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My heart thumps. They’re not local artists, but at least it would allow me to open next weekend. “You have artwork with you?”
“Yeah,” Matt says, hooking an arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder. “We have our final projects from college, and a bunch of other pieces from our collections.”
“We had to put together a huge portfolio for grad school applications,” Christine clarifies. “And since we decided to move everything, we brought it all with us, including the stuff that no one’s seen.”
My pulse quickens as my mouth grows dry. This could work. I don’t have much choice, do I? But if Christine is half as good as her father, I could open my gallery as planned and in the process, put up a big middle finger in Cameron Fuller’s face.
“You okay?” Sebastian closes the distance between us. “You have a strange look on your face.”
I meet his gaze. “I’m jealous of you.”
“Jealous?” His brows lower. “Why?”
“I wish I were the one who’d punched Fuller in the mouth.”
Sebastian throws his head back and laughs. Christine and Matt join in, and pretty soon I’m wiping tears from my eyes—but they aren’t from despair.
“Show me your work,” I finally say. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”
In the hubbub that follows,I barely have time to catch my breath. Christine is a genius with oil paints. Her work is abstract and beautiful, almost an ode to the shapes that she must have seen her father create in his workshop as she grew up.
Matt, on the other hand, paints with watercolor on top of thick, luxurious paper that he makes himself with recycled scraps. The finished products are whimsical and ethereal. I didn’t expect that from him; he looks like a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, but he must have hidden depths.
I might be biased, but both Matt’s and Christine’s work seems a lot better than Cameron Fuller’s. We agree on terms for the display of their work, sign contracts, and get to work framing and hanging the paintings. Six days pass in a flash. There’s a lot more to do than I realized, with every piece of art needing lots of attention and care before it can be hung up and displayed to its best advantage.
On Friday, the day before my opening event, Sebastian finally lets me see the sculpture he’s been working on. It makes me clutch my heart and tear up. I can’t explain why I have that reaction. Seeing the polished metal curving and crashing into colored glass like a riotous, happy wave makes me throw my arms around his neck and plant a big, sloppy kiss on his cheek.
The next morning, I realize I’ve forgotten to order the labels for each piece of art and fall into frenzied panic. My sister helps me find blank business cards from the local stationery store, and she writes out the names of the artworks, the price, and credits the artist (her cursive looks like she spends her time writing love letters to long-lost sailors from the 1800s and is much classier than my own chicken scratch).
Finally, we rush to the dollar store with Alec and Nate in tow, and Piper comes up with a clever solution to sandwich the price tags between a square piece of glass before fixing them to the wall. The effect is elegant and understated, and not at all like we rushed around for four hours the morning of the opening and played arts and crafts on the gallery floor.
By the time we’re done, it’s time to hurry home to change, then come back to prep for the official opening. Before slipping out behind Piper, I turn to survey the space. Clean white walls give the double-height room a bright, airy feel. The floor is warm hardwood, and the mobile walls have been positioned to give the room a sense of flow. The tops of the mobile walls have light fixtures that illuminate the art to their best advantage.
From the front door of the gallery, the eye is drawn to the biggest canvas, positioned in the place of honor on a mobile wall in the middle of the room. A riot of blue, teal, green, and white is an injection of energy as soon as you walk in. Christine told me she’d never shown anyone this piece, and she always thought it looked unfinished and amateurish. I’m an art amateur, so maybe that’s why I like it so much. But hey—it’s my gallery, so I can do what I want. And I wanted that piece in the place of honor.
“You coming?” Piper calls out from the car, which is parked in one of the angled parking spots outside the gallery.
Nodding, I close the door on all my hard work, lock the door, then join my sister so we can go and make ourselves pretty for this evening.
31
MIA
With Baileysafely in the care of her usual babysitter, a local teenager named Sarah, I fluff my hair one last time and check the back of my dress to make sure I’m not showing any panty lines. I bought this dress when I first started dating again six years ago. In my naïveté, I thought I’d be going out for nice dinners and meeting the man of my dreams.
Instead, this beautiful, buttery yellow gown has stayed in its garment bag in my closet the entire time. It has a subtle off-the-shoulder neckline that hits the very top curve of my shoulders and makes my clavicles look amazing. The neckline dips down below my breasts in a subtle V but doesn’t really reveal any cleavage. The sleeves are fluttery and hit just above my elbows, which enhances the nipped waist to make me look a lot curvier than I actually am. I’ve always liked how the heavy fabric hugs my hips and then flutters out, ending at mid-calf in a subtle trumpet.
It’s sexy, I decide.Iam sexy. Even though I haven’t truly felt sexy for over a decade. And even better is that I’m getting dressed for myself. I don’t need a date at a fancy restaurant to get glammed up. I can make new girlfriends and attend their events looking gorgeous all by myself. I’ll sip champagne and look at art and enjoy myself, for once.
I hook dangling gold earrings in my ears and curl a few stray tendrils to frame my face, the rest of my blond hair pinned up above my nape. Finally, I finish it off with some red lipstick.
“You look really pretty, Mom,” Bailey says from the doorway, her head leaning against the jamb.
“I thought you hated dresses.”
She flashes me that grin I love so much—the one that usually means she’s about to get into trouble. But this time she just says, “I hate wearing them. They look nice on other people.”
Smiling, I kiss my daughter’s hair and follow her out to the living room, where Sarah is flicking through movies to watch with Bailey. They settle on the couch together and bid me goodbye, so I slip on my white heels with the thin ankle strap and head to Art’s Cove.
