“Your rabbit is most probably European, and from Bayol’s era, atthe turn of the twentieth century. In some ways, it is very much in his style; Bayol carved farmyard animals with sweet expressions like this one, so that fits. But a hallmark of Bayol’s carvings was their simplicity. His work almost never included flourishes like the lily of the valley here,” he said, pointing to the offending flower. “And this rose carved in high relief, with the detailed thorns? I don’t even know what to say aboutthat.”
“But Bayol did custom work, right?” Cady replied. “Couldn’t a client have asked for the flowers?”
He shook his head. “I know Bayol’s work well; I’m also very familiar with the American carvers Dentzel, Looff, and Carmel. Like all artists, carousel carvers leave their imprints on their work, like signatures. Also, Bayol nearly always attached a small plaque to the saddles of his carved animals, and yours doesn’t have one. Your rabbit might have been carved by one of Bayol’s apprentices, or a competitor—if you could establish its provenance, it would be worth more.”
Cady’s impulse was to argue with Ripley, to rail at him and cast aspersions on his professional qualifications, not to mention his parentage.
But it wasn’t his fault. Maxine had been wrong. It wasn’t surprising: Maxine always had insisted upon seeing possibilities in the junk other people threw away.
So Cady had concentrated on reining in her emotions, fighting an almost overwhelming, and wholly uncharacteristic, urge to burst into tears.
Get it together, Drake,she had scolded herself.We’ve been in worse situations than this one. Much, much worse. We’ll just have to come up with another plan.
As a child Cady had developed the quirk of using the royal “we” when talking to herself; otherwise the only “we” in her world was wishful thinking. Later, the “we” came to mean Cady and Maxine, and finally, now, Cady and Gus-the-rabbit. It was a silly, childish habit, but Cady had more important things to worry about these days, such aswhere she was going to get the money to escape the wildly expensive San Francisco Bay Area, to move to a town where normal people could work a regular job and afford a decent place to live, and where she could become a foster mom, or maybe even adopt a child. The thought of change terrified her, but she was desperate to create the sort of family that she’d always wanted for herself. True, being a photographer wasn’t the best career option in a small town, but she didn’t care what she did for a living. She wasn’t proud.
The important thing was to start over. To reinvent herself. Cady yearned for the anonymity of a second chance, a clean slate, a tabula rasa. To make a home someplace where no one knew where she came from, where no one knew she had nothing and no one.
No family connections, no Maxine, no... baby.
Without volition her hand went to her stomach. The only bump there now was from stress-eating her way through countless bags of potato chips and boxes of Petit Écolier cookies—scraping off the chocolate in an embarrassingly juvenile ritual—as she sat on the couch for weeks, watching endless reruns ofHoarders.
The nurse in the emergency room had smelled of antiseptic and was very nice in the impersonal way of a kindhearted person saddled with far too much to do. She had instructed Cady to finish the round of prophylactic antibiotics, to abstain from sex for six weeks (no problem there—Cady couldn’t imagine being intimate, ever again, with anyone), to get plenty of rest, and to be prepared for sudden hormonal shifts as her body adjusted to what her medical chart referred to as an “SAB”: spontaneous abortion.
The baby Cady had accidentally conceived in an exceedingly rare one-night stand, then after weeks of fear and trembling had decided to keep and come to love, had been lost in a gruesome rush of pain and cramps and blood, a gutting experience referred to simply as an SAB.
An SAB.
Cady’s appalling, alien urge to cry must be due to shifting hormones. Nothing more. Surely.
First Maxine had died. Then Cady’s own body had betrayed her. And now even her precious carousel rabbit had turned out not to be who she’d always thought he was.
Cady was on a merry-go-round, and no matter how fast she galloped, she kept winding up at the same place.
Her eyes stung, tears threatening.So... okay. Maybe she would allow herself a few quick minutes of weeping in the back of the shop, while cursing Mr. Scott Ripley of theAntique Forumand his so-called expertise.
Then she would come up with a new plan.
CHAPTER THREE
PRESENT DAY
OAKLAND
Cady
The banging on the door wouldn’t stop. Cady had hung the Closed sign on the window of the shop door, alongside a note about Maxine’s death. But some of Maxine’s regular customers could be as persistent and annoying as a broken tooth.
“Go away!”she yelled from the back room.
The banging continued. She turned the television volume up.
“Cady?”A woman’s voice. Olivia.
Cady often thought of Maxine as the only person in the world who loved her, but there was also Olivia Gray.
They had met years ago, right after Cady got divorced, in an adult education course on photography—genuine, old-fashioned photography and film development, taught by a cranky old man who didn’t take to what he called “that modern digital crap.”
Olivia was everything Cady wasn’t but had always wanted to be: pretty, petite, quick to smile at others and to laugh at herself. It was the first time Cady had understood the concept of a girl crush; she wasenamored, sneaking glances under her bangs during class, following Olivia out to the vending machines during break.
