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In the studio, she cracked open a window in spite of the bitter cold. A draft knifed in and around her, giving her goosebumps, and she thought about getting a sweater, but she didn’t want to wait. All of a sudden, she needed to get this done.
She dragged a pair of sawhorses out from under some clean towels she had never gotten around to folding and walked one of the huge canvases over and laid it across them, face up. She touched a fingertip to a corner more from habit than necessity. It was dry; Jake had finished this one months ago, right after he was diagnosed. She smiled down at the image, Jake’s mother and sister shelling peas on the back porch of a house in flames. His mother was going to hate it. She was going to say it made her look “country.” But it was beautiful. She ran her fingertips lightly over the faces, feeling the texture, the complicated love expressed in every brushstroke. “I love you, baby,” she whispered. “I miss you.”
She mixed the crackled-sugar powdered varnish with turpentine, the precise recipe so clear in her mind she barely thought about it. The smell as she stirred took her back to Savannah and the first tiny apartment she and Jake had shared on the second floor of an old white house near school. When it was warm, Jake had painted on the porch roof outside their living room window. Tourists passing in the square below had thought he was part of the local color, a half-naked giant in cargo shorts. He had always had paint in his hair, head, and chest. She had fallen asleep every night smelling the paint on him, snuggled close to his bare skin.
When it was cold, they had both worked in the tiny kitchen, huddled as close as they dared to the open oven door, the only source of artificial heat in the damp, Southern winter. She had worked at the kitchen table on a neat easel that she folded away every night, her canvases leaned against the bookcases that lined the living room walls. Jake had blocked the kitchen cabinets for weeks at a time; she would have to move his canvases to get to the oatmeal or the spice rack. He had gone through a triptych phase that had almost driven her out of her mind as a housekeeper. Everywhere she had looked, three images in progress had looked back.
If she had asked her mother for money, they could have easily moved to a bigger, better place with heat and extra bedrooms. But she had refused, and Jake had never suggested she should. He had worked part-time jobs at pizza joints and tourist bars; she had worked the customer service counter at a big department store in the mall, wrapping packages and processing credit card payments, and somehow, they had made ends meet. Later, after Mama had gone into the hospital, she could have just written herself a check; she’d had her mother’s power of attorney. It wouldn’t have been stealing; technically the money had all been as much hers as it was her mother’s, a shared inheritance from her grandparents and what was left of her father’s insurance. But she had never been able to stand the thought of letting her family’s legacy into her life with Jake, even as cash.
She was so caught up in remembering, she barely registered the knocking at the door until it became frantic. “Kelsey!” Jason’s voice echoed down the hallway. “Are you there? Are you all right?”
She put down the jar of varnish and headed to the door. “Oh, thank God,” he said when she opened it. “I was calling and calling, and you didn’t answer.” He hugged her tight.
“I turned off the phone,” she said. “I’m varnishing.” She shouldn’t be annoyed with him, she knew, but she wanted to slam the door in his face. She wanted to be alone with Jake’s paintings, alone with her own thoughts.
“Can I see?” he said.
“Of course.” He was sweet and concerned about her; he didn’t deserve her anger. “Come on in.”
He followed her back to the studio. “I was going to try to get you to come out to dinner with me.”
“No, thanks.” She chose a fresh brush. “We can order out if you want.”
“You should get out,” he said.
“I don’t want to get out, Jason.” She went back to the painting.
“Fine, fine.” He settled into the ratty office chair at her desk. “Jake said you always varnished his stuff.”
“I did, even in college.” She painted on the varnish with careful, vertical strokes. When the first layer had dried, she would go back and do it again horizontally, creating a perfect, barely-detectable grid of delicate brushstrokes. “He always said he couldn’t face them any more after they were finished.” She found the work soothing, the pure, uncreative technique of covering the paint in a perfectly even layer of gloss, keeping the image safe. “He would always see things that he wanted to fix and end up screwing it up.”
“I remember.” He turned his chair to face the last, unfinished painting. “He was amazing.”
She smiled down on the painting in front of her. “Yes, he was.”
“It just kills me that he didn’t finish this,” he said. “I think it might have been his best work.” She made a noise, not looking up. “You don’t think so? You don’t like it?”
“No, I don’t.” She looked over at the huge, unfinished canvas, barely able to face it even from across the room. “To tell you the truth, I hate it.”
“Kelsey, how can you say that?” he said. “It’s a beautiful portrait of you—it’s so obvious how much he loved you.”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s not just a portrait of me. It’s kind of cruel, actually, and that wasn’t Jake.”
“Cruel?” Jason
said, sounding intrigued. “How do you mean?”
“It’s kind of complicated,” she said. “It’s the angel—the beginning of the angel he was going to paint in the background. It’s like a joke—a not very nice joke on me.” She glanced over at him. “Did Jake ever tell you anything about my mother?”
“Not much,” Jason said. “Why? Is the angel her?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “That’s not what I meant.” Her hand was shaking slightly, and she stopped painting on the varnish, willing the tremor to stop so she could go on. “She killed herself right before Jake and I got married. I think I might have told you that before.”
“You did,” he said.
“She was very…religious, I guess you could call it.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Batshit crazy, actually.” She steadied her hand and went back to work. That was the thing about varnishing; you couldn’t stop in the middle of a coat, no matter what, or the painting would be ruined.
“Did she and Jake not get along?” Jason said. “Did she not want you to marry him?”
