Kimmie
In the four hours since Natan said he had to leave, I’ve moved the copper, then moved the copper back to exactly where it was on yesterday.
I ate some left-over fruit standing over the storeroom sink like a raccoon with a business license, and I have looked out of my own window so many times that Mrs. Vasey waved at me with the slow deliberation of a woman making a note for later.
When he arrives, taking up the whole frame the way he does, it’s with a piece of paper folded into quarters in one hand.
“The Rebecchi’s yours,” he says.
“The Rebecchi is Bea’s.”
“It was.” He crosses my floor and puts the paper on the desk.
I unfold it. It’s a receipt off a duplicate pad, written out in handwriting that climbs uphill, because everything about Bea climbs uphill.
My name is at the top. Farrow, Kimmie, underlined twice.
Under that there’s a number with a comma in the middle of it, and beside the number, in brackets, she has written that the gallery commission has been paid separately and in full.
I sit down on my stool.
“You bought the painting.”
“Yes. I bought it from the woman who painted it, and I paid your twenty-five percent on top so you wouldn’t lose a cent. She wanted it written down so you’d know I hadn’t gone around you.”
“You did go around me. That’s what the paperwork is for.
That’s the whole job, artists bringing me work and me finding the person who ought to have it, and the second collectors start driving out to people’s houses with cash in an envelope there’s no reason for any of this to exist.” I hear my own voice going up the register and stop it. “Sorry. That was a lot of words.”
“It was accurate.”
“Why, then? You know how important this is to me.”
He pulls out the chair on the other side of my desk and sits down in it with his elbows on his knees, and I understand that we are about to have a conversation he decided to have somewhere on the road back over the bridge.
“Johansson,” he says. “The skinny one who left the card. He’s Vestbro Holdings. Vestbro owns the laundry at the top of the street, some other properties on this street and in this area. Including the parking lot.”
“The lot where you park.”
“The lot where I park. He’s been buying Calloway one unit at a time for three years and waiting for whoever’s left in the middle to get tired. He did the same thing at the marina in Bellingfell, to a wine bar that wouldn’t sell.”
My arms have gone cold. I look around the gallery before I can stop myself.
“The white van this morning,” I say.
“Two men, a bolt cutter, ten feet of garden hose, two drums of solvent, and a key cut for your back gate.” He says this in exactly the same voice he used for the parking lot.
“Water under your door overnight and up through that floor. Old building, old pipes, bad luck. The solvent was in case you turned out to be insured.”
I think about my floor. I sanded that floor myself over nine evenings with a machine I hired from a man who told me twice that ladies usually get somebody in.
“Where are they now?”
“Mechislav is finishing up with them and their boss. Johansson is signing the laundry and the lot over to Federov Freight this week for what he paid, and the option he’s got on the corner unit will lapse in November without a word from him.
” A pause of about half a second. “I poured the solvent over his car.”
“You poured solvent...” I put the receipt down, “on his car?”
He nods. “Right there on the hood.”
There is a version of me that has a serious ethical objection to all of this, and I fully intend to go and find her later.
“And my painting? Why does a man like that want a painting?”
“Possibly as a way to garner trust with you before pressuring you out. Or to launder money through.” He looks down the length of the room at the long wall.
I get off the stool, walk to the painting and stand in front of it.
“Then put your own name on it,” I say, with my back to him. “You paid for it and you kept it out of a crate. I’ll do you a condition report and a provenance letter and have it couriered wherever you want when the show comes down.” I begin gathering the papers up.
“But I bought it for you,” he says simply.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have a ring.”
I turn around. “What do you mean you don’t have a ring? What’s a painting got to do with a ring?
“Because it’s an engagement gift. Usually men give rings, but I don’t have a ring, so my engagement gift to you is the painting.”
He drops to one knee in the middle of my floor, with the track lighting doing something devotional to the top of his head, and both of his enormous hands empty on his thigh.
“There’s no ring,” he says.
The laugh comes up out of me before I have any say in it, and it arrives with tears attached, which is apparently what my face does now.
“Okay,” I say.
“You’d want to choose it. I’ve seen what you did to the front of this building.” He doesn’t move an inch. “Kimmie. Marry me?”
“We have known each other for four days.”
“I’ve known you for more like three months.”
“Two and a half.” I wipe under my glasses with the heel of my thumb. “You realize that a sensible woman would want to think about this.”
“Then think about it.”
“Absolutely not.” I’m already moving. “Yes. That’s the answer, it was always going to be the answer.”
He catches me on the way down, which is fortunate, since I have arrived at him with more velocity than planning. He stands up with me off the floor entirely and kisses me until my glasses go crooked.
“Right.” I get my feet back under me. “Keys. Shoes. We’re going over the road.”
I make it out onto the sidewalk with the door swinging behind me and the keys still in my hand. He takes them off me, locks up properly, and hands them back.
The bell over the Purr & Pour goes and the warmth hits me in the face, warm chocolate and coffee and hot milk.
Lucifer is up on the till where he holds court.
Delilah is behind the counter with Sammie beside her and Lilah in the high chair at the end, methodically destroying a piece of banana.
Daisy from the paper is at the corner table with her laptop and a coffee she stopped drinking an hour ago.
Bill is by the window with the crossword.
“He asked me to marry him,” I announce, at a volume that Marianne’s stoneware would not have survived.
Delilah drops a portafilter. Sammie gets to me first, both arms around my shoulders, and Delilah comes around the end of the counter so fast that Rhodes has to relocate.
“Show me,” Delilah demands, grabbing my left hand.
“It’s on the wall.” I laugh when her face twists with confusion.
“Who puts a ring on the wall?” she turns the full force of her face on Natan.
“I’ll get her a ring, but I couldn’t wait any longer to ask,” he says.
Delilah holds up her own hand and points her ring at me like she’s checking a fake bill. “Two of us inside a month. These Federov men are dropping like flies.”
“Congratulations,” Daisy calls from the corner, already reaching for her camera bag. “Do you want that in the paper?”
“Page five,” I say. “And only if you use one where my mouth is shut.”
Sammie is looking up at Natan with her hand still on my arm. “Eduard told me at lunch and I didn’t believe a word of it.”
I turn around. He’s standing in the middle of a cat café with his hands at his sides, taking it on the chin.
“I told him this morning before I told you,” he says to me by way of explanation. “That won’t happen again.”
Delilah puts a slice of cake in front of me that I have not asked for and will absolutely eat.
Bill wants to know whether the green out there counts as the something blue.
Lilah bangs her banana on the tray. I answer four questions at once and lose track of every one of them, and Natan stands through all of it with one hand flat on my back.
We come out at half past five into a street going orange at the edges.
A car turns into the lot at the end and Mechislav gets out of it.
He sees us, takes about a second to work out what he’s looking at, and gives Natan a nod.
Natan nods back. Then Mechislav lifts two fingers at me, which is the most affectionate thing he has ever done in my presence, and goes into the café.
“He’s never been on this street twice in one week before” I say.
“No,” Natan agrees, “I don’t think he has.”
I hook my arm through Natan’s and we cross toward my ridiculous green door, and I look at the painting hanging on its own in all that white.