Chapter 8 Salvador Dalí Made It a Point to Steal Pens
Salvador Dalí Made It a Point to Steal Pens
When the bill came, Lainey reached out her hand with the dexterity of a T. rex.
“Please. Don’t pull anything,” Elliot said, swapping out the marriage license for his credit card.
Then they walked to the parking lot with palpable awkwardness, stopping only when their feet had carried them to the space between their cars.
After all that, did they just leave? Were they supposed to go to another restaurant to celebrate their nuptials from this restaurant?
What did married life look like for two people committing health-care fraud for the sake of a real estate transaction?
“Is the ring okay?” he asked, breaking the tension. Or building it. She wasn’t sure. “I assumed there was just one kind, but Kostas had a surprisingly large selection.”
“No, I like it,” she responded. Their eyes fell to the delicate band.
She looked down at his empty ring finger. “I never put yours on,” she realized.
“Yeah, I was waiting for him to tell us to do something with it, but…” He pulled the ring out of his pocket and held it between his pinched fingers.
She plucked the band from his hand. “Let me. You put mine on. We should do one thing the normal way on our wedding day, since we won’t be—”
She pressed her lips shut. She was not discussing consummation within sight of a Crocs outlet.
He lifted his left hand for her. Slowly, she pushed the ring along the length of his finger, feeling a tiny current of electricity buzzing at the gentle contact.
“There.” She shook out her hands. “Now, we match.”
“We do,” he agreed. Then he exhaled. “Did it make you feel weird…that we didn’t kiss?”
For a moment, she hoped someone would hit her with their car. “Of course not. Did it make you feel weird when I sent Isaac private medical photos of your condition as we were leaving?”
“What? How?”
“Relax,” she said, stretching out the word as his eyes bugged out of his skull. “They’re clearly stills from a zombie show. There’s only a forty percent chance he thinks they’re real.”
“I don’t—” He cut himself off with a groan, his eyes staring longingly across the parking lot as though he, too, might welcome death.
Perhaps a short coma brought on by a collision with an all-terrain bike.
“Forget it,” he said, dropping the subject, which was probably wise.
Repudiations would only encourage her. “You seemed offended when I didn’t kiss you.
That’s all I was saying. I didn’t want you to think it was personal. Or about your appearance.”
“I didn’t think it was,” she responded, voice appropriately unbothered.
He bobbed his head. “Good.”
“Great.” She clapped her hands together. “Well, if that’s that, I guess I’ll see you around?”
“What?” He looked genuinely affronted. “We have to go home and unpack.”
Her eyes drifted over to the mountain of suitcases strapped into the bed of his pickup truck.
“Wait.” She looked at Elliot. Then at the truck. Then at Elliot again. “Do you think you’re moving in with me?”
“It’s going to be confusing to my employer and health-care provider if my wife and I have different home addresses.”
“Uh, it’s called lying, Hodges.”
His hand worried at the back of his neck. “I don’t lie to the people who pay my bills, and I can’t afford to keep living in a bed and breakfast if you want me to make you an offer on Forest’s Bridge sometime in the next decade.”
That last part was slightly more persuasive than owing honesty to an evil health-care conglomerate.
She sighed. “You can’t live with your turtles?”
He dropped his hands to his sides. “Come on, Lainey. We just got married. You had to know living together was going to be part of the deal.”
Her palms were starting to sweat. “But we’re not, like, together…”
Elliot’s face contorted like he’d eaten something foul. “Oh god. Of course not.”
“Okay.” Lainey took a full step back. “That was an unnecessarily big reaction, considering that days ago you were basically in love with me.”
“Lainey.” His fingers swept under his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. “We are roommates who will have to coordinate our taxes together come January. That is all. You pay taxes, right?”
“The essential ones.”
He did one of his closed-eyed inhalations that was becoming familiar. “I will dig further into that another day. Can we go home now, please?”
Home. The word chafed against her insides. It had a heft to it. When all of this was said and done, they will have shared a home together, and as much as she wanted to believe this arrangement meant nothing, “home” did mean something.
“Okay.” She swallowed and walked to her driver’s-side door, twisting her keys around her finger.
“Do you think you can remember where it is? It’s the two-bedroom, one-bath where you narced on me not too long ago.
” She wiggled the key into the lock with one hand while jerking the chrome handle with the other.
“Yeah, I think I can find my way to a house that is literally on my property,” he volleyed back as he climbed into the driver’s side of his truck. This antagonism was good. It felt right. They’d been getting too chummy earlier.
They didn’t hit a single red light all the way home. It was as if the universe was conspiring to force them expeditiously into this hell of their own making. In her driveway, he pulled up behind her and stepped out of his truck.
“You’re already familiar with this part.” She pointed at the carport he’d reported to the city. He reddened a bit at the reminder. “Watch the porch. It doubles as a fox den, and the mother is territorial.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, his eyes scanning the entrance as he reached out to touch the exterior stonework. His thumb drifted over the wall-mounted mailbox.
“Don’t—”
He flipped open the lid, and with a piercing screech, a cloud of black wings burst out and vanished into the sky.
He retracted his hand and jumped three feet into the air. “What the—”
“That’s where the bat lives,” she explained apologetically.
“What is this place? Am I asleep?”
Her eyes passed fretfully over the hand he was guarding. “I live in the woods. Bats are part of the deal. Did it bite you?”
“No.” He did a full-body squirm. “But I feel like it’s crawling up my sleeves. Tell me something distracting,” he begged.
“Bree had to get a rabies shot when an unvaccinated show dog bit her, and she said it wasn’t—”
“Literally, any other topic!”
“Okay, um…” Alarm rose in her chest. “Oh! Salvador Dalí had a pet anteater that he would take on walks around Paris like a dog.”
“What?” he responded, befuddled.
“And he made it a point to steal pens everywhere he went.”
“The anteater?”
“No, Salvador Dalí,” she corrected. Lainey placed her key in the door, pausing at the threshold of the front entry.
This home had been designed by Elliot’s idol.
Would he be disappointed to see how she lived in it, with all her secondhand stuff?
Whenever she built anything nice for herself, she had the immediate impulse to sell it to pay for electricity or water or medical bills.
His last home was surely impeccably styled.
He couldn’t stay here. He’d hate it here. Look at how he’d responded to her tacit acceptance of the mailbox bat. It wasn’t even about her not wanting him in her space. She wouldn’t be able to tolerate his perceptible judgment at her every choice.
“So, are you?” he asked.
“Am I what?” She hadn’t been listening. She’d been fixating on the way his lip would curl up in dissatisfaction at the sight of the mismatched mustard-yellow pillows that she kind of sort of loved.
“Are you going to open the door?” He sounded like he was repeating it.
“Oh. Uh, sure.” She turned the knob, a knot in her stomach. He followed close behind her. “It’s a shoes-off house, but you might want to invest in slippers because the floors are this cold—”
“Flagstone,” he interjected.
“Uh, yeah. I guess you would know all of this already. I’ll just let you…”
She watched him take in the space, admiring her house in a way no one had before—with awe and curiosity. His eyes were immediately drawn to the sandstone hearth at the center, which the rest of the house seemed to pivot around.
“This makes the bat worth it,” he whispered reverently.
The sentence shouldn’t have pleased her as much as it did. “Good.”
“Is the sofa built in?” he asked, his eyes wandering the stone walls.
“Yes. The beds are also built in. So are the dressers, the wardrobe, and all the bookshelves. And the dining room table, weirdly.”
Elliot nodded. “He was big on built-ins. It was the only way he could control what furniture people put in his houses.”
Lainey grunted. “He sounds like an asshole.”
“He was a genius,” he responded absently, his eyes studying the beams. “But yes, people found him fairly intolerable. Another reason I’m curious to meet your grandmother.”
Finally, he turned to view the wall of windows facing the lake. That part, she had to admit, was pretty incredible. From a certain angle, the glass almost disappeared into the wood ceiling like a continuation of the forest. An airy space held together with glass and wood and stone.
Elliot took in every detail, every notch in the masonry, every smooth angle in the galley kitchen she’d never thought much of.
There was plenty she’d appreciated about the house.
It was beautiful, undeniably so, and a little untamed, as though the surrounding wildness had seeped into its honey-colored stonework over time.
But she’d never seen it like this. Like it was the kind of art that could move a person.
At once, she understood. There was something magical about art that took up physical space. It was part of what had drawn her to sculpting.