A couple days later, I spotted the blue van again.
It was parked at the end of the block, when before I swore it had been around the corner near Waverly Place. Someone had moved it, even though its tires were still locked by the city and its parking tickets still wriggled in the wind. Now it was much closer to Catherine House. I could see it from the front stoop.
I left the gate and crept closer. Wrinkled stickers, rust swirls, and dents made it seem urgently out of place, a desperate girl screaming into a stone-faced crowd with everyone looking the other way. The porthole windows were covered by curtains or, it occurred to me as I checked more closely, loose and soiled clothes pressed up against glass to keep curious eyes out. Murmuring came from inside, an argument of some kind. Heated and furious, then shushed, then contained. I rested my weight ever so gently against the side of the van, trying to get my ear closer. A hubcap was missing, and one of the tires was bald.
The van door could have slid open with a roar, and any monstrous thing could have happened, but I stayed put, listening.
Placing my ear against the side of the derelict vehicle, dirty and sticky with some unidentified city substance, was like cupping my ear to a seashell. Ordinary, earthly voices stopped, and something else made itself known. A rush of wind could be heard coming from the belly, the air whipping itself into a frenzy, battering against walls and breaking branches, as if a forest of trees crowded inside. Then it calmed, as if it knew I was there listening, and I recognized the sound. I knew the exact timbre, the swell and hold, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the rustle, the whisper. It was the sound of home.
I pushed off, went running. Not for the boardinghouse but beyond it—I didn’t even know where. Uptown or downtown, east or west, closest avenue or any beyond. I was far away from the van in no time—and some passersby, probably tourists, saw me running and seemed alarmed, but others, surely locals and used to minding their own business, didn’t bat an eye.
━━━━━
I slowed to a walk, and then I was walking for a while. A stretch of blocks came and went. At some point, I stopped. I’d come this way for a reason, and I didn’t want to let myself know it yet, but things were taking shape. Something clicked.
I knew that lamppost. A yellow storefront on the corner pulsed with familiarity, and I found myself pulled toward it. I stood beneath the yellow for a long moment, under the protruding awning that kept me out of the sun, until I saw the flowers lining the block. I remembered.
The only time I’d visited the city, I’d come here, to this place. That lamppost, this awning, and my memory shrank my hand to child-size. I sensed the ghost of my mother’s hand in mine.
It was the visit my mother’s husband and his daughters ruined, when I was thirteen. Something else happened that visit, something that took us here.
We’d separated from them for an hour or two. She wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but she’d led us to this corner and stopped. There was so much noise. Color. Activity. I wanted to memorize every inch, to drink in the outfits and accents, to carve my initials in fresh concrete so they would dry and stay forever, like some initials I’d seen. We stood in the glow of the yellow awning while she got herself together. Her fingers were trembling, which made me hold tighter, glancing up at her, trying to understand.
She breathed out. Then she led me down the next block, a street filled entirely with bright, blooming flowers and plants in pots. We traveled for what felt a long time through green shade, which sometimes reached over my head, and it confused me, this part of the city so much like upstate, as if we’d returned to our garden we’d had to give up. But she set me straight: She said this was only the flower district. It had made me think this city must be made up of different divisions, magical islands separated by crosswalks, and if someone wanted a daisy in the city of New York, they had to come to this street only and nowhere else.
Now I was back. Somehow I found myself here again.
A series of flower shops and gardening stores lined the street now as it had then. Not a thing had changed. I walked, buckets of bright blossoms and tall arching ferns on either side of me, basil and oregano and other herbs and spice plants giving the air a tangy scent, and the roses, every last color to be imagined, crowding the sidewalk. To walk this street felt different, now that I was taller and more sure. I could see up and out. I could see where it ended.
When the block was over, the city emerged again, gray and charming in a different way. A traffic sign glowed at me with a beckoning figure: walk.
I came to a stop right in front of the same destination from that visit with my mother so long ago, when she’d forced herself to ask my father for money. This was where he worked.
My father still owned the same art gallery he’d opened after my mother left him—there was some kind of small inheritance he got after his own father died, and he used it all for this. We’d always known where it was, though we’d visited only the once. I remembered the wide pane of glass, the white insides. I remembered some pictures on the walls and an ugly, stumpy figure in the center of the floor—a sculpture of something I couldn’t understand, maybe an animal of some kind, a creature. It was lumpy to the touch, colder than I expected. Something slimy had come away on my wandering hand, as if the sculpture were oozing and alive. My father had yelled at me for touching it.
As for my father, I’d forgotten what he looked like in specifics, but I’d recognize him if he were there. He was my father. He would know me, and I him.
I hadn’t meant to seek him out. My feet had done it for me. They’d traveled through the corridor of flowers and carried me here, for this. I would tell him who I was, and I would ask him for money, and I would be able to eat lunches and dinners in restaurants and buy new shampoo, and wouldn’t even have to think of pawning the opal then. He’d never sent a child support check in his life, and when we’d visited those years ago we’d left empty-handed. He owed me, and my mother, and I would tell him. I hadn’t known it at first, but it was why I’d come.
Through the glass, I could see a series of large paintings hung on the walls—long legs and bare bellies, pinkish flesh and flushed faces—but the art barely registered. I sensed he was close, the tremble of my mother’s hand again in my hand. She never wanted to ask him for anything. She would have torn me away from this place before she’d let me go in there and ask him for as much as ten dollars. My being here was the last thing she would have wanted. She would have shoved me down the sidewalk and into the green.
And yet I didn’t move. He was in there on the other side of the glass, I felt it.
“I don’t get art sometimes,” I heard from behind me. “I mean, why’s it always got to be naked girls? Are we so special they can’t be satisfied painting a tree?”
Her low voice made me unsteady.
I turned.
Monet was resting the weight of one leg on a fire hydrant. She kicked off and came closer, running her fingers through her hair. It was blond today. Her bare arms gleamed in the sunlight, muscled and curved the way an artist might render them in permanent, glistening paint. I wondered what it would be like to be her.
I wanted to act outraged that she’d found me here—confront her, make her unsteady—because of course she’d followed me from the house. She had to have.
But the thought of it pleased me. She’d followed me.
She moved up close to the glass, and now we were both there, hip against hip and shoulder to shoulder, peering in.
“Which one’s your favorite?” she asked.
They were all blurs to me. There were nipples and bellies and pointed toes. The girls in the paintings all had dark curly hair, sometimes a hand running through it. They could have been one girl.
Monet squinted. Her mouth fogged the window in the shape of a crescent moon plunged out of the sky and lying sideways.
“I like the giant one in the middle,” she said. “In that one at least she doesn’t look dead and murdered on that hideous plaid couch.”
The mention of the couch caught my attention, and I found myself studying it instead of the painted girl. The hideous plaid couch—tan and brown, composed so it mimicked a hunched creature itself, moldy and furred—prickled my memory. The arms were tall, the cushions sunken. I recognized it from somewhere, maybe.
Monet seemed to think I was ignoring her question on purpose.
“Don’t be so sensitive,” she said. “People tell you that all the time, don’t they?”
I nodded, because they did. I was gullible, I was sensitive, I was too unsure in my own skin. She didn’t know me, but she knew that.
“Are you stalking me?” I tried to smile.
She shrugged. “You’re the one who called the cops over. Maybe you thought you knew something you don’t. Something you can’t know yet. Because you’re not supposed to.”
The way she spoke made the sunny street dark for a moment. I heard the whistle of wind, as if I were back inside that gated garden, down on my knees in the dirt by the grave, where the city didn’t seem to touch. I had dirt under my fingernails. I noticed it right then and tried to pick it out, but it was so deep in there.
“You’re going to see some things while you’re here, and they’re not going to make sense. And you’re going to try to make sense of them, but your brain is too small to take it in. So stop fighting.”
The dirt was embedded under my fingernails, and I imagined it, plush and dark, seeping into my blood and contaminating me.
“So why are we here?” Monet said, sweeping her hands over the view of the empty gallery. “Out purchasing some art to liven up your tiny room?”
I scoffed. “I have fifty-three dollars to my name.”
I was about to say more, but I saw him then. I saw him.
He was standing near where I recalled the slimy sculpture had been when I’d visited. His shadow was wider but just as tall. He still had that beard. I remembered the beard, and I remembered something else. When I’d touched the sculpture and he’d yelled at me, he’d also pushed me away from it, a shove that landed me on the ground, which was concrete, hard and cold. This alarmed my mother, and a fight began, one that propelled us out of the gallery soon after, without any cash in hand and with him yelling after us that she was a greedy Jew whore for coming to ask him for money after refusing to take his calls for years. I plugged my ears until we were across the intersection and in the flowers again, back with the flowers, away from him, safe, but that wasn’t what hit me as I saw him standing there.
It was that I didn’t want a thing from him after all.
My mother had taught me that. How had I forgotten?
It was too late. He was looking out the wall of windows, straight at me.
Monet didn’t notice my father, even though he was the one person inside the gallery and he was right there. She had eyes only for the paintings. “How much do you want to bet a dude painted those things?” she said. “I’ll bet you twenty bucks it’s a dude. If you win, you’re up to seventy-three bucks. C’mon, let’s go in. Let’s see.”
I should never have come here. That was what I was thinking. I should never have walked the street of flowers and ferns, knowing where it would take me. I should not have come. I should turn around right now. I should never see this man again. I should go. My mother would want that.
Monet was grabbing my arm. She was heading for the glass door. She was opening it and pushing me inside, before I could even protest.
The gallery space was a squished storefront. It seemed smaller now than it had all those years ago. Every wall was white. The ceiling was white. The floor was gray, and hard, as I remembered. The exposed pipes were painted white. The doors were white. There was no furniture apart from a desk and a single stool, and those, too, were white.
Monet was offering her smile to my father, and he wasn’t looking at me at all anymore. He was looking only at her. It was hard not to. His eyes ran from her face down to what was below her face, and took their time there, did a few circles down there, until he came back up again and met her eyes.
If Monet minded some strange creep checking her out like this, it didn’t show.
He had a dark, scruffy beard. He had big, ugly hands. He reeked of cigarette smoke. He had a fat, veiny nose. I wondered what my mother ever saw in him, and worse, how many of his genes I carried, how much my aging future would be like this.
“Don’t be shy. Take a look around.”
Monet had no idea who he was to me. “Why, hello,” she said. “Hello, hello. We were wondering if you could tell us a bit about the artist? Like, what is his name?” She winked at me.
A phone rang behind the white desk, and my father held up a stubby finger. I was relieved to see I didn’t have his hands. He’d be right back, he told us—well, he told Monet. He acted as if only one of us was there. He hustled for the desk and answered a white phone. He turned his back as he spoke, which allowed me to escort Monet to the far side of the gallery, where the girl in the painting—it had to be the same subject in all the paintings—lolled listlessly with limbs outstretched on the hideous plaid couch. Either the artist had limited skill in animating the human form, or she really was a corpse and it was a brilliant interpretation; I couldn’t decide. That was art, I guessed.
I just let it out. “That’s my father,” I told Monet. “I don’t think he recognizes me.”
“Who? That guy?”
I nodded and indicated she should keep her voice down.
“That guy is your dad.” She whispered it, flat. I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me.
“This is his place,” I said. “That’s him.”
“I don’t see any resemblance,” she said, and this soothed me. She made a box with her fingers, as if miming the frame for a photograph. She gazed at him through her finger-frame. “Maybe in the nose.”
I cringed and covered my face.
“Kidding. Seriously. But are you being serious right now? Did I interrupt a family reunion?”
“He didn’t know I was coming.”
“So,” she said. “When’s the last time you saw him?”
“I was thirteen. Forever ago.”
“And he doesn’t recognize you?”
I shrugged.
She grinned. “And you came here to—what? Claim your fortune? Go into the family business? Avenge an old wrong?”
I couldn’t answer.
“What’s the plan?” A spark in her eyes. “What do we want from him? Money?”
I didn’t answer, but something was communicated between us that she liked. She liked it very much.
My father had ended his phone call and was crossing the empty gallery space toward us. “The artist you’re admiring is called Frederico,” he told Monet.
Monet stifled a laugh. He’d said it so pompously, attempting to roll the final r. “Frederico what? What’s his last name?”
Every painting in the gallery was by this same artist. They all had the lack of artistic skill, the flat slops of color, the nude subject with the blob of dark hair. Many featured the hideous couch. In fact, the artist was better at painting the couch than the human.
“Simply Frederico,” my father said. “He prefers to go by only one name. He likes to conceal his signature—see, there, in the corner by her toe, where he signed? He’s a master of the female form. Artforum called him the voice of—”
Monet broke in, making him stop. I figured she’d laugh in his face. Master? Voice of . . . what? But what she said next shocked me.
“I’m not here to see any paintings, Dad. Don’t you know me? I’m here to see you.” Then she stepped back and spread out her arms, as if to say, Look! I’m your long-lost child you never bothered to send a single birthday card to! Embrace me!
His expression went sideways with confusion. He coughed a guttural smoker’s cough and said, “What now?”
“Dad, it’s me. Your daughter. Bina. Don’t you recognize me?”
She came in for the hug now—she was actually going so far as to touch him—and I felt myself turn into a mist in the shape of a person. Someone could walk straight through me, and I’d dissolve. I wasn’t even there. Only two people were, and I was watching them reconnect. So this was how he would greet his estranged daughter.
He returned the hug, awkwardly, but when he pulled away he shook his head. “I don’t remember your hair . . . like that,” he said. That was all he said. After all these years, he had nothing more to say to me. He stood so stiffly. Not a millimeter of his face softened beneath the dark beard.
“So what next?” Monet said. “Want to take me to lunch?”
“Sabina?” he said. “Bina? It’s you?”
The mist hardened to ice. Bina was something my mother had called me, from the beginning, before I even came out. Monet could have kept this going, but I didn’t need her. Not for this.
“She’s lying,” I told him. “She’s not Bina.”
He seemed relieved. Then his face hardened—gazing at me anew. “What do you want?” he said. “Did your boyfriend knock you around or something?”
I touched my face. Makeup never seemed to hide it completely, no matter what I did. “I walked into a door,” I said.
He didn’t like that, not one bit. It was something my mother had been known to say. He changed the subject. “Did she send you? How is she?”
He wouldn’t even call her by a name, but I knew who he meant: my mother.
Here was the man we left when I was nine years old. The man who threw the dishes, practically the whole set, until we had barely anything left to eat on. The man who called her terrible names, who did things to her she’d never told me, because it would hurt me to know, who made her walk into all those doors, here he was.
I would keep her safe, even now. “She’s fine. She’s doing fantastic.”
“Why are you here then?” He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t seem at all happy to be reunited. “You’re here for money. I can read you like I could her. That’s what you want, right? Cash.”
Heat buzzed in my ears. “I’m here for the summer, I’m staying at Catherine House, I—”
“I know the place. She stayed there. When she left me the first time.”
I steeled my eyes at him.
“They tried to poison her to me. But it didn’t work. She didn’t stay long.”
I knew that, too. Her city stories ended so abruptly, as if the sidewalk had dropped off and there was no one left to catch her but him. She went back to him, this stranger. Was it all because of me?
“I was the only one who visited her in the hospital,” he was saying. “The only one. None of them came. Whole house full of chicks, and not one showed.”
Monet watched him carefully. She was getting a clearer picture of him now. So was I.
“She was in the hospital?” This was the first I’d heard of it, and I’d heard most everything that went on that summer, or so I thought.
“After the accident.” This new piece of information— accident?—stung me. “And you could be scamming me, coming here, pretending to be my kid. Don’t think I don’t know that.” He paused. “Except you do look like her. That’s the truth.”
Usually I liked this said aloud and acknowledged. I needed to hear it, needed to remember. Because if I resembled her on the outside, where it was obvious, didn’t we share so much more, on the inside, where only we could know and feel?
“You do look like your mother,” he said. “Only chunkier.”
I stepped back.
“But that doesn’t mean I’m giving you money.”
Monet spoke for me. “So that’s it? You haven’t seen your kid in years, and that’s what you have to say?”
He refused to give me another word and stood there, quaking with rage. The familiarity of the moment squeezed my throat.
In an instant, Monet had his arm. For some reason, she had his arm and was leaning into his ear and sharing something, and he was nodding, visibly calmed, even subdued. It was eerie.
She turned now to me. “Let me talk to you for a sec. Alone.”
“Wait,” I said, because I was still at the edge of something, and it had nothing to do with his money. An accident. There’d been an accident I didn’t know about. My mother’s stories had swirled with forgotten street names and subway stops, clubs that used to be open but weren’t anymore, defunct bands I’d never heard of, movies she watched in downtown theaters that had since shuttered, adventures she had in downtown parks, boots she wore that she bought on sale on the street where she said all boots used to live, the postcards she collected from the shop on Christopher Street that was filled with old art prints and movie stills—enough murky and distracted detail to make a web. She’d left some things out, hadn’t she? I was beginning to suspect that she’d distracted me with other things all so she could keep the most significant part of her summer to herself.
Monet pulled me across the gallery, and soon we were at the doorway. She wedged her arm in front of it so I couldn’t open the door and leave.
“Get your face together,” she said.
I’d been crying. That kept happening. I was facing the street, fully visible through the glass, and not a single person who walked past paused with any concern or even noticed. My mother always said people in the city minded their own business. She’d also once told me there was never another place where she felt so alone.
“What’s the game plan here?” Monet said.
“Game? This isn’t a game.”
The last time I ever visited with him—the day I saw this gallery, and left empty-handed—I remembered my mother’s hands in my hair, her warm body snug against mine as she pulled me close, and how safe I felt even though we were out in the noisy street surrounded by strangers. She apologized for taking me there. She should never have done it, she said. No amount of money was worth it, and we’d be fine without him, just fine.
Then she made me a promise. “You will never have to see that man ever again.”
She never broke that promise. I did. All by myself, on this very day.
“What do you want to do?” Monet said, her voice pitched low. “He’s not going to like hand over his credit cards . . . We could see how much he’s got in his wallet if you want. Who should be the decoy?” She waggled her eyebrows.
“No, no,” I said. I kept thinking about the accident he said she’d had. I kept thinking how he knew something about her that I didn’t.
Monet pointed to one of the paintings on the wall, the largest, ugliest one, the one she’d called her favorite. “Go over there. By that poor girl’s feet. Wait there. I’ll take care of this.” Then she was near my father again, and she was pulling him away. She said she needed to talk with him.
━━━━━
I might have followed, but something on the wall held me. The painting. That plaid couch. That very particular pattern on the couch. It tugged at me the way a vaguely recognizable face in a movie will tug, will spin your mind until you remember where you saw that person before, what role they used to play in some former costume.
What was coming to me was all texture. Nubby and rough against skin. Then the pattern and the distinct colors, the sour brown, the sickly tan, the urine-inspired yellow. I’d touched it, in real life, with my own hand.
That couch had lived in my father’s house before we left him and most everything in it. It had been in his studio (the garage), and I wasn’t allowed to sit on it. Now here it was, depicted in oil paint and hung in a Manhattan gallery far away from that garage, signed pretentiously, Frederico.
Maybe my father knew the artist, but that wouldn’t explain the second thing.
The subject in the paintings. The girl.
In all the paintings, her hair was the same: a mess of curls hanging below her chin, brown squiggly lines, as if the artist didn’t know how to properly render hair using a paintbrush. The same brown squiggles and face appeared on every canvas in the gallery. My hand lifted to my own head, where my hair was knotted and slick at the back of my neck, from summer humidity, but if I broke it free from the hair elastic it would have made my own mess of curls and flyaways as usual. I had my mother’s hair. When she’d stopped dyeing it, the brown grew back in, plain as tree bark. Same as mine.
Hair was only the beginning. We had the same hands and wrists, practically almost identical. Same big hips. Same big lips. He’d said we looked alike, didn’t he?
This painting was of my mother. She was young again, rendered with globs and shaded body parts. The proportions were all off, but I saw the accusatory face of my mother. Full of secrets. Standing in the door of my basement bedroom, telling me she needed to send me away.
I had to go. Through the window, the street was dark now, as if a storm had barreled through the neighborhood, shrouding the block. I should have heard traffic noise and the buzz of activity outside, but I didn’t. How long had we been here?
Moments later, Monet reappeared, tossing me a wallet. “How much you get?”
I caught it and held it close. It bulged with cards and sloppy lumps of cash, and I needed two hands to grasp it. “What’d you do to him?”
“I doubt Fred’s coming back out here anytime soon,” she said. “He’s a little shaken, the pig. I saw him holding his chest when I left, like his heart couldn’t take it. The shock might end up killing him.” She was baiting me.
“What did you do to him?” I repeated.
She cocked her head.
“He’s Frederico,” I said.
She nodded, encouraging me.
“It’s him,” I said louder.
There was something about knowing that the man who made these things was my father. The trick he was pulling on the public by showing his own work and saying some artsy painter made them. The fact that he used my mother to do it for all these years.
A paint can sat on the bottom rung of a ladder nearby. I wish I could say I was the one who noticed it, that the idea came to me, but Monet crossed the gallery to the ladder. The paint was white, of course.
“He could come out at any second,” Monet said, yet weren’t her eyebrows raised? Didn’t she point a finger at the paint can and say, “Hmm”?
I put the wallet down so my hands were free.
“Go on,” she said. “Hurry up, before Daddy Dearest comes out.”
She was so calm. At the same time, she was goading me. She’d done something to him, and now it was my turn.
It was a half gallon of white paint, not so heavy. A paintbrush was innocently set at its side. The lid popped right off, the paintbrush a loaded weapon, dripping everywhere.
I began with a splat, aimed it at the biggest canvas on the biggest wall. It took me over. It was all or nothing, and I wanted to destroy everything, every stolen scrap of my mother. I wanted to erase her from this place.
As I was spraying paint at the pictures, I changed. I turned powerful. Brutal. Brimming with rage.
Soon there was no more paint. There was no more artwork to ruin, except for one painting on the far wall. But I’d done enough, I’d made my mark, had my fill. My rage was spent.
I dropped the paintbrush. I kicked the paint can over. I marked the gray floor with white prints from my feet, and then I stood very still. I had paint in my hair, paint spattered over my bruises and ugly spots and mouth just like my mother’s. I blinked, and all I saw was white. My mother felt so close to me; it was almost as if she were there with me in the gallery, softly saying, That was beautiful, Bean, in my paint-crusted ear.
True dark had fallen, thick now, and streetlights were on, but there were still people passing by, completely uninterested in what was going on inside. The only person bursting with emotion in this room was me.
I took the wallet and held it for a good moment. Then I dropped it in a pool of paint, where it would stick.
“Really?” Monet said.
“Really,” I said.
She nodded with respect.
I grabbed the remaining painting—a small canvas tucked away in a corner—without a second thought. A couple of fresh white dots marred it, but apart from that it was an original Frederico in fine shape. I held it face-first against my chest and headed for the door.
Monet trailed after me.
“You could get arrested,” she called.
Was it me, or did she sound amused?
“How many dollars’ worth of damage would it have to be to become a felony?” she asked. “If it’s art theft, do they have to call the FBI?” I could feel her behind me. This was still a game to her, one in which she felt not a single consequence, as if no one could catch her, no matter what she did. So reckless.
I sensed that same recklessness in me.
I was out the door, and so was she, and no one was yelling after us. I was across the street, and so was she, and all behind us was quiet.
Then we were around the corner, and the awning of a neighboring building made a safe haven where we could stop, and I did, my back against brick, letting myself go calm, leaning my mother against the wall for a moment, simply breathing.
Monet was only watching me now. She was perfectly silent, almost smiling.
After a few breaths, I was back to myself and I straightened. I lifted my mother in my arms again, the canvas slick with panic-sweat. “I’m okay. I’m okay now, I’m okay.”
“You sure are,” she said.
She registered the painting in my arms and, as she did, she happened to notice my hand.
“What’s that you have on your finger?” she said.
I couldn’t hide my hand. It was out in front of me, on display. I’d been wearing it with the stone facing in, but it must have gotten turned around in the excitement.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Nothing?” I could see all the things she wanted to say flash across her face, and she uttered none of them. Maybe she decided to put it away for later. Maybe something about that night made her, too, feel changed.
It was as we walked back to Catherine House that she bumped her shoulder into mine, a knock of appreciation. Her bare skin was cooler than it should have been in the heavy-hanging heat. She was so unbothered by everything, as if she knew already all the things that could be.
“What did you do to him?” I asked. She knew I meant that man I’d never have to see for the rest of my life, who I’d never again call my father. He hadn’t come out of the back room, even with all the noise we must have made. For all I knew, she could have killed him.
“I told you to stop fighting,” she said. “I told you you’d see some things, that they wouldn’t make sense.” She was setting off fireworks in my mind, bursts and pops in the wild field of my imagination. That was enough for now. More than enough.
It was something I hadn’t even known I wanted, what each of us did forming one perfect whole.
She put her arm around me, jostling my mother in my embrace. I didn’t mind the touch. The opal was near glowing. Monet could have stayed that way if she wanted, sidled up to me, the two of us against the world. Even though she’d stood by and watched me do all the destruction and then told me how much trouble I was in. It was almost as if she’d wanted me to get in trouble, was hoping he’d come out and catch me in the act. Even with that.
“You surprised me,” she said. “I didn’t know you had that in you.”
I didn’t know it, either.