Page 4 of Framed By the Mountain Man Firefighter

“I want to see them,” I say again.

“No.”

Same tone, same firmness. But his eyes stay on mine a beat longer than they need to, and I feel it all the way down to my hands. There’s something in that extra second that isn’t refusal. It’s fear. He’s not saying no because he doesn’t want me to see his work. He’s saying no because he does, and that’s worse.

I let it go. For now.

He walks to the other side of the gallery, passing a photographer’s black-and-white series of the old mining tunnels, a ceramicist’s stoneware bowls in earth tones, and two oil paintings by a retired teacher in Frisco who does aspen groves. He looks at all of it. He takes his time.

Then he turns back to me. “Everything in here is someone else’s.”

It’s not a question. I know where he’s going before he gets there, and my chest tightens.

“That’s how a gallery works,” I say, keeping my voice light.

“You don’t have anything of your own on the walls.”

“I’m a curator. I have an eye for other people’s vision.” The words come out practiced and smooth—the version I’ve given a hundred times when someone asks if I paint, if I draw, if I make anything myself. “That’s what I’m good at. Finding the work and giving it the right frame.”

He looks at me. Quiet and patient, the same stillness he had in front of the watercolor. He’s reading what’s underneath, and I can’t stop it because I don’t know how to flinch either. I feel exposed in a way I haven’t in years, and the unsettling part is that I don’t mind as much as I should.

He doesn’t call me out. He doesn’t push the way I pushed him.

“Sounds like what I say about the carving,” he says.

Then he leaves. The bell chimes behind him, and the gallery goes still. I’m left standing in a room full of other people’s art with his words settling into the quiet he left behind.

Sounds like what I say about the carving.

I look at the counter and pull open the second drawer from the left. Inside is a sketchbook with a cracked spine and charcoal dust on the edges. Laurelle is in there, and Lea, and Neve, and Millie, and dozens of tourists and locals I’ve drawn over the past three years, caught in moments they didn’t know I was watching. Every portrait is honest. Every portrait sees something the subject doesn’t know they’re showing. And every single one of them lives in a drawer because putting them on the walls would mean trusting that what I see is worth looking at.

I close the drawer and go back to adjusting other people’s frames.

3

LEVI

Igo back that afternoon.

I don’t have a reason. I spent three hours at home after leaving the gallery this morning, sitting at my kitchen table with a carving tool in my hand, a block of pine in front of me, didn’t make a single cut. I kept thinking about her face when I said the thing about the carving. Sounds like what I say about the carving. The way her expression changed, not dramatically, not a flinch, but something behind her eyes going still. The same thing I felt when she called my carving work.

So I’m back. No excuse, no pretense. The bell chimes and she looks up from the counter, and if she’s surprised to see me twice in one day she doesn’t show it.

“Gallery’s open till five,” she says.

“I know.”

She almost smiles. Almost. It’s there in the corners of her mouth and then it’s gone, and I want to see what it looks like when it actually lands.

I notice her hands first. There’s a gray smudge along the edge of her right palm, another across two fingers. A sketchbook sits open on the counter next to a stack of invoices, charcoal pencil resting in the spine. She’s been drawing. She sees me notice and closes it, slides it under the invoices. But the smudge gives her away.

“What were you drawing?” I ask.

“Nothing.” She slides the sketchbook further under the stack. “Just keeping my hands busy.”

I don’t push. I understand the instinct to close a door when someone looks too closely, because I’ve been doing it my entire life. Instead, I walk to the watercolor I stood in front of this morning. The ridge at sunset, the smoke-colored sky. I look at it again, and it’s still good. I still feel it—that quiet pull a piece of art has when the person who made it was paying real attention to something.

“I never told anyone about the carving,” I say. I don’t know why I start talking. She hasn’t asked me anything. But the gallery is quiet, and there’s something about the way she listens that makes me want to put words in the space between us. “After my grandfather died, I kept going. Every night, the kitchen table, door closed. It was the only thing I’d ever done where my hands got to be careful instead of strong.”