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“He knows there are probate issues, which, knowing my mother as he did, does not surprise him.”
“So you aren’t going to lose him?”
“No. Not now. But I’m nervous about this dragging on too long and giving him cold feet.”
“I’d like to talk to him next week, if you’re okay with that?”
“Why?”
“I’m looking for any insight into your mother’s activities he might give me that, as an outsider, might stand out to me, and not you.”
“Of course,” I say. “That seems logical. I’ll tell him you’ll call, but you have your deposition, Nick. You need to focus on that.”
“I can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time, sweetheart. I do it all the time.”
Our food is set in front of us, and in a few moments, we are both holding forks, and Nick takes a bite. “Well?” I ask.
“Excellent,” he approves. “No wonder you never learned to cook when you could eat here.”
We chat a moment, and I’m struck by the easy comfort I have with this man in any setting. It’s not something I have with people, and I’ve often thought that I stayed with Macom so long because I needed a connection to another human being. Not because I needed him.
“Tell me about the show Josh mentioned,” Nick urges a few bites into our meal.
The show again. He’s mentioned it twice, and I haven’t even let the possibility of being in that show sink in yet, nor do I want to talk about it. “You listened in on the entire conversation between myself and Josh, didn’t you?”
“Unapologetically,” he says, his eyes challenging me to disapprove.
But I don’t. I feel envy instead at his ability to be frank and unapologetic about pretty much everything. Who he is. What he is. How he feels about his father. God. To be that free. What would it be like?
“You told him you painted me,” Nick says.
“I shouldn’t have,” I reply without hesitation.
“Why?”
“Because I used it to justify me being with you.”
Surprise flickers in his eyes. “I realized that,” he says. “I wasn’t sure you did.”
“Otherwise, I’m not sorry I told him. You did inspire me to paint, Nick.”
“By being an arrogant asshole you aren’t sure you can trust?”
He’s right. That is what happened, but somehow that feeling I’d had about him no longer weighs on me as it had. “I don’t trust easily.”
“Those who do get burned,” he says, and there’s something in his eyes, in his voice, that I cannot name but wish I could, and I never get the chance. He circles back to where this started. “The show, Faith.”
“The show,” I repeat, my mind tracking back to those years in L.A. “Being picked for it has always been a dream for me. For years, my work was presented to them. For years, I was declined.”
“And this time they came to you,” he observes.
That hope and dream inside me rises up with panful insistence, and I shove it back down. “An inquiry means nothing.”
“Have they inquired before?”
“No, but they may rule me out.”
“But if they want you, you’re not going to decline.”
