Chapter Twenty-Three

Molly

Molly shaded her eyes from the afternoon sun’s glare bouncing off the subway window. She again counted the small stack of limp, dirty bills in her hand. Maybe they had multiplied since she’d left her apartment in Brooklyn?

Nope. Still the same amount. It was all that she had to bid on her previously owned storage unit.

It wasn’t much and it wouldn’t go far.

All she could count on was a little – or a lot – of luck. Maybe the other bidders wouldn’t see any value in a unit stuffed to the brim with rusty instruments and paintings from a no-name artist. Maybe traffic was heavy and some would be late or miss the auction all together. Maybe the big bidders accidentally forgot their money in their rush out the door to get here early. It happens, she tried to reassure herself. It could happen.

But what if it didn’t happen, and she lost all of her parents’ precious belongings?

She’d probably have to stop herself from bawling right in the middle of the auction, begging whoever outbid her to please, please have mercy. She’d be devastated to walk through the door of her father’s tiny apartment, knowing it would never again be filled with the joy of her mother’s memory.

But at least she’d know she tried. And she’d have her new art piece to work on.

The one she’d diligently worked on ever since she’d walked out of that skyscraper Wednesday morning and found herself alone and jobless on the busy Manhattan sidewalk.

Sure, she’d gone in with every intention of staying at the company, performing well, and earning her paycheck. She’d forced herself into a black pencil skirt and a white blouse and wobbled along the subway platform in work-appropriate stilettos. With a new briefcase from the thrift store and a few pens she’d borrowed from a bank, she’d felt somewhat ready.

Everyone at her new office had been kind and welcoming, and each one told her that she was going to be a perfect fit. And though each one had said it with a warm, genuine smile, Molly couldn’t help but take each reassurance as a gut punch because it merely seemed to cement her new place in life all the more.

At her cubicle, she really did try to settle in. The drive to get her first check to pay the storage facility had certainly kept her ass in her desk chair—she’d even garnered the courage to ask for an advance to pay Joey, but HR had turned her down. Even then, when every part of her had wanted to kick off her stilettos and sprint out that revolving door, she’d stayed put and resigned herself to tapping her foot and chewing at her lips.

“Molly, hey hun,” her boss had said, poking her head over the top of her cubicle. “We’d love you to come join the marketing department’s weekly meeting. There are a few upcoming designs I’ll want you to assist with.”

All said with that same kind, genuine smile, and yet, each word had been like nails on a chalkboard.

“Sure.” Molly had pushed back from her desk and stood. “Lead the way.”

She’d met all the people in the conference room, forgetting every single name in an instant, and taken her seat at the back of the room. She’d brought a notepad and a pen with every intention of appearing diligent and proactive.

But instead, her mind had drifted, and she’d started doodling along the page’s edge, the voices around her fading into an incomprehensible haze.

“What do you think, Molly?”

Startled and embarrassed, she’d blushed, meeting her boss’s raised eyebrow at the front of the conference room. A projector had displayed on a screen the image of a painted sunset advertising some sort of cruise liner.

“We think it really captures the feeling of sunshine on your face and sand in your toes,” her boss explained, pointing here and there on the painting. “We want them to really feel like they’re there.”

Molly had nodded slowly and tapped her pen to her lips to make it seem like she was considering her thoughts on the advertisement. Her skin had felt clammy, and she’d been certain the air had stopped moving.

“Molly?”

The cushion of the chair beneath her butt had suddenly felt scratchy. She’d longed to stand up and walk right out of the conference room. Right out of the building. The ceiling had seemed to be growing shorter, the walls inching closer, the floor squishing her knees into her chest.

“Molly, hun, are you all right?”

She blurted out, “I wore a sunset on my dress once.”

Every executive had turned to her with the same confused look on their faces. Her boss had shifted nervously from foot to foot, chuckling awkwardly.

“Well, that’s nice, hun, but I don’t see exactly what that has to do with the discussion we’re having.”

Molly had glanced down at her paper, noticing for the first time what she’d subconsciously doodled.

A canopy of treetops. Like the one in the forest in Kelso.

The dancing grasses over the endless hills, the flames’ shadows from the castle fireplace twisting along her naked back, the bristles of her brush as she painted with devotion…

“And I felt it.”

By the exchanged glances of concern she received, she realized she’d said it out loud. So, she said it again.

“I felt it and I was there. I felt it.”

A middle-aged man with glasses had squinted at Molly. Her heart had started to race and her palms had grown sweaty.

“Um, where exactly?” he asked, glancing around for help from his equally confused coworkers.

They all continued to stare.

“There,” she insisted, as if it were the most obvious thing in the entire world. “That place where you’re you. Where you’re really you. That place where you feel bold and brave and daring. Where every nerve along your entire body is alive. You feel everything.”

From the looks of those there in the conference room, not a single person had understood what she was trying to tell them. She felt a pang of sadness for them. Because they didn’t know. They couldn’t understand. They’d never been there.

“I felt free,” she explained. “I felt inspired. I felt special.” She’d paused. “He made me feel special.”

He’d believed in her. He’d believed in her talent. He’d believed she was too good to be sitting in the chair she found herself in.

But the question was, had she believed in herself?

As she sat there, everyone still staring at her, for the first time, she realized she hadn’t believed in herself. She’d always thought she had, but maybe taking this job was a sign she really hadn’t.

She’d always been worried her art wasn’t good enough. She wasn’t good enough. The comfort and security of her new job was the easy way out. And she’d taken it.

But Callum had believed in her. He’d believed she was good enough. He’d believed she deserved to chase after her dreams, to live life to the fullest, to be alive and brave and free and wild.

She’d believed in him, too. That he could be the Duke as himself and not some imitation of his father or his brother. Callum had been too afraid to make that leap. But that didn’t mean she had to follow his lead.

She wanted what she had in Scotland. To make art she cared about, believed in and felt something for. To be her own person and choose her own path. Maybe she’d crash and burn. But she believed that she was worth the chance.

Molly stood right up. Her notepad and pen fell to the ground. Every pair of eyes locked on her while she’d tugged at her tight pencil skirt and kicked off her heels, not caring where they landed.

“You need to put that sunset on a dress,” she said to her boss who stared wide-eyed at her. “And don’t just have an intern cut and paste a design onto a digital image of a dress. You need to get real paint and paint it onto a real dress and then have a real woman put it on. That’s what you need to do if you want people to feel something.”

Not a single word was spoken as she walked past the row of high-backed leather chairs towards the door.

“Otherwise, that’s just shit.”

Molly pointed to the screen and the shit staring back at her. Eyes blinked between her and the stock image of a sunset as she’d turned her back on them all and stepped outside the conference room. She was already to the elevator before she remembered what she’d forgotten to say. In her bare feet, she ran back to the door and poked her head inside.

“Oh, and I quit.”

Her boss immediately started to protest, but Molly was already down the hall and slipping into the open elevator.

She’d barely been aware of the strange looks she received as her bare feet smacked against the lobby’s marble floors, as she marched straight toward the busy revolving doors. After all, it was New York City. A woman walking barefoot was hardly the strangest thing people had ever seen. Probably not even the strangest thing they’d seen that day.

Out on the sidewalk, suit after suit pushing past her in an awful hurry, Molly realized she’d forgotten her paper with the doodle she started. Well, her brief corporate career had ended–and her new project began.

Rushing excitedly to her apartment, she immediately began painting those lines. On a piece of cardboard she dumpster-dived for were the treetops. On a broken window screen her landlord had just replaced was his hair. On the table it was grasses. On the back of an old sweatshirt it was the sunset-colored dress she’d worn that night. On a beat-up frying pan it was the dancing flames in the fireplace of Callum’s room.

Up all night painting, she cried and laughed and grabbed a pillow to scream into and laughed again and kicked at the air and above all felt everything. Good, bad, beautiful, ugly, she felt it all. And it felt good. She never again wanted to be numb. She wanted to feel everything.

On the day of the auction, she searched the couch cushions for any extra change, and gathered together all her remaining money before heading to the subway.

Now, as the train rattled into the station outside the storage facility, Molly looked up from counting her bills and noticed a poster across from her. On it, a woman in a sea of gray suits stood, wearing color.

Wearing a dress with a sunset painted on it.

Molly laughed, imagining how her old boss had fought to have the advertisement made and hoping the client loved it as much as she did. She was still smiling even after she’d made her way to the storage facility and found the auctioneer getting started.

“We’re gonna get started folks. Let’s keep it moving fast, all right? We’ve got five units.”

Her unit was the last one, and by the time they reached it she was biting her lip and fidgeting nonstop with her fingers.

The auctioneer cut her lock and lifted the door up for everyone to take a look. Molly took her turn examining the unit, trying not to appear conspicuous.

Thankfully, the opening bid was $55 less than the total amount that Molly had.

But then the bids started to climb. After the second bid, it was $25 less. She could still afford it.

Then the third bid soared over what she held in her back pocket.

That was it. Molly clutched her bills and stared without blinking at the contents of her unit. It was her last chance to see it all, so she had to take advantage of that chance instead of crumpling into a ball and sobbing.

She tried to remember every detail of her father’s tuba in the back corner. They’d made a mini parade down the alley behind their building: her father on the tuba, her mother on the maracas, and Molly on the kazoo.

The bidding continued, and Molly tried to hold onto the uncontained joy from that memory as she looked over the stacks of her mother’s paintings, the sculptures she’d stored on a cheap IKEA rack to the side, the vintage cameras her mother had carried everywhere with her to snap photos of Molly and her father.

Before she realized it, the auctioneer made his fast-lipped call for more bids and was in the middle of pointing to the winner when someone shouted another bid from the back. Molly didn’t know what surprised her more—the staggering amount, a thousand dollars higher than the previous bid, or the fact that she knew exactly who that voice belonged to.