Forever Finley

by Holly Schindler

  Annie Ames returns to her small hometown of Finley to celebrate her newfound success as an up-and-coming young NYC artist...only to come face-to-face with Justin O’Dell, who is both her childhood friend and a journalist who recently penned a scathing review of her work. Can an artist and her biggest critic find common ground—or have Justin's words destroyed their friendship for good?

  The town square of Finley, Missouri had captured all the quaint charm of a Currier and Ives print, as well as every last drop of the simple sweetness that had graced any of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers. And if the young adults behind plate glass windows had their way, these would be permanent qualities—longer lasting, even, than the stones that had been holding up city hall for nearly a century and a half. Finley had raised them on buttermilk biscuits, taught them to skip down the sidewalks, then stuffed plenty of just in case money and extra bologna on homemade white bread sandwiches into their coat pockets, kissing them goodbye at the bus station, shooing them off to college or jobs in bigger cities. But nostalgia set in early for those who had been raised in town; they returned quickly—at times even before their thirtieth birthdays—hungry for juicy beauty-salon gossip and flaky pie crusts filled with both apples from the nearby orchard and long-held family traditions. They hung their own business signs in the plate glass windows facing the square, inviting Finley, Come in; I’m back home; I’ve missed you.

  Last month’s Christmas bustle—and the evergreen wreaths, so many of them, the entire town square had smelled of pine the moment shoppers pulled themselves from their cars—had been replaced by a dangerous mix of January-in-the-Midwest sleet and rain. “Worst storm of the year,” a few tight, worried voices called out to each other, repeating what the Channel 27 weather team had predicted. “Hurry—get home while you can.” Open signs had begun to turn their backs apologetically toward the sidewalks.

  One corner of the square refused to let a little rain—and a bitter twenty-nine-degree chill—dampen its spirits. Cuppa, the popular coffee palace, was still proudly open. The banner that stretched across its front window continued to boast, even as it sagged beneath the accumulating freezing rain, “Finley Welcomes Back Annie Ames - Charity Auction - Tonight.” Several dozen brave residents were scurrying inside, hastily pulling off woolen gloves and unbuttoning jackets, reaching for Cuppa’s still-warm lemon bars and steaming lattes.

  But Finley was becoming increasingly dangerous; that much was getting hard to ignore. The click of ice pellets hitting storefronts perfectly mimicked the sound of fingers clicking at a computer keyboard in the nearby newspaper office. The icy clicks were a bit mean-spirited; they’d wrapped cars in frozen cocoons, denying entry, and they’d weighed power lines, threatening to steal the town’s light.

  A few weeks ago, before the holidays, the literal tap of fingers on a computer keyboard—Justin O’Dell’s fingers to be exact—had culminated in a slew of words that the habitual Finley Times readers had also interpreted to be mean-spirited. Those words had built a frozen wall between Justin and the very Annie Ames who was standing inside Cuppa, hugging everyone who had braved the weather to attend her art show.

  Justin had arrived nearly ten minutes earlier, but hadn’t yet been able to drag himself inside Cuppa and come face-to-face with Annie, whom, word had it, had yet to let go of what he’d written and published for the entirety of her hometown to read. She was angry at him; it wasn’t a surprise. He’d expected as much. Now, though, he was having a hard time squeezing out enough courage to finally deal with it.

  “When we go in there…” a voice called from down the sidewalk.

  Justin turned, sighing with relief when he found that the person approaching Cuppa was Damien December—Justin’s childhood best friend and the person who’d promised to help soothe Annie should she turn into an angry cat, arching her back and hissing warnings at Justin, the mongrel dog he was. Damien waved his arms about, clenching his entire body as he attempted, in a pair of slick-soled dress shoes, to stay upright on the thickening ice. “You have to promise me you’ll behave yourself.”

  “Behave myself?” Justin asked innocently. “What do you think I am, one of your kindergarten students?”

  “Come on, Jay,” Damien moaned, sliding to a stop. “It’s cause to celebrate. Hometown girl makes good.”

  Yes, Finley’s girl of the moment had definitely made good in the big-bad world of skyscrapers and endless taxi streams and hoity-toity art connoisseurs who usually preferred their geniuses to be East-Coast bred. She had impressed even the snobbiest of highbrows, the sort that still assumed that anyone from Missouri didn’t wear shoes and had to swerve to avoid piles of horse dung in the street. The quirky girl who’d once doodled incessantly on her canvas sneakers, whose fingers were chronically stained from her favorite inks, and whose locker in high school was instantly identifiable (think: papier-mâché bas-relief down the gray metal door) had been in nearly fifty juried shows since she’d begun her studies at NYU. Currently working on her MFA at the Pratt Institute, she’d also, the previous fall, been profiled by Art Trek as one of NYC’s most promising young artists and had subsequently landed her first solo exhibition in Chelsea.

  “Her folks are here. Her old teachers are here. She’s not going to be here long. Got to head back out to New York for the spring semester,” Damien went on, pausing to gesture toward the plate glass, then blow a quick burst of warm air on his freezing fingers. “A silent auction of a bunch of her new paintings, in order to help fund the old art department at our high school. She’s giving back. She hasn’t forgotten her roots. That’s admirable, right?”

  “She knows, though. About my review of her Chelsea show.”

  “Wasn’t that the point? Isn’t that why you wrote it? So Annie would read it?”

  Justin grunted.

  “It took everybody here by surprise. Had to have taken Annie by surprise, too. You fly all the way to New York to see her exhibit—” Damien started.

  “Not just to see the exhibit. I had to meet with my editor, too,” Justin insisted, blinking sleet from his eyelashes.

  “Oh, sure, you had to meet with your editor. They fly all their midlist authors to New York these days?”

  “They were interested in my second book—”

  “—which you said they were going to offer a whopping twelve thousand dollars for. Just like the last one. Which is why, I believe, you had to keep working at the paper.”

  Justin sighed.

  “You could have handled all that editor stuff through e-mail. You bought your own ticket to New York to see Annie’s exhibit. And then you don’t say a word to her face, you just come home and write the world’s most scathing review for The Finley Times.”

  “She deserved honesty.”

  “You know more about art than any of the critics in New York? They all love her stuff.”

  “I know more about her, though,” Justin murmured, staring through the plate glass—but not at Annie. He was staring instead at the tiny table in the back corner. The same table where a teenaged Annie had spent Saturday afternoons curled over her sketchbook, nursing the same cappuccino for hours. Mindlessly sloshing cold coffee onto the white butcher paper Cuppa used as disposable tablecloths, her pencil scratching feverishly against her pages.

  Back then, Justin had often joined her, sliding his own scribbled-on notebook under her nose to share his latest piece of flash fiction—which usually involved aliens and ray guns. And Annie had laughed, loving them (or so she’d said) because they played out like comic books in her mind. Because she could see them. She had even drawn his main characters in her own sketchbook, slipping finished illustrations through the slots in his locker door or tucking them underneath the windshield wipers of his Pontiac.

  She had drawn him, too, Justin remembered. Always with a crooked smile and a crooked slant to his shoulders and overly exaggerated, large eyes.

  What is this, manga-me? he’d written above one of her drawings before shoving it into
her locker.

  Big eyes, because you see everything and put it all in your stories, she’d written back. Those aliens aren’t so alien after all, are they?

  “Just do the polite thing,” Damien insisted. “Tell her how great she looks. She does, too.”

  That much was true; she had the look of a woman who had found success early—at twenty-four, the funky brightly-colored hand-knitted hats and fingerless gloves that had been her winter wardrobe through high school were long gone, as were the two loose dirty blond braids she’d once preferred, one on each side of her head—“Helga braids,” she’d always called them, after Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of his neighbor, a woman who’d worn her own hair in a similar fashion. Now, she looked completely at ease in her long tweed skirt and knee-length leather boots, her hair dyed platinum and cropped to chin length—too short for braids anymore.

  “The news team is here to cover this event, not you,” Damien reminded Justin, fidgeting as a Channel 27 reporter and videographer set up near Annie. Damien fidgeted a lot—even more than he changed his address. For the past couple of years, he’d bounced between apartment buildings in Finley the same way his five-year-old students bounced between playthings. But the moment he caught the eye of the videographer in the red sweater, a large white gardenia corsage on her left shoulder, the fidgeting subsided. Justin suspected all that apartment-hopping was coming to a stop, too, now that Damien shared the same apartment building with the videographer whose name—Natalie—took up most of their conversations.

  “You’re here as Annie’s friend,” Damien insisted in his best teacherly voice.

  Justin wasn’t sure that old friendships were simply habits a person could fall back into, given the right surroundings. They seemed more like plants that could turn black with the first frost—never to be revived again.

  Natalie winked at Damien, making him release an uncensored cackle that banged like a fist against the plate glass.

  A smiling Annie swiveled, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the crowded room and the rush of so much attention—and instantly shifted, like a kaleidoscope, into an angry scowl.

  “She saw you,” Damien said. “No more dragging your feet.”

  Justin stepped inside at the same moment a microphone was thrust beneath Annie’s chin. She returned to smiling for the camera; Justin heaved a relieved sigh. Saved—for the moment.

  She really had been too busy at the Chelsea show for Justin to get in so much as a hello—just like this, cameras and reporters hovering. Handshakes. Compliments buzzing all over her like bees. Not angry bees, though—these were more like happily pollinating bees. Sweet honey-making bees.

  Denise, the owner of Cuppa (and Justin’s boss throughout his college-era summer breaks) swooped closer, proudly bearing a tray of white ceramic mugs.

  “You just missed your folks,” Denise shouted at him over the din. “They came to congratulate Annie on all her success.” She stretched her plum-colored lips into a grin. But it was strained; it weighed more than the tray in her hand. She, too, knew about the review. She’d shaken her head at him the morning it appeared, muttering, “Justin,” in the way of disapproving principals. In the way that said she’d thought he was above this—more mature, kinder. In a way that said she hoped she hadn’t pegged him all wrong.

  The entire room was watching both of them now—almost as if Annie and Justin were illuminated by spotlights that advertised something show-stopping was about to unfold. Wordlessly, they all warned that whatever punishment Annie wanted to lob at Justin, he had it coming to him. At least, that was how he was interpreting every wide eye and wrinkled forehead turned his way.

  He reached for one of Denise’s mugs, anxious to find out what her own favorite barista—her son, Michael, also back to Finley after a brief big-city stint—had drawn in honor of Annie’s return. His latte art had grown increasingly wilder of late. The simple leaves and hearts created by the perfectly-steamed milk had, within the past year or so, become spider webs on Halloween, turkeys on Thanksgiving, or gift boxes for birthdays. (In Finley, birthdays were dates of common knowledge, put to memory like lines from favorite movies). Tonight, each mug was topped with steamed milk in the shape of cursive capital-As.

  Justin quickly took a sip, burning the roof of his mouth as he erased the triumphant-looking “A,” and turned his attention toward the art on the walls. The pieces he’d seen in New York had been praised for their tactile quality—plaster and thread-work had been applied to her canvases in a manner that Justin was certain should have reminded him of her hand-knitted fingerless gloves and the papier-mâché relief on her locker door. But Justin thought the pieces looked two-dimensional. It had disappointed him, made him feel sad—like something utterly precious had been lost.

  Tonight’s canvases had been created, he assumed, to please a crowd whose tastes ran far afield from anything vaguely considered “avant-garde.” These were photorealistic images from daily life in Finley: a rusted truck in a hayfield, reflections in one of the square’s many plate glass windows, the ancient and abandoned mill. But these, too, were flat, the colors as dark as the shadow that eclipsed Justin the moment he recognized they were missing the same quality as the works he’d seen in Chelsea: Annie’s heart.

  Justin thought of the night after their high school commencement, when he had nearly kissed her under the football field bleachers. She was twirling her honors cord, dancing to the melody she was humming. Finley was about to usher them both to the bus stop, shove bologna sandwiches into their pockets, send Annie to New York and Justin to the state university to major in English. She’d seemed so alive then, her joy leaking out everywhere.

  He’d started to feel bad about his review as he’d stood on the sidewalk, but he didn’t anymore—not when he thought of commencement and how vibrant she’d been. Not when he remembered the passion that had once filled even her quickest sketch.

  The camera lowered and the microphone pulled back. Annie turned to face Justin, her jaw clenched and her arms crossed defensively over her chest. Perhaps, Justin caught himself thinking, the fogged-up front window wasn’t the result of the breath of so many chatty visitors and the constant brewing of the espresso machines. Maybe it had been created by the steam that had risen from the heat of Annie’s glare.

  His thoughts bounced to the past once more as he considered that the moment under the bleachers—that blip of possibility of becoming more than friends—wasn’t the only thing they’d sped past, faster than they could leave behind a landmark on a highway. Maybe who Annie had been back then—and their friendship—was every bit as long-gone. Maybe they’d already become strangers when Justin showed up in New York—and maybe what Justin wrote was mourning that.

  Denise emptied her tray and approached Annie, placing a hand on her arm in a way that begged her to relax, calm down, enjoy her night.

  Annie turned a reassuring eye-roll toward Denise, as if agreeing to ignore Justin’s presence. But she could still feel his eyes on her, so busy fault-finding they scalded.

  She had seen him at the exhibit in Chelsea; his appearance had surprised her, kept her from instantly waving and saying hello.

  The Justin she had known had gotten tall early—six feet by the sixth grade. He had stooped, pushing his shoulders to make him appear shorter, closer to the rest of their classmates’ height. And he’d always hesitated—before announcing what he wanted from the lunch ladies in the cafeteria, before getting up enough guts to share his stories with her, before trying to kiss her beneath the bleachers on graduation night. He’d hesitated so long before the kiss, it had actually never even happened. They’d both shrugged, cleared their throats and laughed as they tossed their mortar boards into the air one last time, just because.

  This person who had come to her show had the kind of confidence that declared any hesitation was long gone; he appeared unapologetic for anything, including his height and the way he towered over the crowd and took up so much space in the small gallery. His hair was lo
ng enough to cover half his ears, and he had a well-manicured goatee. He’d looked professorly, literary. She’d wanted to offer him scotch, a pipe. Impress him. On one pass through the room, she’d grown close enough to see that the old playfulness was still in his eyes. She’d gotten the urge to tease him then. The next pass through the room, though, he was gone. She’d thought about getting in touch, thanking him for coming, apologizing for not having time to talk, inviting him out the next time he was in New York. But then his review had filled her tablet screen one morning, thanks to her online subscription to The Finley Times.

  She had felt instantly betrayed. Had he forgotten what they’d meant to each other? That they had been partners in daydreaming? It had been more intimate to her than a kiss would have been, to share her dreams with someone. To share them with a person who understood that dreams were living creatures—beings that had to be fed and cared for properly or else they’d die. Their dreams were real, not the play-pretend ramblings of seven-year-olds proclaiming they would someday be president or travel to Mars. Of all the people in Finely, Annie’d considered him the one closest to her. Closer than the boys she’d dated. Closer, in some ways, than her family. And now, this?

  “He’s not here for the paper, Annie,” Denise tried.

  “Doesn’t mean he’s not here to judge.”

  “You two were always such good friends. I can’t believe he was trying to hurt—”

  “He did, though.”

  “You know that book of his didn’t do much. He’s still known around town as a newspaperman, not a novelist.”

  “A novelist with a slew of really lovely reviews. One starred. He should know, firsthand, how important reviews are. How they can play with your mind. Why is he insisting on being the one person—”

  “Yes. One person. What does it matter what one—”

  “Because it’s him. One bad review from him is worse than fifty bad reviews from the toughest critics.”