After Lacy went home, Gen waited a while for Kate to come out. When she didn’t, Gen went downstairs to her apartment and slept restlessly. She felt unsettled—things weren’t right in her world if her friends were unhappy with her—but she also felt a renewed sense of determination. She couldn’t let her friends’ feelings get in the way of the things she needed to do for herself and her career.
Kate and Rose would come around. And if they didn’t … Well. They would if they cared about her, and that was all there was to it.
Chapter Six
It didn’t take long. The next morning, Gen was just dragging herself out of bed when she heard a gentle knock at her door and found Kate standing there holding two mugs of coffee.
“I brought you caffeine,” Kate said, looking sheepish. “Can I come in?” It was still early, and a heavy fog on the ground made everything look soft and gauzy. The morning was chilly, and Kate was wearing flannel pajama pants and an oversized UCLA hoodie.
“Sure.” Gen stepped back to let her inside. “Jackson go to work already?”
“No, he’s still asleep. He had a late night at the restaurant.”
They went into Gen’s bedroom/living room, and Gen turned up the gas fireplace to ward off the morning chill. She sat cross-legged on her bed, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and reached out for the coffee mug. Kate handed it to her, and Gen took a satisfying sip. “Thanks.”
“Gen, look, I'm sorry about how I reacted last night.” Kate looked miserable. “I am. I know you have to think about your career, and I know Cambria isn’t exactly the center of the universe. It’s just … If you go, I’m really going to miss you.” She sat on the bed next to Gen, and Gen squeezed her knee.
“I know. I’ll miss you too. And Rose and Lacy. God, I don’t know what I’ll do without you guys. But …” She gathered her thoughts. “I kind of came here in the first place to run away from my problems. You know? And now …”
“Now it’s time to face them.”
“Yeah.”
“I get that,” Kate said, nodding. “I hate it like hell, but I get it.”
“And anyway … you don't really need me anymore. Now that you have Jackson.” She’d been thinking it for months, and she’d hinted at it the morning after Kate’s party, but it had taken her this long to come out and say the words to Kate. She braced herself for Kate’s reaction.
“What?” Kate looked at her as though Gen had lost her mind. And maybe she had. “What makes you think that just because I’m in a relationship, I don’t need my best friend anymore?”
Tears came to Kate’s eyes, and Gen immediately felt guilty for having said it. She knew she was being ridiculous.
Gen put a hand on Kate’s knee. “I’m sorry. It’s just … I’m happy for you. Really. But you’ve got this … this life now. And I want a life, too.”
“Okay.” Kate nodded. “Okay. But I do still need you. I’ll always need you.”
They sat in front of the fire and drank their coffee.
“There are phones. There are planes,” Gen offered.
“Right.” Kate nodded again. “There are.”
“And Skype. There’s definitely Skype.”
They sat there, and Gen thought some more about how that would be, how she would cope without Kate and Rose and Lacy in the giant, relentless world of New York.
In the gallery that day, Gen thought some more about her artist-in-residence program. Now that she had the detail of lodging worked out, there were the two simple matters of who would be the artist, and how she was going to pay for it.
She had the answer to the first question—or, at least she hoped she did. The abstract artist from Chicago whose work she’d tried to sell to the McCabes would be perfect. Gordon Kendrick’s work was raw, emotional, expressive. And he hadn’t been discovered yet, not really. He was getting a little bit of attention—Gen had heard of him, after all—but not enough. Gen had good intuition regarding this sort of thing, and her intuition told her Kendrick was a caterpillar inside his cocoon, and when he came out, shook out his wings and started to fly, his work was going to be amazing—and potentially very expensive. If she could ally herself with him now, get her name and his linked, she could capitalize on his eventual success.
But she’d have to get him to say yes to her proposal. And to do that, she’d have to make that proposal attractive. Which meant she’d have to pay for all or part of his stay. While many artist-in-residence programs asked for the artist to contribute to or even fully pay the cost of lodging, Gen didn’t want to do that. She wanted to woo him.
Sitting behind her desk in the main room, she looked over her income and expenses, her expected sources of revenue, and the quote Ryan had given her for rental of the cottage and barn space. He’d said he could come down on the rent if she booked the place for a full five-month term. But he hadn’t said how much he could bring down the price. She decided to reduce the rate he’d given her by ten percent, and work with that figure. That seemed safe.
The last deal she’d done for the McCabes had been lucrative, and had given her a good cushion in her business accounts. She could use some of that money for Kendrick. But that wouldn’t get her all the way there.
Inspired, she thought again of the McCabes. They had more money than they knew what to do with. If she could find a way to appeal to their narcissism, maybe she could persuade them to sponsor the program. She had the skills to do it. Appealing to people’s narcissism was ninety percent of what she’d done at McIntyre’s gallery in New York.
She got on the phone and made an appointment to meet the McCabes for another lunch, and began writing up a plan.
“You’re gonna do what?” Orin asked, peering at Ryan through eyes squinting with skepticism.
“I’m gonna rent the guest house. We talked about this, Dad. When I fixed the place up, we talked about how it would make a good rental, bring in some extra income.”
“Yeah, but I thought you were gonna rent it to a regular tenant or a vacationer or some damn thing. Now you tell me you’re gonna rent it to an artist.” He said the word artist the same way he might have said prostitute or meth dealer. In Orin’s mind, the latter two were probably more useful.
“Genevieve Porter’s gallery is going to rent it for a visiting artist. I don’t see what the difference is if it’s that or some vacationer.”
The two of them were in the barn—the new barn—checking out a heifer that had been showing decreased appetite and poor coordination. They’d culled her from the herd until they could figure out what was going on. The barn was still chilly with the crisp morning air, but the sunlight slanting through the windows was quickly warming it up. The place smelled like hay and cow shit—two smells as familiar to Ryan as the scent of his own skin.