Together, they carried the empty cardboard boxes back to the basement, and while they were down there, Patty noticed the corner where all of Markie’s artwork sat, still boxed up, waiting to be loaded onto the moving truck.
“You mind if I . . . ?” Patty asked, a hand on one of the boxes.
“Go ahead.”
“Whoa,” Patty said, lifting out a painting. “Mother and girl. Or Madonna, right? That’s what they call her? You don’t see that too often, do you? Isn’t she usually holding a boy?”
Markie smiled. “She’s always holding a boy. Can you believe that’s supposed to be one? The artist got carried away with the curls, I guess, and ended up with a very feminine-looking boy. That’s why I got it for such a good price, because it’s a reject. I was in this gallery looking for some things for the nursery after we learned Jesse’s gender, and that’s the first thing I saw. I bought it anyway, since it was marked down to almost nothing, and I thought, Why not? We might have a girl next. We didn’t, obviously, and I never hung that one. I didn’t get one for Jesse’s nursery, either. I ended up going with a Noah’s Ark theme and stopped looking for a proper Madonna. Anyway, the rest”—she swept her hand over all of the boxes marked ARTWORK—“were all hanging in our old house. That one’s lived in a box since the day I bought it. Kind of a shame, now that I think of it.”
Patty held the painting in both hands, extending her arms so she could admire it. “Reject or not, it’s beautiful. I love how the gold in the baby’s hair is the same as the gold in the frame. The whole thing is just so . . . hopeful, isn’t it? I don’t know if that’s the word, but it just kind of reaches out and grabs you and makes you stare at it.”
Markie nodded. It was what had drawn her to the painting—how joyful it was, not only in its color but in its mood. Since she had first laid eyes on the painting, she had thought of it anytime she heard the word radiant. She said the same to Patty.
“Radiant,” Patty repeated, still gazing at the painting. “Yeah, that’s the word for it. Not reject Madonna. Radiant Madonna.” She set it gently back in the box and gestured toward the rest of Markie’s collection of paintings. “This kind of thing—real art—you don’t run across in ‘curb retail’! And I’d never spend good money on things like this because Carol’d sell it all out from under me in a flash. Not that she’d appreciate the real value and ask enough for it.”
“Oh, none of it’s worth anything,” Markie said. “It’s all just cheap stuff I’ve collected over the years. I think the Madonna one was ten bucks.”
Patty lifted the picture out of the box again, gazed at it for a moment, and then put it back, patting its gold frame. “Well,” she said, turning to the next painting, “you’ve got some real nice things. Valuable or not.”
“Do you want to hang Radiant Madonna in your room?” Markie asked. She pointed upstairs to the second-floor guest room.
“Oh no, I couldn’t—”
“Really. I mean, if it doesn’t hang on the wall of a room shared by a mother and daughter, where else is it going to go?”
“Well, that’s a fair point.”
“I have picture hooks,” Markie said. “In that smaller box by your right foot. There, at the top, in that envelope. And there’s a little hammer in there, too.”
“Organized,” Patty said.
“Sometimes,” Markie said. “Not lately. Hence all the artwork still in boxes in the basement.”
She refrained from adding that Frédéric had been willing to hang it all months ago and she wouldn’t let him. And then she thought, What the hell? It was Patty she was talking to.
“Actually,” she said, “lack of organization isn’t the reason it’s all still down here. Frédéric was all set to cover the walls the day we moved in. But I didn’t feel like . . . I don’t know, committing.”
“To the bungalow?”
“To anything,” Markie said. “Including myself.”
“Yeah,” Patty said. “I got that feeling from you.”
Markie reached a hand up to touch her hair.
“I didn’t mean outward stuff,” Patty said, making a face as if to say, Who cares about that kind of thing? “I just meant sometimes you seem . . . not entirely here.” Markie bit her lip, and Patty quickly added, “Look, you’re not the first person who’s wanted to check out of your life for a while, you know. And as far as I can tell, you’ve picked about the least bad way to do it.
“Believe me. I live with someone who’s chosen some pretty dangerous ways to disappear from what she doesn’t like. And not just dangerous. Expensive. Not to mention illegal. If the worst you’ve done is hole up on your own rather than throwing parties on the patio and inviting the entire neighborhood over, or kept your paintings all boxed up in the basement instead of decorating the place with them . . .”
“That’s not the worst I’ve done.”
Patty put a hand on her hip. “Oh, really? So what, then? You get stoned and let your grandbaby crawl out of the apartment? You fight with your dealer and have him push you down the stairs so you end up in the ER? Steal money from your kid? Get arrested?”
“Nothing that bad.”
“Then there’s no reason for you to stand there looking like you’re sorry. There’s nothing worth apologizing for. To me, to yourself, or to anyone else.” Patty locked eyes with Markie and added, “Including that boy of yours.”
Markie had made some assumptions about Patty long before they had ever spoken, the kinds of things one (or at least, one from the Saint Mark’s circle) concludes about a woman who wears skintight jeans and low-cut blouses, who smokes a pack a day and lets other people raise her child. One of those assumptions was that when Patty spoke, all that would come out of her mouth was poor grammar and a cigarette-induced rasp, possibly a string of expletives. Nothing, certainly, of real substance.
She had been right about the hoarseness and the grammar. Wrong about the swearing, and so, so wrong about the lack of substance. And she knew, suddenly, with absolute certainty, that Patty knew this. That she knew how she had been judged in Markie’s eyes, knew that women like Markie expected nothing of value from her. That she had figured out long ago what the assumptions were behind the looks she got, and what names were being used behind her back.
“God,” Markie said, “I’ve been so—”
But Patty shook her head. “You heard me. Nothing worth apologizing for.” She reached into the small box for the packet of picture-hanging nails and the hammer, tucked the Radiant Madonna under her arm, and headed for the basement stairs. “It’s not how we got here,” she said as she went. “Or even that we are here. It’s where we go from here.”
A few minutes later, Markie stood smiling contentedly at the kitchen counter, alternately mixing ingredients for the casserole and wiping tears from her eyes as the tap tap tap of the little hammer sounded from the floor above.
Chapter Thirty-Two