Work of Art

by Monica Alexander

“Fine, I’ll call Jessica and see if she wants to go to Anything Goes with me.”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes. I didn’t like Jessica that much. She worked with Kelly, and we’d hung out a few times, but we just didn’t get along. She was loud and brazen and rude half the time. Hey, maybe I should introduce her to Brandon, they might get along famously. She was sort of like the female version of him.

  Okay, not really. He seemed like a nice guy, and she was just toxic. I wasn’t sure why Kelly liked her.

  “Oh, shit,” Devin said then, emerging from their bedroom wearing just a towel. “Sorry, Harper. I didn’t know you were here.”

  I winked at him. “Looking good, Dev. How’s your eyebrow?”

  He grinned. “What do you think?” he asked, leaning toward me so I could admire the piercing I’d done for him the week before.

  He’d had it done years earlier before we’d met, but it had gotten infected, so he’d taken it out and let it close up. I’d been begging him to let me do it again for him, after he showed me the one picture he’d taken shortly after it was done. It suited his face, and his personality, and he’d finally let me get him under my needle. It wasn’t the first time. I’d done five of his tattoos, but he’d been hesitant about getting another piercing, and it had taken a lot of convincing on my part.

  “I think it looks as great as I told you it would.”

  “You were right,” he said, walking over behind Kelly. “Hey baby.”

  She turned around and kissed him. They were always so gushy and in love, and had gotten even more affectionate with each other since Devin popped the question a few months earlier. It would make most single girls jealous, but for the girl who saw them regularly, they made me actually want a relationship when I’d shied away from them for so long.

  “How was work?”

  “Good. Did you listen to the show?”

  She shook her head. “I had a meeting with a client this afternoon, so I couldn’t.”

  Devin was a deejay at an alternative rock station. He had the afternoon drive show, and we always tuned in and listened at the shop. He played a good rotation of 90’s and current alt rock. Kelly worked at an ad agency, so she didn’t always have the luxury of listening to his show.

  When they met, I never thought Kelly and Devin would last. Julian had actually been talking to me about dating his edgy brother who’d gone to Berkley, and I was considering it since Devin was just the kind of guy I probably should have been interested in. He was tall, good looking, had full lips and shoulder-length dreads. He also liked ink, so he was a fan of both my job and the artwork I’d decorated my body with.

  Over the years I’d learned not to care what people thought, but for a period of time when I was much younger, I got upset when I found out a guy I liked didn’t think I was girlfriend material because of my body art. So I figured maybe someone who had come into my parlor for their own ink wouldn’t be so judgmental.

  Then Devin brought Kelly home one day and never looked back, and I pushed away the idea of dating him since if I was being honest, he wasn’t preppy enough for me anyway. I craved men who were perpetually wrong for me, and I knew it was all because of the one guy who’d broken my heart when I was eighteen. Damn him.

  “That’s okay,” Devin said, reaching over to pluck a carrot out of the Dutch oven Kelly was roasting the chicken in. “Damn, did you make my mother’s chicken recipe?”

  Kelly winked at me. “I like to take care of my man.”

  “And your man appreciates it,” Devin said, as she smacked his hand away from where he was trying to pluck a piece of meat from the chicken.

  “Stop that. Go get dressed, and when you come back out, Harper and I will have dinner on the table.”

  “We will?” I asked, knowing full well that she knew that the extent of my cooking skills included ordering in and heating up the leftover takeout food the next day. And I had mastered most breakfast foods, but they were sort of hard to screw up. I definitely wasn’t as accomplished in the kitchen as Kelly was.

  “You can set the table,” Kelly told me as she leaned over her cookbook. “I just need to make the gravy, and then we’ll be good.”

  “Fine, I guess I can help in some way since you did cook for me,” I said, finishing my wine and going over to the drawer where I knew she kept the silverware.

  * * *

  That night when I finally crawled into my bed exhausted from traveling all day and then staying up late talking to Kelly about the hell that had been my trip to Boston, I closed my eyes and fell asleep instantly. Then at around three in the morning, I woke up crying.

  I’d dreamed about Ryan Carson, the very first boy I’d ever loved, and the first boy to break my heart. I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d been home where everything had seemed to remind me of him or if it was because I’d been recounting my hatred of the ladies my mother was friends with who were just like his mother, but for some reason he was on my mind.

  And I hadn’t thought about him in a long time.

  Very few people in my life knew the real story of why I’d fled Boston in the first place after what Ryan had done to me and my mother had kicked me out. It wasn’t something I was particularly proud of, and at the time it had hurt more than I’d ever imagined.

  My father was one of the people who knew my story, because he’d lived it with me, and because of that I picked up my cell phone, knowing I’d catch him awake. He barely slept as it was and always got up early to open up the garage he owned. During the three years I’d lived with him, there were many times when I found him up in the middle of the night working on his motorcycle or one of the vintage cars he rebuilt from the ground up. I’d go downstairs, sit on the steps leading down to the garage and watch him work. He never said anything, but he’d smile at me, so I knew he knew I was there.

  “Harper,” he answered gruffly. He’d probably had to roll out from under a car to answer his phone. “It’s been a while since you’ve called me in the middle of the night.”

  “Hi Daddy.”

  For the longest time, I hadn’t known that Bill Harper even existed, let alone that I was related to him and had been named after him. My mother had told me growing up that my stepfather, George Connelly, was my father, but it had been a lie. She’d gotten pregnant at sixteen and at nineteen she’d met George who was ten years older than her and a little bit of a Bill Gates type. He wasn’t social, he didn’t have many friends, but he had a boatload of money that he wanted to share with someone. He fell in love with my mother and her two year-old daughter.

  When I was five, we moved to the town where I grew up, and they told everyone, including me, that George was my father. It wasn’t until I was sixteen and George was arrested for embezzling money that my mother finally told me the truth. I’m not sure why she did it when everything was already crashing down around us, but for some reason she felt I needed to know the truth. I learned that she’d also been lying about her age for years, telling everyone she was four years older than she actually was, because God forbid anyone know she had me when she was a teenager. But in our town, appearances were everything, and she wanted to maintain hers.

  Once I learned about my birth father, a part of me wanted to find him more than anything, so I set out to do just that, not even sure if he’d want to hear from me. But he’d been elated to hear from me the first time I called since he’d been trying to have a relationship with me for years, but my mother wouldn’t let him. She was a little bit of an evil bitch when she wanted to be – or when she needed to protect something important to her, like her reputation. So she’d kept me in the dark as long as she could.

  But once we started talking, I knew I wanted a relationship with my father. He was a great man, a better man than my stepfather had ever been. So Bill and I started talking regularly. And when I’d called him in tears asking if I could come live with him he hadn’t even hesitated before saying yes. He sent me a plane ticket to San Francisco, I was there the next day, and I rar
ely ever looked back.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

  I sighed, contemplating whether I wanted to tell him about my dream or not. “Nothing. I just wanted to say hi.”

  “At three in the morning?”

  “Sure,” I said, snuggling deeper under my comforter, feeling better already just hearing his voice. “I missed you, I guess.”

  My father lived nearby in North Beach, but I’d been so busy that it had been a good month since I’d seen him.

  “Well, why don’t you come for dinner tonight?”

  I sighed. “I can’t. I have to work.”

  “Is business good?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, it’s really good.”

  My dad had helped me get my business started six years earlier. He’d owned a small business for twenty years, so he knew so much about how to succeed and how to fail, but he’d also helped me negotiate the loan for the business, secure the space I rented and remodel the shop so I could turn it into an art gallery/tattoo parlor. It was eclectic, but I liked to think I was eclectic, so it fit.

  “Maybe one of these days I’ll let you give me a tattoo,” my dad interjected then.

  I laughed. “Dad, tattoos are really personal. I won’t give you one until you decide you want something meaningful. I’ve told you that before.”

  I was big into the symbolism of tattoos, one, because it was part of my job to help people figure out what they wanted to permanently ink on their bodies for life, and two, because I would never tattoo anything on my body again that didn’t have a strong meaning. I’d made that mistake once.

  “Fine, I want a ’57 Chevy on my ass.”

  “Dad! Be serious.”

  “Fine. I’ll keep you posted.”

  He’d been saying the same thing for the past eleven years, ever since I’d gotten a job as a receptionist at Black Ink, a parlor in North Beach, simply because I needed to make money when I’d first moved to the city. I’d started getting more tattoos once I was around them every day, and my dad had been joking since then that he was going to get one too. I wasn’t holding my breath. He wasn’t an ink kind of guy anyway.

  “How about I come over for dinner on Monday night? I’m not working then. I’ll bring Chinese.”

  I’d planned to work on a photography series I’d shot a few weeks earlier that was for a show in August. I’d been working steadily to edit the thousands of pictures I’d shot and still had a long way to go, but it could wait. Seeing my dad was more important.

  “It’s a date,” he said. “So, how was Boston?”

  I’d been wondering if he’d ask me about the funeral. My father had made the decision not to go to my mother’s funeral. They hadn’t talked for close to fifteen years, their relationship had never really been civil, and I was pretty sure he’d lost all empathy for her when she kicked me out of her house eleven years earlier.

  There had been a time when they’d been in love, and they’d tried to make a go of raising me together when I was first born, but they were in high school, so it was hard, and then my father joined the military when he was eighteen and was stationed overseas for several years.

  While he was gone, my mother met George and established a life with him, and when my father reached out to her to try to see me once he was back in the country, she wouldn’t allow it. She told him I was happy and well-adjusted, and I didn’t need a father I didn’t remember coming back into my life. He’d stayed away, but I knew he hated it, and he’d been so grateful for a second chance when I’d tracked him down in high school.

  “I don’t want to talk about Boston,” I told him.

  “Her friends were that mean to you, huh?”

  “I have no idea what she told them about me, but yeah, I think they would have preferred if I hadn’t been there.”

  I’d barely talked to my mother in the eleven years since I’d moved out, but I’d felt obligated to go to her funeral. It seemed heartless not to, but then again, I’m not sure she would have come to mine. I probably shouldn’t have bothered.

  “Harper, I hope you didn’t let them get to you. You’re a beautiful, successful, wonderful, caring woman, and I am so proud to call you my daughter.”

  I hugged myself as I listened to his words, knowing he meant each one of them.

  “Thank you, Daddy.”

  “You’re welcome. Now go back to bed. And remember, it was just a dream.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. How he knew the reason I’d initially called him was because I’d had bad dream, I’d never know.

  “I know. Thank you, Daddy. Love you.”

  “Love you too, little girl.”

  Chapter Five

  Ryan

  Shit. I had not been this hung over in years.

  I rolled over to look at my alarm clock and didn’t see it. In fact, all I saw were the legs of my fifteen thousand dollar ‘you can’t put your feet on it’ coffee table and realized it was tilted away from me.

  I groaned, vaguely remembering kicking it repeatedly the night before at like three in the morning. What the hell was I thinking? Trish was going to kill me.

  But I knew what I’d been thinking. I cringed at the thought. I was going to kill Brandon – as soon as I could get up off the floor because my back was killing me and my head was pounding, and I wasn’t moving any time soon.

  “Morning,” Brandon said then, sauntering through the living room wearing a pair of basketball shorts and a t-shirt. “We’re going to the gym. Get your ass up.”

  “No,” I mumbled, rolling back over and smushing my face into the carpet, glad we’d paid for top of the line. It didn’t make for a bad pillow.

  “Come on, douchebag,” he said, as he kicked me in the thigh.

  I reached out for him blindly with my arm and missed by a mile. “Go away.”

  Then my stomach started to seize, and I doubled over in pain, rolling onto my knees with my forehead still resting on the carpet. Shit. I needed to get up, or I was going to get sick all over the living room.

  Pulling all my strength together, I got up and bolted to the nearest bathroom while Brandon laughed behind me.

  Shit. I knew the raging hot chicken wings, onion rings, draft beer, and all that other toxic shit Brandon had forced down my throat had been a mistake. I hadn’t eaten fried foods in years, and Trish and I had lived on a low carb diet for the past six months. My body was not accustomed to digesting crap like that, and I was paying like hell for it now.

  “I’m pulling your Man Card, you jackass,” Brandon called to me from outside the bathroom. “Anyone who can’t stomach pub food and keg beer doesn’t deserve a penis.”

  “Fuck you,” I grunted, as I fell in front of the toilet and threw up everything in my stomach.

  He just laughed when he heard the toilet flush. “Lightweight pussy,” he muttered.

  I didn’t have the energy to dignify his jab with a response. It had been years since I’d been that hung over. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thrown up from drinking.

  When I emerged a few minutes later, Brandon was standing in front of my open refrigerator. “Well, it’s no wonder you threw up. You eat like a chick.”

  I slumped down at the breakfast table and leaned my head on my hand. It was throbbing. “Aleve,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Get me some fucking Aleve. It’s in the cabinet above the coffee maker. Please.”

  Brandon laughed. “Sure thing, dude. Just don’t vomit on my shoes if I get too close to you.”

  I glared at him, and my cell phone chose that moment to ring, but I ignored it, hoping it wasn’t work. I couldn’t talk to anyone or make any coherent decisions yet.

  “It’s your girl,” Brandon said, glancing at the screen as the phone vibrated along the counter.

  Shit, I couldn’t ignore it. She’d flip out if she couldn’t get a hold of me.

  “Hand it to me,” I said, sticking my arm out. “Hello?”

  “Ryan, s
weetie, are you sick?”

  “Hey, baby,” I said, garnering as much strength as I could. “Sorry, I just woke up.”

  “It’s eleven in the morning.”

  Oops. I never slept in. Trish knew I was up and at the gym by seven on the weekends.

  “Yeah, I had trouble falling asleep last night. I had some indigestion.”

  At that, Brandon started laughing, so I punched him in the stomach, and gave him a look that said ‘shut up’. I did not want to explain to Trish why he was there.

  “Aww, you pour baby. Did you take some Tums?”

  “Yeah, and then I was able to fall asleep.”

  “Pass out is more like it,” Brandon muttered.

  “Who’s there with you?”

  “Huh?”

  I was totally buying time.

  “I heard someone in the background. Who was it?” Trish demanded.

  “Oh, uh, Sports Center.”

  Yeah, that sounded plausible.

  “Oh, well, don’t watch too much TV. Get out and do something, get some fresh air.”

  Yes, Mom.

  “Yeah, I think I’m actually going to hook up with Chris from work and see if he wants to bike over to Sausalito.”

  “Well that sounds like fun. Tell him I said hi and to have Sandra call me. We need to do lunch next week.”

  “Yeah, sure thing. Will do.”

  Brandon raised an eyebrow at me, so I just ignored him.

  “I love you, baby.”

  “Me too,” I said quickly, my brain suddenly remembering how I’d sort of trashed her the night before and I cringed.

  I’d gone on and on about how she kept me on a tight leash, never let me do anything fun, constantly told me what to do, where to go, who to hang out with, what to eat, and I’d complained about the sex, since when we’d been having it, it had sort of sucked. I’d let it all out, airing all the things I usually tried not to let affect me.

  Then I’d proceeded to kick the coffee table until it broke. I needed to find someone to fix it before Trish got back on Monday, or I’d be in deep shit.

  I was a dickhead.

  “Does she not know I’m here?” Brandon asked as soon as I hung up the phone.