“Okay,” Grace said.
“But I thought it was settled, and I went downstairs to paint.”
She swallowed.
“And he came downstairs about an hour later to argue with me. I heard him coming, and I moved the courthouse in front of the painting. But as he was talking, he was looking at the paint.”
“The paint.”
“The pink fucking paint on my palette. He saw it, Grace. He saw the paint, saw the courthouse, saw that it was bone dry, and pulled it forward and saw the other thing.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Tell him? I didn’t have to tell him anything. He knew. He knew I’d never painted any bowls of flowers before. He knew it didn’t look like my stuff at all. He just knew.”
“Exactly what did you tell him?”
“He told me that I was copying something from the Wynne House, and he knew—guessed—that it was your idea.”
Greg. She wanted to choke him with his own hubris, just ball it up and shove it into his throat.
Riley swallowed. “So I told him we broke up. Are breaking up.”
“What?”
“He said he’s never trusted you, and that you had brainwashed me, and I can’t just fuck everyone else over, and I—I told him the painting was my idea, that I’d been working on it, and then I showed it to you and you freaked out, and we had a big fight, and we’d been having a lot of problems anyway, and this just made it clear that we weren’t—that you were moving out.”
“What the fuck, Riley? Why would you say that?”
“He caught me off guard. I said the first thing that—”
“That was the first thing?”
“You’ve never made up something stupid when you got cornered? Look, I fucked up. I shouldn’t have been working when they were home. I should have had something to say in case this happened. But it’s going to be fine, okay? We just have to pretend we broke up. It’s three weeks, Grace. Three weeks. Then the rest of our lives.”
“Why can’t we just switch the paintings now and get out of here?”
“I’m not finished yet,” he said. “Jesus, it’s not a coloring book.”
“You’re the worst liar,” she said, and then she realized he might be lying to her. He never had before, but then, how would she know?
“Yeah,” Riley said. “But Greg believed me.”
? ? ?
Grace could not bear to ask her parents if she could come back home, or even to tell them. She sneaked into her childhood bedroom to sleep that night. “Riley and I are going through some stuff,” she told her mother the next morning, after she’d clutched her chest and yelped in fright at the sight of Grace coming out of the bathroom. “It’s just a few weeks, until I go to Prague.”
The next day, she went back to collect her things. Riley was at school. Greg leered at her on the stairs, and she swore she saw in his eyes some perverse triumph. Grace’s disgust with Riley made her role as his bitter ex easier to play.
The storm door slammed on her ankles as she shoved her big wheeled suitcase out the front door. She could almost feel the neighbors watching. When she was nearly to the corner, the suitcase lurching over the fat cracks in the sidewalk, she heard the door slam again. Alls ran up behind her.
“We broke up,” she spat. “Ask him.” She yanked her suitcase forward.
Riley called her that night and she didn’t answer. His messages pleaded with her to talk to him and promised that everything could still work out. But that was impossible. She’d collapsed every possibility except the one in which she and Riley ran away alone, and now she and Riley could not run away. They could never rely on Greg to keep the painting a secret. She thought of the plan as she had made it, as they had made it just between the two of them, and how simple and clean it had been, and theirs alone. And then he had passed it around—twice!—to his friends, and now it was ruined, a soggy, dirty blunt that she wouldn’t touch with anything but a bleach rag. They could have it.
She had never thought about splitting up, but he had, obviously. Why else would that have been the first story to leap to his mind?
By the end of the second day, her voice mail was full and he couldn’t leave her any more messages. He showed up at her parents’ house and banged on the door, first demanding, then pleading, and then demanding again. She sat in her desk chair with her arms crossed and let him talk. Her mother knocked on the door and asked them to keep it down; the boys were trying to go to bed. She said that was fine, Riley was just leaving.
She had come to despise his arrogant halo. He was a youngest child, accustomed to forgiveness. In the face of Grace’s doubt, he did not reassure; he condescended, as if her agreement was something he owned outright.
? ? ?
Grace’s twin brothers, now ten, regarded her suspiciously, like a cousin visiting from the branch of the family with a different religion. Aiden accidentally kicked a ball into her room and retrieved it as if he’d kicked it into the neighbor’s yard and Grace were the Doberman on the chain. Her mother offered her a stack of clean towels with a tight smile that seemed to say she had predicted this. Grace’s mother probably thought Riley had dumped her. Grace hadn’t known she could feel so livid and so limp with defeat at the same time.
That afternoon, after she had run and showered, she was eating yogurt alone at her parents’ kitchen table, doing the newspaper crossword and watching her wet hair drip on the comics, when Alls drove up in his old blue Buick. The weather was warm enough now to have the windows open, and she heard the sound of the motor idling at the curb, and then the engine shutting off.
He’d never been to her parents’ house. She met him at the front door.
“Hey,” he said. “A minute?”
“Hi, yeah.” Her voice was off pitch. She didn’t want to let him in, but he stood there, waiting. She stepped back and he came in and stood with his hands in his front pockets.
“How are you?” he asked, too casually, and then he looked at the floor. “I just meant how are you, how’s it going, you know.”
“It’s hard,” she said flatly. She wanted him with her whole self, from the prickly hot soles of her feet up to her temples.
“You’ll be fine. I know it. He knows it.”
“How is he?” she asked.
“Depends on who you ask,” he said. “He acts like he’s been born again.”
“Ah,” she said, vaguely stung.
“I mean that in the lunatic sense,” he added quickly. “He’s like a hyper kid, tearing around, can’t slow down.”
“That doesn’t sound like him.”
“He’s in shock. He’s headed for a crash.” Alls chewed his lip and stared down at the potted shrub in front of him. “That’s why I’m here, to talk to you about that. This Wynne bullshit.”
No one was home. “You want anything to drink?”
“Water.”
She led him into the kitchen, pushing aside the tent the twins had pitched on the carpet to catch their soccer balls when it was raining outside. She poured him a glass of water and sat down behind her yogurt and newspaper.
“You weren’t really going to do it,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“I didn’t think it would go this far,” he said, and for a lost moment, Grace forgot that he was talking about the Wynne House.
“Greg always does the dumbest shit he can think of,” he went on, “and we all laugh about it. But Riley’s usually smarter.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going on in his head.”
“He thinks this is going to work. He thinks he had a perfect idea. Stealing paperweights and selling them for millions of dollars.”
The fork in the road: Play dumb or don’t. She hadn’t thought Alls would come to her. She’d thought they had both chosen Riley, his good opinion.
“He said it would be a good project for me,” she said. “Identifying them, since I was so bored. I thought he was just trying to get me out of his hair.”