“Is it okay that you’re not at work?”
“Totally. I didn’t leave Austin in charge this time,” he said, flashing me a grin. “Actually, things are finally pretty much running like clockwork. I hate saying that out loud. It’s like an invitation to drop a piano on my head.”
“Why?” I ducked underneath the drooping arms of an unruly forsythia bush that was encroaching on the sidewalk. I could already hear the buzz and music from down on The Row. It was funny—I’d always avoided street festivals, fearing the noise and the crowds, but here I found myself almost dancing toward the sound, eager to be part of it. Eager to be part of something, someplace that wanted me.
“It’s just such an unstable industry. Restaurants fail all the time, staff quit in the middle of a shift—it’s notoriously difficult to find good help, if you’ll forgive the expression.”
“Don’t apologize. My mother says it all the time,” I laughed. “Anyway, you seem great to work for, so I’m sure they’ll keep you around.”
“Well, thanks. It makes it much easier to have great employees if you’re a good boss. Short answer: they’ll be fine for a while. What about you? How goes the great moving adventure?”
“It’s going. She finally had an appraiser and an antiques dealer over, so they’re clearing some things out of the house. It’s incredible how much stuff there is.”
“She’s lived there for what, almost fifty years? That’ll happen. My parents are still in the house I grew up in. We joke that when they die, we’re just going to have to burn it down. It would be easier than cleaning it out.”
I pictured our condo in fifty years, when it would still feel empty. Phillip had an almost clinical intolerance for clutter, or anything he thought of as clutter. More than once I had left a book or some papers on a table only to come home and find he had recycled them as if they were trash. No matter how many times that place was redecorated, it would never be anything other than clean and bare.
“It’s amazing the things we’ve been cleaning out. I told you I found all my grandmother’s journals, which are amazing, and there’s a trunk full of books that have to be from the Civil War. Plus, of course, my Leif Garrett record collection, so clearly, treasures from throughout the ages.”
“I sincerely hope the appraisers appreciate the value of those records.”
“They’ll go for millions at Sotheby’s, I’m sure. Along with my vast collection of art works.”
“Have you been painting again?” We reached a narrow point of the sidewalk, where a tree’s roots had buckled the pavement, and he stepped back, letting me move ahead of him and then catching up a few steps later. It felt strange walking beside him—though he wasn’t much taller than I was, he was broad and had a comforting presence. Phillip was a greyhound, all sleek lines and delicate bones. Henry was more like a bulldog, wide and solid and comforting.
“Yes. How can you tell? The rosy glow of artistic achievement?”
“Well, that and the paint in your hair.”
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed, patting at my head, feeling for a stiff spot. For all my bathroom ministrations, I might as well have been a hobo, just wandered in off the streets. “Sorry. You’re always catching me looking like a slob. I don’t look at myself in the mirror a lot. Am I totally covered in it?” I checked my arms and saw a smudge that looked like I’d rubbed against some wet paint after I’d wiped my brush on my apron.
“No apologies necessary. I’m just going to pretend I’m hanging out with a famous artist.”
“Ah, I’m not an artist. I mean I was, years ago, I thought I would be. But I stopped.”
“Why?”
“That,” I said, whistling out a breath, “is the question of the day. I’ve been reading my grandmother’s journals, you know? And she really wanted to be a writer, but her mother was dead set against it. And I don’t know how much of that was the time, like women shouldn’t be having careers in general, or how much of it was the arts in particular, or what, but I got that message too, that art was a waste of time. My parents were practical people.”