Chapter 25
Zoe
I look at myself in the mirror and swallow. I spent more time on my hair this evening than I have for the last three weeks combined.
I don’t know why I am nervous. I tell myself it’s because I spilled water in the man’s lap yesterday, and I want to make up for it. But I know that’s not true.
I like him. I really do. He handled that far better than anyone has ever handled anything going wrong in the diner. I mean, he had ice in his lap for goodness sake. Now, it was just water, but I’ve had customers get irate and start screaming at me over far less.
And you know how those micro-expressions go over people’s faces? I didn’t notice any of those either. Like, he truly wasn’t mad from the very beginning. I suppose that's the way people should react to things like that. It was an honest mistake, not something I meant to do, and that was obvious. Plus, getting upset about those things never does any good. But what are you gonna do? Take the water back?
Regardless, I admire that, deeply. And I already really liked the guy. But he sent me friend flowers. There is no way he wants anything more with me, when he sent me friend flowers.
Plus, I was the one who told him that I wasn’t interested. Not even a little bit. I said I wanted to get my career going.
Speaking of, I spent the day after I got off work yesterday and today finishing the recording that I had started of the Scarlet Pimpernel. I’m pretty excited about this one. I have a little bit more editing work to do on it, and then it’s ready to upload to my channel. The last book I uploaded got tens of thousands of views. I’m not making a killing there, but it’s starting to get better. I’m optimistic. Not optimistic that I’m going to make a killing, but optimistic that... I don’t know, maybe someone will notice? Maybe I’ll draw the attention of someone who knows someone who needs a voice actor for a movie. Or, who knows how it could work. I’ve heard stories of that happening, and if I’m not putting stuff out there, I have no opportunities. So, that’s part of the reason I’m trying to use all of my spare time to get something out there. I’ll do my part, and then, if the Lord sees fit, He’ll work things out so that the right person sees it at the right time.
A knock on the door startles me, and I remember that I am nervous.
I laugh. The one thing that can get me to stop being nervous is to think about my career. Does that mean that my career is more important than Pete?
I would have said yes not long ago, but now I don’t know. Would I be crazy to let an opportunity like this slip by? If he is interested in more, Connie’s right, and my intuition is right, I should just tell him, or maybe ask if he might be. That feels scary, but it’s like getting my voice out there on social media channels. Nothing is going to happen if I don’t lay everything out, and I’m not even trying.
Same thing with Pete. If I don’t put any effort out, and don’t try, nothing is going to happen.
But if I try and God blesses, then I have a winning combination.
I hurry to the door, while Flipper runs under the couch.
That’s where Flipper typically stays when someone comes. She is a friendly cat, but not right away. It takes her a little while to warm up to people. Which is fine, sometimes it takes me a little while to warm up to people.
“Hey,” I open the door, hoping that I didn’t dress too fancy. I have on a casual skirt, and flowing blouse. I was going to wear jeans, but I’m more comfortable in the skirt. I just don’t feel as constricted, but skirts do have a tendency to look dressy.
“You look nice,” Pete says, and I can immediately feel my face start to heat.
“Thanks,” I say, remembering what feels like so long ago when I saw him in the restaurant with the rose, waiting for me. What if I had just gone over and sat down.? What if we would have just started talking then? I almost wish I would have.
“You can come in,” I say, stepping back and opening the door after a couple of awkward seconds of us looking at each other. He looks nice too, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to say that. He’s wearing jeans and a dark green T-shirt. It must be a stretchy kind of tee, because while it seems like it’s a little tight, it’s not constrictively so. It’s just tight enough to emphasize all the nice things that men have the women don’t. Like broad shoulders, muscles everywhere, and I guess you get the idea.
Anyway, I drag my eyes from that as he walks by me, and close the door, reminding myself that I’m giving drawing lessons.
He holds up the birdcage. “I think Trixie is excited about seeing Flipper again.”
“It might take Flipper a little while to come out. She is shy when it comes to visitors. You can set him here,” I say, pulling out a barstool and setting it in the middle of the kitchen.
“All right,” Pete says.
“Pete and his Precious. Pete and his Precious,” Trixie says, and Pete looks startled. “He hasn’t talked all day. Not since the last time you were at my place.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know how often they’re supposed to talk, but Trixie doesn’t talk that much. Maybe he’s depressed.”
“Hopefully Flipper will help out with that.”
“Pete and his precious, Pete and his precious.”
I’m trying not to smile, because Pete looks adorably embarrassed.
“I promise, I have not been trying to teach him that. For a long time, I was trying to teach him to say my name instead of Leo’s, but I have not been instructing him on anything else.”
“I believe you. I’m not sure how they pick up things. I’m not sure people actually know.”
“We can make sure that they hear things, but I have not been going around my apartment saying Pete and his precious.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, teasing, and enjoying his adorable blush. It has started running down his neck, and I half expect him to tug at the neck of his T-shirt.
His Adam’s apple bobs.
I decide to have mercy on him. “How long are you watching him for?” I ask, as I point the table, where I have my sketchbooks out along with various pencils. I didn’t think we would get too involved. He only needs to be able to paint things on people’s faces. Not paint a million-dollar picture.
“I don’t know. They didn’t really say when they asked me. They just wanted to know if I could, and I didn’t realize that I was agreeing for the foreseeable future. I suppose I was thinking that I was just going to be for a night, maybe two.”
“I’m surprised, since they're down there. I mean you’ve even took them to breakfast yesterday. Did you ask how much longer they wanted you to have him?”
“I didn’t even think about it,” Pete says, and he seems kind of surprised that it was something that had slipped his mind.
“Maybe you were too busy getting ice water dumped on you to actually think about the things you wanted to say.”
“I suppose that’s a possibility,” he says, grinning at me, and I appreciate the fact that he’s okay with me teasing him. He doesn’t get all upset. Or uncomfortable. And he definitely didn’t attack me. I’ve been around people who can’t take a little gentle picking, and those are usually the kind of people who dish it out unceasingly.
We pull our chairs out, and sit down. I’m sitting beside him on his right side. I assume that he is right-handed, and it will be easier for me to teach him this way.
“I gotta warn you. I really can’t draw at all.”
He says that, but I know he doesn’t have to be an expert. All he has to do is be able to believably draw just a few things.
“I looked up some of the most popular items for face painting, and horses are number one.”
That surprised me. Since horses are often brown, and who wants to go around with a brown picture on their face? But, I suppose that most of the people who get their faces painted are young girls, and young girls often are horse crazy.
“A horse sounds like it’s so far out of my talent range I might as well try to contract the flu. That’s pretty much the only way I can think of that I would get out of this.” He fidgets in his chair, like the idea of drawing a horse makes him want to run.
“Now don’t talk like that. We’ll get this figured out. First of all, it helps if you have a picture to look at. So, what I did today was print off a bunch of pictures, and then cut them out and put them on a sheet of paper like this.” I pull out the cheat sheet that I made. I have glued on pictures that I got on a quick search of the Internet.
“I think I could draw a ball,” Pete offers, his gaze worried as he looks at the paper.
“By the time I’m done with you, you’re going to be drawing more than a ball. But yeah, I think you have that one down without my help.”
We work for a bit, with me trying to just give him the rudiments of drawing, and to talk a little bit about proportion, and how he looks at the picture, and then how he needs to just try to draw what he sees.
But, Pete was absolutely correct. When he said he had zero talent, he was giving himself a compliment.
Finally, I look at the twentieth horse he’s drawn, and I say, “I think you do a really good job on the back half of the horse.” That is the best compliment I can think of. The head is constantly out of proportion. It almost looks like an elephant in some cases, and in other cases it looks like the horse was severely deformed in utero. The kind of horse that would have died at birth if it had been born alive.
And that’s being generous.
“Thank you, I think.”
I grimaced.
He looks down at the table.
“Maybe I could draw the back half. I just need someone to draw the front half.”
I lift my brows, and tilt my head.
“That’s not a bad idea,” I say. Under no circumstances should he be allowed to draw the front of a horse on anybody’s face. It’s almost sacrilege to have him doing it on the paper.
He shrugs, like any idea is a good idea to him.
“Let’s try this with crayons. A pencil makes you be a little bit more exact, which I thought might be a good idea to try to get the proportion in, but I think crayons will more accurately reflect what we’ll be using, since they mimic paints a little better.”
“All right,” he says. “Do you mean that drawing with crayons is easier?”
“Yes. And paints should be even easier than that.”
“If you think I’m impossible, you can just say so.”
I shake my head. “No. You are right that this is never going to be your area of talent, but I do think that you’ll be able to get going well enough to paint faces at the festival. At the very least, we’re going to try.”
“I’m game for trying,” he says, and he picks up a crayon, and listens intently as I start to talk again. Then I show him, then he tries to imitate what I do. I think he actually gets better on the backend. He’s just really good at the lines in that area. But he can’t get that neck to look right for anything. Most of his horses look like dogs in the front, and a horse in the back.
We try elephants, dogs, zebras, and even a frog, and with each one he gets the lower or back half but just can’t seem to get the upper.
“Can you see pictures in your head?” I ask suddenly, knowing that I’d heard before that there was such a thing as people who actually didn’t see pictures in their mind. Which I think is really weird, but it might explain why he’s having such a hard time visualizing things. But he seems okay on the lines down, and he’s able to do that, and I just wonder...
“No. It’s just kind of fuzzy up there. I have to look at the picture, and then I can kinda see like a little fuzzy rendition of it in my head. There is another way everybody sees?”
“I see full-color, full detail, complete whole photographs in my head. When I read it runs like a movie in my mind.”
“Really? You’re kidding. You see full pictures? Like a movie?” he sounds shocked.
“Yes. I do. And I had heard that some people don’t, but I had never run into one of those people, that I know of anyway, until I met you.”
“Do you think that’s why I can’t draw?”
“You can draw. But I think that’s why you struggle with it. You’ve somehow gotten the muscle memory in your hand to do the back, but you struggle in the front, and you can’t see the picture in your mind.”
“Well that’s true. I can’t see the picture in my head. Although I can’t explain how I’m able to do the backend so well. That’s a mystery to me.”
“I think your idea of you doing the back and me doing the front is a good one. We’ll just do each kid together, and you’ll do the hind end on one cheek and I’ll do the front and on the other. It’s gonna look a little bit weird, but you might as well play to your strengths.”
He laughs a little, and I appreciate the fact that he understands my humor. I wasn’t being hilarious, but I was trying to be a little bit funny. After all, we can’t fix this. I can’t make him draw, and he can’t suddenly start to see pictures in his head and draw well, so, we’ll just use what we have.
We work for another hour, until my back starts cramping up, and I think that he must be tired too, but he hasn’t complained at all.
I stop, put the crayons on the table, and stretch.
“I should have offered you something to eat.”
“I ate at Baxley’s house. That’s one thing they are really good at. They always cook for me too. I get an afterschool snack, too, if you can believe that.”
“That’s really nice. I kinda like it when I time my visits for when Baxley gets home from school, because their housekeeper is a pretty good cook, and she makes awesome snacks.”
“I kinda thought I might see you yesterday or today,” he says, and there is no accusation in his voice. He’s put his crayon down, and he leans back in his chair a little bit, his hands behind his head, his feet stretched out, and he’s looking at me. Those eyes, so serious and intense, but still crinkling a bit at the corners. He’s friendly and funny but not to the point of joking all the time. And, he definitely has a serious personality. I love all the little details of him.
That’s a scary thought. I hurriedly shove the thought aside. I’m not against talking to him about how I feel, but I don’t want to do it right now. At least, I haven’t thought about it enough, and I don’t know what I will say. And I know I’m starting to panic right now even thinking about it.
I lift a shoulder. I can’t explain why I didn’t go see Baxley.
“That’s okay. You don’t have to come. I just... Enjoy being with you and I know Baxley likes seeing you too.” He pauses for a minute, as though the thought just occurred to him and then he says, “I hope the fact that I’m there isn’t keeping you from visiting your niece?”
“Oh no,” I say quickly. “You haven’t kept me away. I... I was working on finishing up the Scarlet Pimpernel so I could upload it. I almost have it done.”
“Well that’s exciting,” he says, and I nod. I don’t know if he’s just saying that, or if he understands exactly how much it really does mean to me. And how much that could possibly mean to my career. Each book I get done, each view I get, each thing that pushes the algorithm to show it to more people, greatly increases my chances of being seen by the right person. I know that the Lord is in control, but I also believe that God wants me to do as much as I can, so that’s what I’m trying to do. And if nothing comes of it, then that’s fine. I’ve done all I could to use the talent God gave me for Him.
But Pete said he wanted to see me. Didn’t he?
“I don’t want to bother you guys, if you and Baxley are doing things together.” Maybe I’m fishing for a compliment. Maybe I want him to say that he wants me. Maybe I’m just insecure, and don’t want to push in where I’m not wanted.
“You’re always welcome in my opinion. And I know Baxley loves you, so I’m pretty sure she would say you’re always welcome to. I... I really enjoy spending time with you.”
I smile. That’s kind of what I was looking for. It could have been a little stronger but, this is pretty good, and I’m not going to argue with that, or look a gift horse in the mouth.
“All right, maybe I’ll see if I can make it tomorrow.” I smile. “Have you guys been playing ping-pong lately?”
“All the time. I am glad I really like it, because Baxley is pretty much addicted to it. I wish that there was some kind of club or something that she could join around here, but you probably have to go to Richmond for that.”
“She has you.” My smile fades. “But I guess you’re getting paid to play with her.”
“I would play with her just for the exercise. She’s good, and I love the challenge.”
“Is she beating you more?”
“We’re about half-and-half right now. But I don’t think I’m going to get better as fast as she will. Just because I’m older, and she’s still developing her skill.”
“I bet you’re helping her with that - she has a great coach. But that’s probably hard on the ego to be defeated by a little girl.”
“It’s not too bad. I guess I see her as being a prodigy almost. It would be like being beat at chess by a six-year-old, who is well known for their brilliant ability.”
“I see. Ping-pong is a little bit different than chess, though.”
“It is. But it’s the same idea.”
“I see.” And I do, but I also appreciate the fact that he doesn’t care that she’s beating him, and plays anyway. That really says what kind of a man he is.
“Would you like something to drink?” I ask.
“Sure. I’ll take water, although I prefer it in a glass, and not my lap, if that’s okay with you.”
“I deserve that,” I say, chuckling as I stand up.
I bring back the waters without incident, and we sip, while we chat a little more about the drawings.
“I think that you can practice with what I’ve given you. And I think the more that you work the better you get at it.”
“Are you saying you can’t give me any more lessons?” he asks, and I wonder if that’s disappointment in his voice.
“I’ll give you as many lessons as you want. But I do think that practicing on your own will be just as beneficial in a lot of ways.”
“All right. I commit to practicing at least thirty minutes every day between now and the festival. Unless, well unless something comes up.”
I like that. That he wants to try to make sure that he doesn’t make a promise that he can’t keep. A lot of people aren’t concerned about that kind of thing. He’s definitely a man with the kind of character I’ve been looking for.