22. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
I need to know for myself.
Not his version of events or Odette’s threats or the careful half-truths and strategic omissions that I let pass for communication in my marriage for five years. I need facts, dates, numbers, things that happened or didn’t, from someone who has no reason to lie to me.
So the next morning, I do what I should have done months ago.
I dig through my old phone contacts until I find the number for Elias, Mal’s assistant.
The one who ran his whole life in the city, scheduled his shows, managed his studio, made sure he ate food that wasn’t caffeine and turpentine.
I only met him a handful of times, but he always seemed competent and slightly terrified of me, which I appreciated.
He answers on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Elias. This is Gracie. Gracie Koch.”
A long pause. “Mrs. Koch. Wow, hi. Is everything okay? Is Malcolm-”
“He’s fine. He’s here.” I sit down on the porch steps, phone warm against my ear, watching Waffles nose around the edge of the fence. “I have some questions. About the tour. About what happened after I left.”
Another pause. I can practically hear him calculating, loyalties, consequences, what he’s allowed to say.
“Elias,” I say quietly. “I’m not asking you to betray him, only to tell me the truth. Please.”
He exhales. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
It comes out of him like water through a broken dam. Four months of watching, waiting, wondering if someone was ever going to ask.
“He canceled the tour four days after you left.” Elias’s voice is hushed, almost reverent.
“Didn’t tell anyone, just called the venues directly and pulled the plug.
Houston, Chicago, Miami - all of it. There were contracts, penalties, more zeros than I could count.
The gallery threatened to sue. The museums were furious. ”
I close my eyes. “When was this?”
“Right after you left - the Houston opening was that same week. They had to scramble for a replacement show. It was a nightmare.”
Four days after I walked out the door. He didn’t know where I was. Didn’t know about the pregnancy, or anything except that I was gone.
“What about Odette’s work?” I ask. “The portrait, the other pieces?”
“Pulled from circulation. All of it. He called the gallery that same week and demanded they take everything down - the portrait, the studies, even the sketches. Odette was volcanic. I’ve never seen anyone that angry.”
“And the retrospective?”
“The Whitfield? They’ve extended the invitation three times. Malcolm turned them down every time. Last I heard, he’s not even returning their calls anymore.”
I press my free hand to my stomach. The twins are active today, little flutters like butterfly wings. “Elias. The ring.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My wedding ring. The one I left on his desk when I walked out.”
A long silence. Then, very quietly: “He put it on a chain the first week. Hasn’t taken it off since.
I saw it every day when I brought him coffee - he’d have his shirt half-buttoned, and it’d be right there, hanging against his chest.” Elias pauses.
“Everyone in the city thinks he’s lost his mind, Mrs. Koch.
Walking away from everything he built, disappearing to some farm in Texas that nobody’s heard of. ”
“What do you think?”
“Honestly?” A soft laugh. “I think it’s the sanest he’s ever been.”
I sit on the porch steps for a long time after we hang up.
The afternoon sun is warm on my face. A cardinal lands on the fence post and watches me with its head tilted. Somewhere in the distance, I can hear the tractor. Mal working on the irrigation line he’s been promising to fix since last week.
He burned it down.
Before he found me. Before the groveling, before the terms, before there was anything to gain.
He looked at the career he’d spent eight years building, the tours and the galleries and the retrospectives and everything that mattered more than me, and he set a match to it.
Walked away. Came looking for me with nothing but a canceled tour and my ring on a chain.
And he never once used it as currency. Never said look what I gave up, look what I sacrificed, doesn’t that prove how much I love you. Just showed up in my driveway and asked to work.
I have to sit down on the porch step. The bolt I’ve kept thrown for months, against hope, against being a fool again, slides back.
I think about calling June, about driving into town to sit in a diner booth and process this properly, the way you’re supposed to process big emotional revelations, with coffee and a best friend and possibly some pie.
But there’s one errand I need to run first.
The Cedar Hollow Community Church holds a winter auction every year to raise money for the food pantry.
It’s a whole thing, the fellowship hall packed to the doors, folding chairs set up in rows, Pastor Williams doing his best auctioneer impression while his wife keeps track of the bids on a clipboard.
This year’s lineup includes Mrs. Henderson’s famous apple butter, a quilt donated by the Methodist ladies, and two tickets to the fall harvest festival.
The big-ticket item, though, is new.
I hear about it from June, who heard about it from her mother, who heard about it from Betty Carmichael: “A portrait sitting with our own famous painter.”
The church ladies’ idea. Apparently they cornered Mal last month while he was buying feed at the co-op, and by the time he escaped he’d agreed to paint a portrait for whoever won the auction.
In exchange, they fed him soup recipes and taught him how to make biscuits and generally treated him like a stray cat who needed fattening up.
“He couldn’t say no,” June tells me on the phone. “Betty had him by the arm. I think he was scared.”
I don’t doubt it. Betty Carmichael once made a state senator cry by asking pointed questions about his voting record during Sunday coffee hour.
The fellowship hall is packed when I arrive.
I slip in through the back, trying to be inconspicuous, which is difficult when you’re visibly pregnant and everyone in town knows your business. June saves me a seat near the door and hands me a lemonade without comment.
“You’re here for the portrait, aren’t you,” she says. It’s not a question.
“I’m here to support the community food pantry.”
“Uh-huh.” She grins. “How much are you planning to bid?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The auction starts. Mrs. Henderson’s apple butter goes for forty-five dollars.
The quilt goes for two hundred, bought by a woman I don’t recognize who apparently drove in from the next county for it.
The harvest festival tickets cause a brief bidding war between the Rodriguez family and old Mr. Patterson, which Mr. Patterson wins by sheer stubbornness.
Then Pastor Williams clears his throat. “And now, our final item of the evening. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - a portrait sitting with Cedar Hollow’s very own Malcolm Koch.”
A murmur runs through the crowd. Heads turn toward the front, where Mal is standing against the wall looking like he wants to disappear into it.
He’s wearing clean clothes for once, actual pants, a button-down shirt that someone probably made him iron, and his hair is tied back in a knot.
He catches me looking and his ears go red.
The button-down pulls tight across his shoulders every time he shifts, and my eyes keep snagging on the open collar, on the notch of his throat where the chain disappears under the cotton.
My ring is under there, resting against his skin.
I know exactly how warm it gets when it sits on a body all day.
I should be watching the auctioneer. I’m a grown woman with a doctorate and a farm and two babies on the way, and instead I’m going dry-mouthed in a church fellowship hall over a man in an ironed shirt.
I hate wanting him this much. Four months of careful distance, and it comes apart at the sight of him buttoned into someone else’s idea of respectable, hair pushed back, big hands hanging useless at his sides because he never learned what to do with them when they aren’t holding a brush.
I press my thighs together under the hem of my dress, pick a knot in the far wall, and make myself stare at it.
“We’ll start the bidding at one hundred dollars,” Pastor Williams says.
Three hands go up immediately.
“One-fifty from Barbara McCready. Do I hear two hundred?”
“Two hundred!” That’s Delia Prescott, whose daughter had a crush on Mal in high school and has apparently never recovered.
“Two-fifty from Martha Collins. Three hundred?”
“Three hundred!” Barbara again.
June is vibrating with glee beside me. “This is the most entertaining thing that’s happened in this town since Meatball got into the Hendersons’ garden.”
The bidding climbs, the numbers ticking up fast. The three ranchers’ wives are locked in combat now, voices getting louder, chairs scraping as they lean forward. Mal looks increasingly horrified with each new bid, which only seems to encourage them.
“Five hundred from Delia Prescott! Do I hear five-fifty?”
“Six hundred!” Martha shouts.
“Six-fifty!” Barbara counters.
“Ladies, this is a charity auction, not a blood sport-” Pastor Williams begins.
I raise my hand.
The room goes silent. Every head turns. I feel the weight of the whole room landing on me, the pregnant wife, the woman who left him, the reason the famous painter is now mucking out chicken coops instead of touring museums.
“One thousand dollars,” I say.
June makes a sound like a teakettle boiling over.
“I - that’s-” Pastor Williams adjusts his glasses. “One thousand dollars from Gracie Tate. Do I hear one thousand fifty?”
Nobody moves. Delia Prescott’s mouth is hanging open. Martha Collins looks like she might cry. Barbara McCready turns around in her seat to stare at me with an expression somewhere between outrage and respect.
“One thousand going once.” Pastor Williams is grinning now. “Going twice-”
“A thousand is a lot,” June whispers. “Can you actually afford-”
“Sold! To Gracie Tate!”
The room detonates.
June leaps out of her chair and onto the seat, screaming. The church ladies are applauding. Mr. Patterson is laughing so hard he has to take off his glasses and wipe his eyes. Someone wolf-whistles from the back row.
And Mal.
Mal is standing at the front of the room, red to his hairline, staring at me across the chaos like I’ve just set the room on fire. Which maybe I have.
I shrug. Like it’s nothing. Like my pulse isn’t going wild in my wrists, like I haven’t just made a grand gesture in front of a packed fellowship hall, like I’m not terrified and hopeful and completely uncertain what happens next.
He holds my eyes. I hold his.
June grabs my arm. “Gracie Tate, you absolute legend-”
“It’s for charity,” I say, and even I don’t believe it.
She’s still talking, about this being the best auction in Cedar Hollow history, about the look on Barbara McCready’s face, but I’m not really listening. I’m watching Mal start to smile, slow and wondering, like he can’t quite believe what just happened.
Neither can I, honestly.
But when Pastor Williams asks me how I’ll be paying, I just pull out my checkbook.
“I had the budget.”