We posted a photo of momma and her paintings on the internet and the internet decided momma was a star.
It was no special thing, the photo: momma alone on the plastic-wrapped sofa in the front room, unsmiling as ever, encircled by her newest litter of paintings, maybe a dozen or so. I took the picture on one of my monthly visits, before I hauled the paintings down to the basement with her years’ worth of others. Still, people online went gaga for it, people outside Palace even. It got spread all over the usual sites, the ones where I struggled to shore up any attention on my own profiles. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was over, not really. Hell, if what drew people’s attention was her paintings you could hardly see them—it was sunny that day, so sunlight spilled through the window and washed everything out in yellow, leaving most of the finer details fuzzy at the edges. People latched onto them anyway, though. Soon enough, some big shot reporter wrote some wacky article about the Kentucky granny and her strange, homeland paintings. On my next visit, I pulled it all up on my phone to show momma, but she didn’t so much as crack a smile. It was about the work, she told me, painting was what she did to feel okay in her own skin. She didn’t need the attention, especially not from out-of-towners. I shut up about it after that. That high-and-mighty principle crap was important to momma, always was, and I typically tried to let on like it was important to me too. Least I did till that man Lincoln called.
Lincoln had a halted, toneless way of talking and I listened to him blather on and on over the phone. “I think your mother has potential,” he said, “to be the next big thing in outsider art.”
Now that, that just about slayed me. I had to snort back an aborted trill of laughter. See, I never thought of momma as “outside” much of anything. She had one story from girlhood about leaving the state of Kentucky, on a class trip to Cincinnati—didn’t like it much, she said.
“I’m serious, Allison,” Lincoln went on. “I own a gallery here in Chicago, have for a long time, and I know what people like.”
“Why would anyone be interested in something momma made?”
“Because she has a unique vision, an untrained eye. The work I’ve seen has a sort of accidental beauty to it that can’t be manufactured.”
“Accidental beauty?”
“Is there any way I can come down just to see the work? Maybe say hello to your mother?”
“Sorry, Mr. Hammer, but she doesn’t do well with people from outside Palace.”
“I’ll just go through the work and be on my way. And please”—his breath came through the receiver in a crackly burst—“call me Lincoln.”
After so long I could see there was no turning him down, so, in an effort to be polite, I gave him momma’s address and set up a time for us to meet. Before we hung up, he said, “You must be so proud to be the daughter of such a talent.”
But I wasn’t.
It must be said that I never much cared for momma’s paintings. Forgive me, but all she ever painted was scenes of Palace—landscapes of soy fields we passed every damn day, portraits of whichever neighbor was kind enough to lend a photo for reference. No, thank you—I kept my curtains drawn for a reason. Besides, let’s be honest, I don’t think she had half an idea how to wield a brush. All her people had heads like little thumbprints, and she blotted grasses and bricks on the canvas so thick it all became muddy, nothing looked real anymore. And lord knows she’d had practice! Always, when I was a little girl, she’d hole up in her bedroom at the back of the house, the stench of her oil paints noxious through the seams of her shut door. Very early in my life, I learned that if I needed anything I had two ways of going about it: either run in and snatch the brush from momma’s hand, or go behind her back. More often than not I opted for the latter. Townsfolk used to comfort me by saying what an amazing momma I had, chalking her painting up as a sign of some misguided passion—if anyone had bothered to ask I could’ve debunked either claim. Not that it rankled me any. We were women of different fidelities, momma and me; I’d comforted myself to that years ago. Still—I suppose I struggled some, so far as the paintings were concerned.
But if Mr. Lincoln Hammer wanted to drive the nine hours from Chicago, Illinois to Palace, Kentucky to take a gander at the things, I figured it was worth the lark.
He arrived the following week, right on time. The hood of his bright white van down the driveway reflected a blast of sunlight into my eyes as I waved him in from the yard. When he opened the door and hopped to the ground he threw a smile my way, a little stringbean of a mustache quivering above his lips. He was older than I expected, maybe sixty or so, and taller too. His face was pink from the whitened roots of his hair all the way to the starched collar peaks of his yellow oxford, the sleeves of which he wore gathered around his elbows. As he walked, he swayed at his sides ten long, knobby fingers that tapered into a set of chewed up fingernails, his lone imperfection. I’d never seen a man like that in Palace before, and I wondered what people might say if someone were to drive by and catch sight of the two of us together.
As he approached he held out his hand, then retracted it as he did a phony double take. He lowered his glasses in order to better appraise me with his eyes. “But you can’t be Allison,” he said. “You’re much too young.”
Sure, this was nice to hear; but—more importantly—I didn’t buy it. I was twenty-seven, but under the sun, in that loungy get-up I was wearing, I bet I looked a hard thirty-five at best.
He handed me a bottle of wine—“Just a little something for Cora,” he said—and followed me through the front door. Momma sat with crossed arms in the same spot as in the photo Lincoln had seen, only now with undisguised malice scrunching up that wrinkly face of hers. I placed Lincoln’s wine on the table in front of her, told her what a nice gift it was, tried to instruct hospitality with a waggle of my eyebrows.
“I don’t drink,” she said.
To his credit, Lincoln remained unabashed in the face of momma’s unkindness. “For when you have company, then,” he said.
“No guest of mine is drinking that.”
I spat through my teeth that she ought to be nice, but she kept her eyes narrowed on Lincoln as he cozied up in the gingham recliner across the coffee table. I took a seat beside her, at which point a long silence leaked between us three.
Lincoln crossed one leg tight over the other, so that a heel hung loose from his loafer. “I think your paintings are extraordinary, Ms. Aiken.”
“You haven’t even seen them.”
“I was so impressed with the things I saw online. Impressed enough I drove all this way to see them.”
“That was Allison’s idea.”
“She must love you a lot, to get your work out there like that.”
“Don’t pull my leg, mister. Tell me what it is you want from me.”
I saw a grin flash beneath Lincoln’s mustache, but it vanished just as quick. “Tell me,” he said. “Have you ever sold your paintings?”
Momma sneered, and I knew why. There was hardly a house in Palace that didn’t have one of her paintings hung in some obscure corner or another. In each instance, though, she’d given the things away for free, even when people had begged to pay her—more of that principle crap again. “They ain’t for sale,” momma told Lincoln.
“I don’t think you understand. I want to buy your work to sell it in my gallery, in Chicago. I could get eyes on your paintings from places well outside Palace.”
“I don’t need people from nowhere looking at those paintings, they’re fine where they are.”
“Momma,” I said, prepared for the disappointed glance she tossed me. “Maybe he’s got a point. It’d free up space in the basement, and you could use the money.”
“Thank you, Allison, but this is about more than money. I’m saying I would construct a legacy for your mother, for your town. Your work, Ms. Aiken, shouldn’t be in a basement, it should be seen.”
Momma let out a long, derisive snort and said, “You must be out of your mind.”
Believe it or not, this wasn’t just crabby artifice on momma’s part—she said this sort of thing all the time, always hinting she was content to forget the work she kept stored in the basement. It was enough—sometimes—to make me fantasize about flooding the whole house, erasing all those paintings from her history, if only to see how she’d feel then.
I leaned in close to momma, took her hand in mine. “Maybe it’s time we try something new,” I said. “If what Mr. Hammer says is true, your work could find some real value up in Chicago.”
Momma’s eyes weren’t on mine but on our hands, which lay coiled together atop the tattered knee of her jeans. Our skins seemed to blur together there, an optical illusion brought on by the spots of dark between our fingers and the overlap of our thumbs. When she raised her head it was not to look at me but at Lincoln. “Tell you what,” she said. “Since Allison seems so partial to your whims, how about you go to the basement and take as many damn paintings as you want.”
“Thank you, Ms. Aiken, I promise to compensate you more than fairly.”
Momma shot up from the couch and shoved a palm toward Lincoln’s face to halt his talking. “Keep your money. Just because I’m letting you take them don’t mean they’re for sale.”
Lincoln flapped his lips open and shut like he was fixing to say something, but it didn’t matter—momma recrossed her arms and sped out the room before he could so much as say thanks. My eyes met Lincoln’s as her bedroom door snapped shut down the hall.
“I hope I haven’t made a bad impression,” he said.
I told him not to worry on it, that momma wasn’t impressionable by nature. He stood first, and then I led him to the basement door in the hallway. It didn’t take him long to recuperate, I guess—I could feel him jitter with excitement as I opened the door and flicked the light switch.
At the bottom of that rickety staircase, a hazy cone of yellow light sprung forth from the bulb screwed into the ceiling and spread out over the concrete slab floor, just about every inch of which was covered with canvases stacked one against the other. When I turned to spot Lincoln descending the final step, I bit my tongue to stifle a laugh; his jaw hung so loose I worried he might drool. He kept his eyes cast downward, as though he were reading his words off the backs of canvases. “Her whole life she’s painted like this?”
“Just about,” I told him. “Seems to me it’s the only thing she’s ever cared about.”
Lincoln swept a finger over the top edge of a canvas, which kicked up a brume of blonde dust. At last he glanced my way and said, “May I?”
I nodded, and within seconds he was on his knees. He peered this way and that, as though deciding where exactly to begin. I figured I would be in his way, so I went and sat on the bottom step to monitor him from there. He was fascinating to watch, his face all screwed up in concentration as he pawed through stacks and stacks of momma’s paintings. Every so often he would pause for closer inspection and mutter to himself, his eyes cast every which-way between the canvas’s four corners. It got to be silly, just about, how often he would take one and set it aside in a new pile; he must have accumulated a dozen within the first few minutes. Once in a while, I peeped the ones he chose as special. I admit it made me question his judgment. Momma was by no means a sophisticated painter, but she had her moments. For Lincoln, though, the cruder the painting, the quicker he stockpiled it. I thought about asking what he was looking for, but probably I wouldn’t have understood if I had; clearly, our tastes differed, mine and Lincoln’s.
After a while, he paused and stepped forward, leaned on the beam in front of me. Sweat dappled his hairline now, as though he’d been hard at work. His shirt too was dusted with brown smudges, but he didn’t seem to mind. “They’re even better than I thought, these paintings,” he said.
“You really think people will buy them?”
“Certainly. There’s a rawness to the vision here that you don’t find anywhere else. And my customers clamor to be among a new artist’s first collectors.”
Just as I went to break it to Lincoln how many people in Palace already owned one of momma’s paintings, a big brown camel cricket leapt from the ground and fanned its spidery legs into my hair. I was used to the bugs, had grown up with them, so I went to sweep it off me, but before I could, Lincoln leaned down and pinched it from my hair. He held the bug in his fingers for a moment—its spotted exoskeleton glossy in the light—and then tossed it over his shoulder. It might’ve ended there, except what he did next altered the energy in the air between us. He touched my hair once more, tucked it behind my ear this time, and then grabbed my chin with his forefinger and thumb. “Can’t let something like that crawl all over a beautiful thing like you.”
Now, listen: I know what beauty is and never once had I seen it in a mirror. Don’t think I’m self-loathing either, because I’m not. If anything, my plainness had become, over the years, a tool for keeping at bay unwanted others. Sure, I’d had plenty of relations with men, but only dalliances, which was how I liked it. With rare exception, men in Palace were such a bore it made most sense to use their attention only when I needed it. Plenty of them had called me beautiful too, but you could never trust that—we’re taught in Palace to say anything to anyone we think they want to hear. What did I know, though; maybe it meant something different for a man like Lincoln—a little pretentious, and from so far away—to tell me something nice as opposed to the boys I’d known. Likeways, I suppose Lincoln was handsome, or anyways not so unappealing.
A little on edge now—confused, as much as anything—I rose from the floor without a word and hauled myself upstairs. Lincoln was back to work before I made it to the door—I heard him flicking through canvases like a little mouse. An hour or so later, he crept upstairs to ask me to help carry the ones he’d chosen out to his van. It was a substantial stack, a few dozen at least, so it took some doing to transport them, especially with how preciously Lincoln treated them (he insisted on carrying only two or three at a time). Meanwhile, I stacked them in my arms like scrap and jutted them beside one another in the back of his van. On our last trip outside, he paused and dotted the air with his pointer finger to count how many were stored back there. I waited under the sun in momma’s unpaved driveway while he darted to the passenger door and clicked open the glove box. His ass and legs poked out the door, high enough off the ground I couldn’t make out what he was up to. Moments later, he walked back in my direction and folded my hands around a bulky envelope.
“I know what Cora said about the money, but it wouldn’t be right. There’s four thousand dollars in here. See to it she has art supplies, if nothing else.”
Probably momma would have wanted me to insist he keep his money, to shove it back his way. But that isn’t what I did—instead, I pocketed it, and gave him a polite handshake as a way to say both thanks and goodbye.
“I hope we see each other again,” he said with a quick squeeze to my fingers before he climbed into the driver’s seat. On foot, I followed him as he backed out the driveway and then I stopped at momma’s mailbox to watch, the sun in my eyes, as he disappeared off into the vast, tree-lined road that stretched through momma’s little corner of Palace.
On the other side of the screen door, momma waited for me in the hallway door frame. Where before there’d been only scorn on her face, I now saw something awful close to concern. I’d never seen her look so brittle, I realized, as she raised her eyes and said, “How many did he take?”
I shook my head and slapped Lincoln’s envelope down on the coffee table. “Don’t worry, momma,” I said. “You can always make more.”
And she did make more, in the weeks and months that followed, a time in which we all but forgot about the whole event and slipped back into normal life. In fact, nothing half so interesting as Lincoln’s first call came to pass until about four months later, when I got his second.
“The opening for Cora’s show is next weekend,” he told me. “I can’t imagine she has any interest in coming, but would you like to attend?”
“In Chicago?” I said. “I won’t have a place to stay.”
“Nonsense, you’ll stay with me. My condo is upstairs from the gallery, it couldn’t be more convenient.”
I’d been to Chicago once before, on a sneakaway weekend trip back in high school with some friends. I told people upon my return that I’d liked the city, had been amazed by its grandeur and density, but kept to myself that I preferred the calm and quiet of Palace. What’s more, I hadn’t forgotten that strange incident with Lincoln and that cricket down in the basement. Honestly, though, it was the thought of that long trek away from home that made the whole offer seem unappealing.
But just as I went to turn Lincoln down, an image of momma’s sour face popped into my head. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Sure,” and listened as Lincoln whooped in celebration.
*
Lincoln’s gallery stood on the corner of a busy Chicago intersection, three stories in a narrow building, rife with windows. Stripes of sunlight gleamed down its side, so bright I had to shade my eyes as I stood from the driver’s seat and hiked my backpack over my shoulder. I was achy all over from the long drive, but when I got a good look at the building’s front window, I nearly curled back up behind the steering wheel and set off for home. Embossed there on the tinted glass was momma’s name in big gold letters: CORA AIKEN. From across the street, the letters picked up scraps of sunlight and glittered at the edges. It seemed a display meant for some other name, and rather than make me feel at home the sight of momma’s name felt like a warning. My fault, I figured, for expecting anything less.
Once traffic paused for long enough, I darted across the street and pushed open the door to Lincoln’s gallery. Inside were housed even more surprises. The room was one big, echoey square, the whole thing painted a uniform white. Hung in a perfect line across the walls were some of momma’s paintings, a slender fraction of what Lincoln had taken from the basement. Only they no longer looked like they’d come from momma at all, I thought, not in this sterile place. Occasionally the overhead lights illuminated a streak of dust down the center of some Palace landscape or another, which made them feel a bit homier, but for the most part it was like discovering the work of a stranger. Each one had been fitted with a bulky wood frame too glossy to be rustic, though it was clear that was the desired effect. Alone in the room, I took advantage of the time afforded me and rushed up close to the nearest one, a thickly-painted farmstead dotted with browns and blacks. It was paired, like the others, with a title card pasted beside it on the wall. Momma’s name was printed at the top, some made-up title beneath that, and in the last line a price whopping enough I nearly choked: five thousand dollars.
The longer I stared at those three crazy zeroes, the more a laugh worked its way into my chest, though I did my best to suppress it. I was glad I did, too, for at that moment I heard Lincoln’s voice titter up behind me. I assumed he was muttering to himself like he’d done back in momma’s basement, but when I turned I caught him emerging through a door at the back of the gallery with a woman at his side. She was beautiful, in pearls and black dress, with the sleekest waves of silver-white hair; I barely had time to admire her, though, for as soon as Lincoln laid eyes on me he adjusted the tweed lapels of his blazer and scooped me into a hug as though we hadn’t met just the once.
“Allison,” he said. “How does it feel to the daughter of Hammer Gallery’s newest star?”
As I recited a canned answer to his question, the silver-haired woman stepped toward Lincoln and placed her fingers on his elbow. I confess that once I saw up close how gussied up she’d made herself I felt decidedly undecorated in my slouchy boat neck blouse and jeans. Lincoln made no moves to introduce me to her, so I thrust a hand toward her and did it myself.
“Madeline,” she said, her hand in mine. “Lincoln’s my husband.”
I’d never considered whether Lincoln was married, but the sight of Madeline’s soft brown eyes as she pulled her lean face into a smile didn’t make me look back on that cricket incident with any additional fondness, that’s for sure.
“Lincoln told me all about you and your mother and your little town. Sounds like such a charming place. I hope I get to visit someday.”
I smiled and moved my mouth to respond, but Lincoln beat me to the punch. “But you have no reason to visit now,” he said. “Allison’s mother’s paintings will take you there.”
At this, he bellowed out a laugh, a toothy wheeze that greased the surrounding air. Madeline turned to me and ticked the edges of her lips into a smile I chose to read as apologetic. While we let Lincoln’s laugh subside, she scooped my bag from my shoulder and offered to secure it upstairs, in the condo. She exited the rear door and left me alone with a still smiling Lincoln, whose eyes remained fixated on me as he smoothed a palm over the bright yellow tie snaking down his belly.
“Don’t you think the show looks marvelous?”
In an effort to appease, I pursed my face into a simper and nodded. That’s all it took. “Listen, Lincoln,” I said. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. It’s important momma never catches wind I made it out to this. I appreciate being invited, don’t get me wrong. But she wouldn’t understand.”
“Of course, dear,” Lincoln said, elongating the words so that they oozed out of him. “My pleasure, to keep a secret between us.”
In a flash, he set off across the gallery, the click of his wingtips echoing into the corners of the room, and beckoned me to follow. He led me to a table a few feet removed from one of momma’s paintings, two women in a meadow coated with bluish Kentucky moonlight. The table was arranged with an assortment of plates and snacks—cheese, fruit, the works. From its corner, Lincoln grabbed two dinky plastic cups and nozzled sangria into them from a big glass jug. Before I could refuse, he handed me a cup of the fruity, red liquid and held his to mine. “A toast,” he said. “To Palace.”
We clinked our cups and sipped. A sugary wave glossed my tongue, so sappy it just about shuddered my teeth, but I downed it regardless. After we drank, the room chilled with quiet, silent but for the traffic whooshing past outside. I leaned my hip against the table. Lincoln dabbed his wet mustache with the cuff of his blazer. Awkward, some might have called it, though I didn’t care much, not till Lincoln chose once again to touch me. Didn’t even wait for an excuse this time, just passed a hand beneath the curtain of my hair and wrapped his fingers around the side of my neck. “I’m so glad you came,” he said.
Trust me, part of me wanted to slap him off me then and there, though not as sizeable a part as I might have imagined. Besides, I reasoned, to castigate him wouldn’t have taught him anything; he would have called me the crazy one. Either way, I let his long white fingers rest there on my skin for a moment, warm and clammy like some kind of slug.
Soon enough, there came the clicking of Madeline’s heels down the steps and Lincoln flitted his hand away. He didn’t act as though anything funny had transpired once Madeline reentered, just strode to her and laced an arm around her waist. Call me naïve, but I was stunned at this whiplash swap of allegiance—for a moment I wondered whether I hadn’t dreamed up the whole exchange. Right away, Lincoln started to flap his jaw about how hard he’d worked on the show, how certain he was the work would sell, blahblahblah. I turned and fixed myself a second cup of sangria.
Not long after, a new voice entered the room, an older, suited fat man at the door. “Another excellent show, Lincoln, I can tell already.”
Lincoln forced a laugh, but before he moved to his friend he grabbed me at the elbow and whispered, “Should anyone ask, tell them your mother is at home painting. They’ll like that.” Once he worked a smile back onto his face, he set off toward the man in the door.
No clue what else to do, I made to follow Lincoln, but before I could, Madeline caught my eye and said, “Don’t mind Lincoln. He’s always overeager before his openings.”
It seemed for a second that I might get to plot myself beside Madeline and evade Lincoln’s jittery energy for a while. Soon enough, though, he called me over and introduced me to the suited man, who squeezed my hand and gruffed out how glad he was Lincoln had discovered such a fine new artist as momma.
Over the next several minutes, this interaction became routine as more and more of Lincoln’s friends and customers filled the room. As he hobnobbed among the crowd, Lincoln kept me tethered to his side, introducing me to each person through the door as Cora Aiken’s real life daughter. Reactions to this varied from politely disinterested to downright gobsmacked—some folks gawked and tossed praise my way, praise not meant for me but that I accepted regardless. It felt uncouth to say thanks for so many compliments aimed at momma and not me, but I didn’t want to be rude. One older woman in a charcoal pencil skirt asked the million-dollar question, the one Lincoln had prepared me for: “And why couldn’t your mother be here tonight?”
I hesitated for a moment. I thought maybe I should look to Lincoln for support, but I didn’t think I could handle his eager little face just then. “She’s at home,” I said. “Painting.”
Lincoln was right: the lady beamed when she heard that, showed teeth and all.
It was probably true, what I’d said, but the satisfied smirk Lincoln tossed me once the woman moseyed toward a painting made me regret saying it—suddenly I felt more like a prop than a guest. As if in answer, my stomach churned a little in my gut and I stole off from Lincoln, told him I needed more booze.
By now there must have been twenty, thirty people crammed between the gallery walls. The buzz of their dozen conversations hovered in the air: old friends seeing each other for the first time in ages, here to discuss Lincoln’s latest discovery. I brushed against the linens and wools of their dress clothes as I worked my way through a cluster of folks blocking the snack table, holding up a finger as an excuse when someone tried to question me about momma. By my Kentucky standards, it veered on rude to shunt off like this, but I knew a second of quiet would do me good.
At the table, I armed myself with more sangria and leaned, alone, against the wall. I allowed myself to wonder what the hell I was doing in a place like this—not because I felt out of place at all, simply because I didn’t like it here. I sipped from my cup and, from the corner, picked up snatches of the surrounding talk:
“The brush strokes are so raw, so visceral—there’s a lived-in quality you can’t fake.”
“I haven’t seen subject matter like this so well depicted by an outsider since Sudduth. I’m glad for rural life to get more attention.”
“What I love about them is how apparent it is that the artist loves them.”
Myself, I still didn’t get it, quite. I topped off my sangria and stepped to the nearest painting, a blooming Palace sunrise shining pinks and yellows onto a church, outside of which stood a single girl in the weeds, so naively rendered she was only a notch above stick figure by my estimation. Against my better judgment, I tried to will myself to see what Lincoln and his customers saw in momma’s work, tried to focus in on the brush strokes and find beauty there. Try as I might to fire up some newfound appreciation, none came.
“That’s my favorite one of the whole show.”
This voice too emerged from the crowd, but I recognized it straight away as Madeline’s. She sidled up beside me, nursing her own cup of sangria above one crossed arm. She regarded first me and then the painting with the tip of her tongue teethed between her lips.
“How come?” I said.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Now, I never was one to embarrass easy, but something about the frankness with which Madeline said this made me avert my eyes and fuss with the hem of my shirt. “Art never really was my thing,” I said. “Before all this I never figured anyone would give momma’s work a second glance.”
“You don’t have to be an art critic to see what I mean,” Madeline said with a snicker. She lifted a finger from her cup and gestured toward the far edge of the painting. “The girl,” she said. “She looks like you.”
The girl was a rounded off blot of pink paint with a couple of pigtails of enamel black hair. Her features were etched in with a pencil, difficult to see, but pudgy and easygoing enough that I could, in fact, see the resemblance. Still I saw no beauty in the work, but I warmed at the recognition anyhow. Maybe the likeness was intentional, maybe it wasn’t, but I decided then and there that this was my favorite painting I’d ever seen come from momma, and knew I’d tell her so when next I saw her.
Madeline must’ve seen something shift in my face because once I’d ogled the painting for long enough she said, “Your mother is smart, you know. Artists only paint things they really love, things they find beautiful.”
Somehow I didn’t think that was quite the point, but I didn’t have it in my heart to tell Madeline. Instead I said, “Cheers to that,” and we tapped the rims of our cups together. As soon as I touched the plastic to my lips Lincoln stepped between me and Madeline so suddenly I had to use my wrist as a stopper to keep sangria from pouring out my nose.
He stretched a finger in the direction of two paintings across the room, obscured some by the scads of admirers. On each title card shined a newly drawn red dot, large and bright enough to spot at a distance. “A red dot means it’s sold,” Lincoln said, the vapor of his breath thick and fruity up close.
How wonderful, I told him, or something like it. Really I didn’t know how to react—it was getting to be uncomfortable seeing momma get all this attention. Lincoln, with a grin, tightened his skinny tie knot before darting off to some other customer, leaving me alone again with Madeline. Her mouth was knotted, not quite a grimace, not quite a grin. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s just looking for any excuse to talk to you.”
Madeline told me that she was done for the evening, ready to retire upstairs, and then gave me a hug and promised breakfast in the morning. When I turned from her I found myself again among the crowd of people—strangers, I should say. Over the course of the evening I’d caroused myself in enough sangria that I had, by now, loosened into drunkenness. I was ready, then, when one by one people began to jockey for my attention.
One eager couple begged a story off me, just a little something from momma’s life in Palace, they said. The room quieted as I dredged up an old memory from girlhood. Back when daddy was still alive, I told them, the three of us used to take walks along the edges of the neighbors’ farmland at night, after dinner. Just the three of us under the moon, I said, no one else’s eyes on us. The walks were always daddy’s idea, and stopped once he died. I recounted to the crowd how I used to watch from behind as daddy would try to grab at momma’s hand as he walked beside her, and how she’d always swat his hand away with her fingers. It had never occurred to me that this detail might be funny, but a shimmer of laughter passed over the crowd once I finished telling it. At the back of the room, Lincoln gave me an overeager thumbs-up. I felt my face redden. A couple more red dots cropped up not long after. I drank more sangria.
As the evening wore on, the jug on the corner table drained of liquid until the fruit inside was limpid and bare, shiny in the light. The gallery drained too, of people, until I found myself alone with momma’s paintings. Thanks, I reckon, to the sangria, it took me a moment to notice that even Lincoln had disappeared. I stumbled to the doorway to search for him, but the whole place was empty. Lincoln showed up in a minute, my backpack hooked over his shoulder so that I assumed, for a moment, he was about to kick me out, dissatisfied with my evening’s performance.
“Allison,” he said as he hopped the final two steps. “My dear, you were extraordinary. This was my best opening in years.”
“What’s with the bag then?”
With a chuckle, he explained there was no comfortable space for guests in the condo, but that he and Madeline had fixed up the basement to be more than accommodating.
On the other side of the gallery’s rear door, Lincoln showed me into a basement of his own, more organized than momma’s, but no less teeming with art. I lumbered behind him down the staircase, at the bottom of which I came upon Lincoln’s tall wooden shelves. They canopied across every bit of wall space, brimming with chipped-up wooden sculptures and scores of crude paintings and drawings framed up real nice.
“Why so much art?” I said.
“I’m a collector. It’s my job to collect things.”
Nearby was an unfolded cot with a wad of bedding on top, upon which Lincoln dropped my backpack. He loosened his tie with a couple of sideways tugs and leaned against a stainless steel washer-dryer unit.
A great thrum of silence vibrated between us. I busied myself by unfurling a sheet across the little cot, but it was no good, I could feel Lincoln’s eyes on me the whole time. Finally I shot a look his way.
“I never asked,” he said, “why you posted that photo of Cora online.”
My lips all winey now, I said, “I figured it was time for the things momma made to get some attention, is all.”
“Well, look at how much attention you brought her tonight.”
I didn’t have time to consider whether this effort had been worth a damn before Lincoln took a step my way. The light fixture behind him blinded me a little, left sunny spots of yellow around all of Lincoln’s edges. When only a foot separated us, he stared down at me and whispered how glad he was to have me there. Before I could so much as formulate a response, he yanked me by a belt loop until our bodies pressed together, his eyes lit up like twin suns behind those rimless glasses of his. All that sangria must have blunted my good sense, I guess, because I didn’t pull away or otherwise rebuff his approach. Drunk as I was, it felt good to have his eyes on me, and better when his mouth was on mine.
I was a fair deal shorter than him, so to compensate he spun me around and lifted me onto the dryer, where my legs dangled around his waist. He slithered his belt out its loops so that his trousers pooled around his shiny shoes. From that point forward, he didn’t waste any time, even when perhaps he should’ve. Once he got my pants and socks off me, he tried right away to squeeze himself into me—men can be as blind and as eager as field moles, can’t they?—until I slowed him and spit on the spot where our genitals met. After that he slid his modest cock inside me and leaned in close. He gave my neck a few nubbly kisses, making sounds like a rat gnawing through drywall. I tried to buck him into a steady rhythm, really I tried, but he was determined to bounce against me in whichever way he could muster. One overeager thrust dislodged a stack of empty, wooden picture frames wedged between the washer and dryer—two or three of them clacked against the hardwood with a report like that of a hammer, another blight to my focus.
Really I wanted to enjoy myself, but Lincoln didn’t make it easy. When I peered over his shoulder at a carving of a bird mid-flight and tried to think only of the pleasant friction between my legs, his weird noises brought me right back to earth. Let’s get this over with, I decided. I let my eyes wander across the room. Encircling us from every corner was Lincoln’s collection, all the art he for whatever reason felt inclined to trade in. At the bottom of one shelf I spotted some unframed canvases of momma’s, leftovers, notched between a thick metal rack. I could only see the sides of the canvases, but I’d spent so many years alongside those paintings that it was no trouble to pick them out among the crowded field—they were close as family. Even the barest glimpse of them was enough to snip the tether between me and Lincoln that drunkenness had theretofore allowed.
I scooted away from him until he plopped out of me, felt the dryer buttons jam into my back. He waddled back some too, his pants at his ankles still. The more I took in the sight of him the more I felt amused more than anything. He looked, after all, ridiculous, boyish even. His collar was damp now with sweat, and under it his chest puffed up and down from his labored breathing. Above his slouched shoulders, all the features of his face had gone florid from alcohol, or exertion maybe, and his expression disassembled to show only hurt and confusion. Most ridiculous of all, though, was his softening cock, from the tip of which hung a spindly thread of ejaculate. It dangled for a moment before it snapped off and landed on one of the fallen picture frames. And I’m sorry, I know it’s not polite, but something in me clicked, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
