“Why not?”
But she tells me anyway how she has two people to thank for her artistic talent: some junior high teacher and Bob Ross. I don’t know who Bob Ross is so she tells me. She says that she used to set up her paints and easel before the TV and paint with him. Her sister would tell her to get a life. She’d call her a loser. Her mom would pretend not to hear. She says that she started drawing early on, when she could hide in her bedroom with a coloring book and crayons.
“It’s not bad,” I say. But I’m not looking at her. Or the picture. I’m scraping old caulk from the window. It falls to the deck beside my feet, scraps of the white caulk that build up on the ground.
“How do you know?” she asks. “You didn’t look.”
“I looked.”
“You didn’t,” she says. “I know indifference when I see it. I’ve been staring at it my whole life.”
I sigh and mutter some curse under my breath. Her hands are still covering the picture. “What is it, then?” she asks.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“What’s it a picture of?”
I stop what I’m doing and stare out toward the geese. One by one, they leave. “That,” I say and she gives it a rest. I move onto another window.
“What did you do this for?” she asks, holding up the notebook.
I stop what I’m doing long enough to look. I’m going after that caulk with some brutality and I know what she thinks: Better the caulk than me.
“Why do you ask so many fucking questions?” I snarl and she goes silent. She begins to sketch the sky, low stratus clouds that wander just above the ground. At some point I say, “So I didn’t have to babysit you. So you’d shut up and stay out of my hair.”
“Oh,” she says. She stands up and lets herself back inside.
But it isn’t entirely the truth.
If I wanted her out of my hair I would have bought more rope to tie her to the bathroom sink. If I wanted her to shut up, I would have used duct tape.
But if I wanted to atone, I would have bought her that sketch pad.
*
Growing up, anyone could have guessed that I’d end up this way. I was always getting in trouble. For beating up kids, telling off adults. For failing and skipping classes. In high school the guidance counselor suggested to Ma that she take me to a shrink. She said I had an anger management issue. Ma told her that if she’d been through what I’d been through, she’d be angry, too.
My dad left when I was six. He stayed long enough for me to remember him, but not long enough for him to actually take care of Ma and me. I remember the fights, not just yelling. Hitting each other and throwing things. The sound of breaking glass when I pretended to sleep at night. Doors slamming and four-letter words screamed at the top of their lungs. I remember empty beer bottles and the caps that showed up in his pant pockets long after he claimed he was dry.
I got in fights at school. I told my math teacher to go to hell because he said I’d never amount to anything. I told my high school biology teacher to screw herself because she thought she could help me pass her class.
I didn’t want anyone to give a shit about me.
I found this life by accident. I was washing dishes at some pretentious restaurant in the city. There was the filth of other people’s leftovers on my hands, the scalding hot water as I stacked the clean plates from the conveyor dishwasher. My fingers would burn, my head drip with sweat. All for minimum wage and a share of the waitresses’ tips. I asked if I could get some extra hours. I said I was tight on cash. My boss said to me, “Aren’t we all.” Business was slow, but he knew somewhere I could get a loan. It wasn’t a bank. I thought I could handle it. I’d borrow a little, pay it back the next time I got paid but it didn’t work out that way. I couldn’t even cover the interest. We worked out a deal. Some bigwig owed about ten times as much as me. If I could get him to pay up, we’d be even. So I showed up at his Streeterville home, tied his wife and daughter to their antique dining room chairs and, with a borrowed gun to the wife’s head, watched him withdraw the crisp dollar bills from a family safe hidden behind a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lilies.
I was in.
A few weeks later Dalmar tracked me down. I’d never met Dalmar. I was in a bar minding my own business when he wandered in. I was the new kid on the block, their plaything. Everyone seemed to have something to hold over my head. And so it was out of necessity that when Dalmar claimed some dude had stolen his stuff, I went in to get it. I was paid generously. I could cover the rent. Take care of Ma. Eat.
But with every dollar I earned was also the knowledge that I belonged to someone other than me.