on this that I’m very, very interested. But the part of me that loves art separate from business would be making this happen regardless. Or trying to. So you’ll at least let me explain?”
“I’ll listen.”
“Mystery Man wants to commission work but something different than your other stuff.”
“That makes no sense.” I interrupted her even though I’d promised myself to let her finish. “If he likes me for my old work, why would he want me to do anything different?”
“He’s requesting something less conceptual. Instead of your city/mountain mash-up, he wants to see your take on a mountain landscape only. He wants a half dozen eight-foot canvases, and he’s offering to pay exactly what he used to.”
This conversation was making less sense to me by the minute. He wanted to commission a conceptual artist to do landscapes? Large ones that would run him in the low-to-mid six figures for a series? “It’s an interesting idea in the way that insane people are fascinating, but no.”
“Think about it,” Victoria said, and it sounded like an order, the kind a mom gives her kid, not a boss to an underling. “His assistant says Mystery Man understands that neither of you may like the result, but he’d be interested in seeing you try. He’s willing to pay you for your time on the first painting even if he doesn’t buy it.”
“I won’t do it,” I said.
“Five thousand dollars, Lia. That’s what he’s willing to pay for both of you to even see if it’s worth your time and his money. Does waiting tables pay you enough to blow off that kind of money as a matter of principle?”
“There’s not enough money in the world for me to do something that’s against my principles,” I said, the words sounding as hard as trail rocks. I’d seen too many people sell their souls instead of their art by compromising their vision for money in the first place. “This is about me having no idea if I could paint anything worth showing him.” Something else she said sank in. “Wait a minute. How did you know I’m waiting tables?”
“Same way I got your phone number. I hired a private investigator to find you. I guessed you’d gone back to Utah. It didn’t take him long once he looked for you under your maiden name. Was it supposed to be a secret?”
“It’s not like I left you a forwarding address.”
The idea of a detective looking for me made me antsy.
“I was worried. I found out where you went within a couple months of your leaving. I didn’t have a reason to bother you until now.”
“I’m still weirded out.”
“You think Donovan’s going to find you? He’d have done it by now if he wanted to.”
True. And I’d told myself the same thing a million times, but something about hearing another person say it made it easier to believe. “Thanks for caring to look.”
“You’re not trying to hide, are you?”
“Not really.” I couldn’t be around Dani and Chloe if I didn’t want to be found. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that Donovan was done and had made no effort to reconcile in the three years I’d been gone. Thank goodness. He must have believed me when I’d walked out the last time and threatened to call the police if I ever heard from him again. “Victoria? Thanks for trying to get me to do this painting, but it’s not what I do anymore.”
“Don’t say no. Say maybe, or I can’t let you off the phone.”
At that moment, I heard Chloe scratching at the glass as she attempted to slide the door open to join me.
“Maybe,” I said into the phone, already reaching for the end button.
Victoria’s triumphant “We’ll talk soon” overrode my “I have to go.”
I hung up and turned as Chloe pushed the door aside and raced to fling herself into my lap. I settled her down and stroked her hair while she told me about her Barbie movie. I eyed the mountains in the distance. Maybe . . .
No. I was done being crazy and giving up bits of my soul to everyone else.
Chapter 5
The scent of onion and grease washed over me like it did every time I walked in the door of T&R, but instead of smelling like comfort, it struck me with the force of a slap, the kind you give to snap a person out of being hysterical.
Painting Kisses Page 4
