Chapter 9
DRAWING
When I head up the stairs again the next day, I’m desperately hoping Rig has exhausted all the skeletons in my closet, and we can go back to a good meal, maybe some cleaning, and no difficult questions.
But when I push through the door, a pile of three different sizes of sketchpad, colored pencils, a box of what appears to be watercolor paints, and brushes and pots are sitting on the table.
Seeing it all piled up makes my chest ache.
I packed all my stuff away in a box years ago and I don’t know what happened to it.
One move too many. Left in somebody’s closet, someone’s basement.
My heart thrums for the little blue brush pot and white palette I mixed watercolors in when I was fourteen years old, painting in my bedroom. I kept them for more than a decade.
I pick up a couple of brushes and draw the soft sable across my hand. It’s an action so familiar to me that it tightens my throat. “What’s this?”
Rig appears in the doorway from the living room. “I thought if I got you some shit you might like to mess around with it.” He pauses. “Called the lady in that arts and crafts store in town and she recommended some stuff, so I said I’d pay her in cash if she brought it over.”
I want to bundle it all up in a bag and stash it in the back of the closet like a gremlin, but I can’t because Rig bought it for me, and he’s clearly a mind reader because he says:
“I thought we could do some of that tonight.”
“Tonight?” My voice is two octaves higher than normal. “Do you paint or draw?”
He gives me that sexy lip quirk that is getting to be somewhat familiar as he walks over to me and slides a hand in my hair, his gaze roaming my face.
“Maybe you could teach me how to do it?” he says, then he grins. “Start with something simple like a cup.”
A cup? Okay. I could do that.
He puts on a pot of coffee as I hang my coat on the hooks by the door, and he takes a mug out of the cabinet.
It’s an old one I bought years ago from a pottery studio on a trip out of town: a swirl of blues and grays.
Placing it on the table, he takes a pencil and a pad and sits down.
Heat swamps my body. I haven’t drawn in over ten years.
I sit down next to him and pull another pad toward me, opening the box of colored pencils.
It’s a wonderful array, with thirty or forty different colors.
“This is beautiful.”
“Beautiful pencils for a beautiful girl,” he says with another lip quirk, and I roll my eyes at him. I’m not sure what comments like this mean. Perhaps he’s being nice, Carly.
I put the colored pencils to one side and pick up an ordinary lead one, sketching a quick outline as he watches. My hand is shaking, but if he notices, he doesn’t say anything. He starts drawing on his pad, tongue between his teeth.
The focus comes back so fast. The concentration required to get the line just right, the shade and the shadows, trying to judge the color. Is this going to be black and white, or am I going to use the colored pencils? Maybe a watercolor wash?
I glance over at what he’s done, and he’s drawn a basic outline of the cup. It’s not half bad. “Good use of perspective,” I say.
He grunts. “I did art at school. Liked it, wasn’t terrible at it. But nothing like you.”
I shake my head at him. All the things I drew over the years, the pieces that won competitions that Dad used to send off without my knowing.
How he’d squeeze my neck and say, “See? See? You’ll be a famous artist one day, mark my words.
” It’s funny now that I’m older I can appreciate how he was saying that just to encourage his kid and how impossible it would have been for someone like me to become an artist. He did keep everything I ever drew, though.
When Mom was committed and my uncle cleared out the house, so much stuff went missing—including all my drawings.
“What you thinking about?”
“My dad.”
“What about him?”
“He held on to all my pictures. Everything I ever drew.”
“Is that what those ones were I found the other day?”
I shake my head. “There were a lot more. Hundreds. Right from when I was in kindergarten through to all my work from college.” I laugh. “Like stick men whose heads are too big and animals with five legs.”
“Some animals have five legs.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Centipedes.”
“I think you’ll find they have a hundred legs.”
“That’s close to five.”
“Very close,” I say with a grin as I push my tongue out and shade in around the edge of the cup.
“What happened to the pictures?”
“I think they went in a dumpster. I never saw them when my uncle cleaned out the house.”
He studies me, and I know this look now: It’s what I call his punching walls face. “That sucks” is all he says.
“Yeah, it does. I loved some of that art. Spent a lot of time on it, too.”
“You have anything of your mom and dad’s?”
I stand up and head through to the bedroom, opening the doors to the closet. The inside is amazing, everything hung up and stacked in neat piles. I pull the plastic box down from the top shelf and carry it through to the kitchen.
“One day our neighbor called me and said someone was clearing out my mom’s house.
I jumped in my car and raced home, and there was a huge dumpster outside.
They were selling things on our drive. My uncle said my mom was being committed.
I wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t been right for a while.
I asked my uncle if I could keep anything, and he asked me where I thought I was going to put it.
I ran around the house gathering as much stuff as I could before the guys clearing out the house threw it all out.
Fortunately, they hadn’t started on my dad’s study.
I told them to do that last when my uncle wasn’t listening.
I forgot all about my paintings in the rush to save whatever I could of him and my mom. ”
I unclip the lid of the box and pull out a handful of pictures.
My parents on their wedding day, a picture of Dad in his service uniform that used to hang on the wall behind his desk.
Photos of the three of us together, Dad and I playing tetherball in the backyard.
I pulled everything out of the drawers in the study, stuffed it into bags in a panic, and threw everything I could in the back of my car.
Rig peers in the box and guffaws.
“What is it?”
He holds up a school photograph of me: I have pigtails and crooked teeth.
“Oh, so yours are so much better?”
“Don’t know, babe. I never saw any.”
“Really?”
He nods. “I’m the youngest of three. My eldest brother is a bully and an asshole.
The second one isn’t any better. My ma never did anything to constrain them, and they spent their time fighting each other and when they got bored with that, they picked on me.
That’s kinda how I learned to fight. Nothing like having bigger people whale on you to make you motivated.
They move around the country now, avoiding the law.
Setting up dubious illegal businesses and ripping people off.
” He shrugs. “Like I said, assholes. Anyway, I think Ma forgot I existed most of the time. Don’t think she took any pictures. ”
He examines the photo again, grinning. “He a decent man, your dad?” he says.
I don’t trust myself to speak. What makes a good person?
“Sometimes. Proud as punch of everything I achieved, no matter what it was. Art, music, you name it. But he lost his temper a lot, blamed me for things he shouldn’t have blamed me for …
my mom and my brother, too. Drank too much and killed himself in a car crash. Nobody’s perfect, right?”
I stare down at the picture I’m working on; it’s already beautiful.
I’ve switched to colored pencils now, and the blues and greens dance on the page.
I can’t stand the beauty of it, the beauty of him.
I pick up the paper and screw it into a ball in my hand then get up from my seat and put it in the trash.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I say.
Rig appears in the doorway as I step under the spray, stripping his T-shirt over his head.
Muscles ripple across his shoulders and his chest as he unbuttons his jeans, bending to push them down and take his socks off.
He’s such a huge guy, legs like tree trunks, and I could watch his naked body move all day, every day.
He slides his hand into his boxers and pushes them over his ass.
That’s nice, too. I’ve dug my fingernails into it a few times.
“Have I marked your ass?”
“What?”
“With my nails?”
He laughs and turns around, and, sure enough, there’s a whole array of little crescent moon marks across the bottom of his cheeks.
“Oh, God.”
He chuckles and steps into the stall. Broad flat feet slapping into the swirl of water.
“Don’t stop doing it … I like it when you dig your nails in.
” He bends down and takes hold of my chin, brushing his lips over mine.
“You do it when you’re close to coming. The desperation kicks in and the tiger comes out.
I can take a lot more than a few fingernails. ”
I smile up at him, watching the droplets cling to the wild curls of his hair, his eyes smiling at me. He places a condom in the little ledge built into the wall and turns around.
“Wash my back, babe?”
I grab the soap from the alcove—a bar, of course, because I can buy three for one for fifty cents from the dime store—and I lather it up in my hands, spreading it all over his enormous shoulders as the heat of the shower beats down on my back.
“This is a very good hotel,” he says, and I laugh.