Chapter 3 - Jess
I called Nish.
It took me two days after Tess's visit to work up the nerve, which is ridiculous, because it's a phone call. Artists call galleries. Galleries show art. This is how it works. But my hands were shaking when I dialled, and when he picked up on the first ring, I almost hung up.
"Jess." I could hear the smile in his voice. "Tell me this is the call I think it is."
"I want to do the show."
He was quiet for a beat. Just one. Then, very softly: "Good. It's about time."
He didn't gush or celebrate or make it a bigger deal than it needed to be, which is one of the reasons I trust him. Nish understands that for me, saying yes to this was like stepping off a ledge, and he wasn't going to make noise while I was still looking down.
We talked logistics. Wall space, lighting, freight elevator access for the large piece. He wants me near the entrance—prime position, maximum foot traffic. I said anywhere was fine, and he said no, anywhere was not fine, because my work deserved to be the first thing people saw when they walked in.
Nobody's ever said anything like that to me before. I had to press the phone against my ear and breathe for a second before I could answer.
That was four days ago. The show is in six weeks, and I've been working long hours since, trying to finish the sculpture and also not think too much about the fact that in six weeks, strangers are going to stand in front of something I made from the most honest part of myself and decide what it's worth.
I'm trying not to spiral about it. Some days I succeed.
This morning I'm at the bodega before heading to the studio.
Same bodega I've been coming to for four years—Hector behind the counter, radio playing something in Spanish, coffee for a dollar fifty in a blue paper cup.
I like this place. I like that Hector remembers I take mine black with two sugars without me having to say it.
I like the way the morning light comes through the front window and makes everything look warmer than it is.
Small things. I've always loved small things.
When you grow up without much, you learn to notice the beauty in what's ordinary.
The way steam rises from a coffee cup. The color of brick in early light.
The sound of rain on a metal roof, which might be my favorite sound in the world after the hiss of a welding torch.
I'm waiting for my coffee when I notice the man.
He's near the door, looking at his phone.
Tall—noticeably tall—with dark hair and a coat that doesn't belong in this neighborhood.
Everything about him is precise. The way he stands.
The way his thumb moves across his phone screen.
Even the way he holds his coffee cup—carefully, like he's aware of it as an object rather than just drinking from it.
He's striking. I notice that the way I notice most things—quickly, the artist's eye cataloguing details before the conscious mind catches up. The line of his jaw. The way his coat sits on his shoulders. He looks like he was assembled by someone who understood proportion.
He doesn't look up. I take my coffee from Hector and pass the man on my way out. I catch a scent—something clean, something that probably costs more than my weekly groceries. It's nice. Unexpectedly nice, in a bodega that smells like coffee and fried plantains.
Outside, the cold hits my face and I hunch into my jacket, already thinking about the sculpture. The man slips from my mind like water off metal.
The studio is freezing. The space heater wheezes to life and I give it twenty minutes before I strip off my outer layers and pull on the gloves.
The sculpture is waiting, and I've been thinking about the upper ribs all night—the way they need to taper, to thin out as they rise, so the whole structure feels like it's reaching rather than enclosing.
I fire up the welder and lose myself.
This is the part people don't understand about making things—the joy of it.
Not the tortured-artist suffering, not the existential crisis of creative vision.
Just the plain, physical joy of material responding to intention.
The steel gets hot and it bends, and I decide where it bends, and something that didn't exist before starts to exist, and that is genuinely, uncomplicatedly wonderful.
Even on the bad days. Even when I'm broke and tired and eating ramen for the fourth night in a row. The making itself is good.
I weld a new cross-brace between two lower ribs and watch the bead form—clean, even, the color telling me the heat is right. I run my finger along it and feel the smoothness through my glove. Yes. That's it. That's exactly it.
I'm grinning behind the welder's mask. Nobody can see it, which is fine. Some happiness is just for you.
By noon, I've made real progress. The upper ribs are nearly complete, curving inward with a delicacy that keeps surprising me.
I didn't plan for them to be this graceful—I was thinking of something more brutal, more angular.
But the metal wanted to be gentle, and I've learned to listen when that happens.
I strip off the gloves and stretch. My shoulders ache in that deep, satisfying way that means I've been working well, not just working hard. I fill the kettle and call Nish while I wait for it to boil.
"Question," he says instead of hello. "How many pieces are you bringing?"
"One. The big one."
"Can you do two? Even something smaller? I've got pedestal space if you have anything that works at that scale."
I think about the pieces on the back shelf—half-finished experiments, abandoned starts.
Most of them aren't ready. But there's one I made last winter during a week when I couldn't sleep.
A small thing, iron and wire. A hand reaching upward out of broken ground.
I wasn't sure about it then. It felt too personal, too exposed.
Like something I should have kept hidden.
But maybe that's exactly why it should be in the show.
"Maybe," I tell him. "Let me look."
"That's a yes."
"That's a maybe, Nish."
"I have known you for two years. Your maybes are always yeses. You just need time to catch up to yourself."
I laugh. He's not wrong.
After we hang up, I dig the hand sculpture off the back shelf.
It's dusty, and the wire at the base is tangled in a way that needs cleaning up.
But when I set it on the workbench and look at it properly, I feel something.
The fingers aren't elegant—they're thick, a little clumsy, reaching with effort rather than grace.
It's not a beautiful hand. It's a desperate one.
And there's something true about that desperation that makes my breath catch.
I set it aside carefully. I'll work on it tonight.
Around noon, Cal shows up. He lets himself in through the side door with his master key, the way he always does—a courtesy knock followed immediately by entry, which isn't really a courtesy at all, but Cal has his own logic about these things and I stopped arguing years ago.
He's carrying a bag of bagels, which he sets on the workbench without comment.
This is how Cal shows affection—food, delivered silently, with no expectation of thanks.
He did the same thing when I had the flu last winter, appearing with soup and disappearing before I could say anything.
For a man who communicates primarily in grunts and shrugs, he pays remarkable attention.
"Heard back about the latch," he says, leaning against the doorframe.
I look up. "And?"
"Building owner didn't send anyone. Says he hasn't authorised maintenance here in over a year."
"So who fixed it?"
He shrugs. "Couldn't tell you. Maybe someone from the city? They do those safety walkthrough things sometimes."
"Since when does the city fix anything voluntarily?"
"Fair point." He scratches the back of his neck. "Look, kid—I don't know who did it. But it's a good latch. Better than the one that was there. You want me to pull it off?"
"No. It works."
"Then I wouldn't worry about it."
He raps his knuckles on the doorframe—his goodbye—and leaves the bagels. I eat one with cream cheese that I find in the back of the mini fridge, past its sell-by date but still fine, and think about what he said.
The building owner didn't send anyone. Cal didn't do it. No city inspection, because the city doesn't fix things in buildings like this. The other bays on this side are empty.
Someone came to my studio door, specifically, and replaced the hardware. Someone who noticed it was broken and decided to fix it.
I chew my bagel and turn it over in my mind. It's a strange thing to do—not threatening, not intrusive, just strange. Like finding a gift on your doorstep from someone who didn't leave a note.
I don't love mysteries. I grew up in the system, and the system taught me to pay attention to things that don't add up. Not because every unexplained thing is dangerous—most aren't—but because noticing is a habit that's kept me safe, and I don't see the point in unlearning it.
So I notice. I file it. And I go back to work, because the sculpture isn't going to finish itself and the show is in six weeks and I don't have time to chase a mystery that's probably nothing.
The afternoon disappears into the piece.
I weld and grind and shape, and the ribs grow taller, thinner, more delicate.
The gap at the top is still open—still unresolved—and I still don't know what to do with it.
Close it and the piece becomes a cage. Leave it open and it becomes something more vulnerable. More honest.
More frightening.