The Talented Miss Farwell Read online

  “Whoa, whoa.” The man from the desk was at her side, gently but immediately taking the painting away, his face dark with displeasure.

  Becky was caught off guard. “You can’t hold them?”

  “No, you can’t ‘hold’ them. Christ.”

  Well, she hadn’t known. “All right, I’m sorry.” Her impulse had been only to more closely examine it, the way you picked up a single high-heeled pump off the shelf at Rudy’s. “It’s for sale, isn’t it? Wait—why is it for sale? This is a museum.”

  “Yes, but we include gallery sales in our rotating exhibit twice a year. If you want, you can sign up for our newsletter.” Still holding the frame to his chest, the man nodded toward the front desk.

  “Can I . . . Please. Just a bit closer?” Becky held up her hands and then clasped them behind her back.

  A flash of amusement, then the man extended his arms. Becky hung her face over the painting as if steaming her pores. The man started talking, although she wished he wouldn’t, about the deceased artist, his stellar career that flew under the radar, his influences included Hopper, of course, but also the modern gestural work of . . .

  Becky tried to memorize every inch of the canvas, knowing with a sick sadness that her time was running out. She had to get back to her father.

  At last, having finished his spiel, the man carefully rehung the painting. Tactfully stepped back—but not far—so Becky could pick up her purse and leave.

  Becky gave one last regretful look, then began to turn away. Stopped, her eye caught by a small circular sticker next to the painting on the wall. “Hey. What’s this?” She tapped the number printed on the sticker.

  “That’s the price of the piece.”

  $540. Becky’s heart started pumping. For a moment the nearly matching figures, here and printed on the check buried in her office drawer, seemed manifested straight from her own mind. Don’t be crazy, she told herself. She waved at the man without looking at him and hurried for the door.

  Waiting in line at First Federal, Becky thought about the Pierson Disaster, how most of the town had unreasonably blamed the bank for those drownings on the morning of its opening ceremonies, and that a faint hint of guilt and apology still hung in the air, eighty-plus years later. She hoped it might work in her favor.

  It was a late October afternoon, and she was fourth in line along the dusty velvet rope. She’d timed her visit for the afternoon “rush” of storekeepers making deposits before the close of business. She had chosen her outfit just as carefully: new cream-colored boatneck sweater, pulled down over the pinned waistband of a thrift shop jersey skirt one size too big, and her favorite thin-heeled pumps, the ones she knew would tap smartly on the bank lobby’s polished flagstones.

  Now third in line. She smiled back at Mr. Fornet as he touched his baseball cap. Repeated versions of the same old lines with the lounging security guard as she had on every bank visit she’d made in nine months on the job. Weather’s turned. Sure has. With our luck, there’ll be snow by Halloween.

  The teller waved Becky up to the counter for her turn. “Where’s your coat?” she asked.

  Becky made a shiver motion and set the forms and checks on the worn brass surface, a chest-high counter.

  “You’re crazy,” the teller declared. “I even wore mine on a smoke break!” The bank was a long quarter mile down First from Town Hall.

  “I’ll jog back. In my heels.”

  The teller snorted. “Don’t kill yourself for them.”

  Becky had studied this woman for weeks, had chosen her for a certain disdainful quality, a punch-out-and-get-the-hell-out attitude. She didn’t know her name but could picture her at Ladies Night with a group of fellow working girls, voice rising above the hubbub as she held forth on the latest idiocy of her pimpled creep of a manager. Becky leaned an elbow on the counter and watched the woman’s formidable mauve nails detach deposit slips, stamp checks, and tap on the keyboard.

  An ancient fan slowly stirred the air a dozen feet above them. Becky made herself look away from the ring of lit windows lining the balcony, where the manager’s office must be.

  The teller was processing the mistaken refund by now. Becky lounged against the counter and pinned her eyes on the Golden check—receipt separated, $542 added to a list on the teller’s screen, and set to the side in a growing pile. Wait, she told herself. Wait. One agonizing check more and then—

  “Holy crap.” Becky slapped a hand over her eyes. “I can’t believe I spaced on that.”

  “What?”

  Becky reached over to tap the withdrawal form in front of the woman. “Getting that signed!” “Petty cash,” she’d filled out, as neatly as ever.

  The teller picked up the form and studied it. “You’d think they’d put you as a signatory by now.”

  Becky motioned for it impatiently. “I gotta run back up there before—” She glanced up at the clock and the teller mirrored her action, then winced.

  “I’m screwed,” Becky moaned. “I was supposed to get it yesterday, but . . .”

  “Nah,” the teller said, in a low voice. She scrawled something along the bottom of the slip and detached its receipt, putting the original on top of the pile of checks. As she opened the cash drawer, Becky whispered over the counter, “You’re saving my ass.”

  “No worries.” The teller gave her a smirking wink that said it all: us against them. She started to hand over the piles of receipts to Becky, including the envelope of cash, and then paused, studying the amount. “Five hundred, huh. What are they going to do, go crazy on toilet paper and Sanka?”

  Becky leaned in. “Hookers and blow.” The woman laughed outright and gave her the money.

  Thank you, Becky mouthed, and backed away from the counter.

  Her new evening routine, that next month, was to switch off the overhead and turn on her bedside lamp. You didn’t need to look directly at a painting, she found. In fact, sometimes it was better to move around in its proximity while pretending you had forgotten it was there. They weren’t the same, but she remembered the same delicious charge she’d once gotten from slowly, so slowly, pulling her trig text out of her locker while Cal Hartman eyed her. Turning a few pages, cocking a hip. Replacing that book, stretching up to reach a notebook instead. Her back to him, her whole body covered in sparkly invisible ions from his gaze. (Cal Hartman himself, though: bleh.)

  Tonight was Thanksgiving, and Becky sat on the front of her bed in a turtleneck sweater and jean skirt, filing her nails. Her insides felt thick and sodden from the three-course “banquet” at the Palace Diner out on Route 4. With her father near silent the whole meal, there was little to do other than eat steadily from the thick white platters of food that covered their booth table: turkey and gravy, potatoes and green beans and two kinds of stuffing. Three slices of pie, one extra because the waitress was fond of Hank and counting on that big holiday tip. Which Becky had added to the bill.

  She filed and burped and waited for the painting to work its magic. The office was closed for the next few days and the streets were full of noisy students home for break, but Becky’s room stayed the same—drafty, scuffed at the baseboards. For a moment doubt flared: not at what she’d done, but why she’d done it. What if it wore off?

  “Daddy?” she yelled, not looking up from her nails. The late-night TV movie was the second Indiana Jones, and she could follow every chase or torture scene by the strangled sounds coming up through the floorboards. “You asleep?” To her surprise, the TV sound cut off, and her father’s heavy steps—same as always, even after the strokes—sounded up the back stairs.

  Becky met him in the hall. “C’mere for a second.” She drew him in and gently settled him on the foot of the bed beside her. “All they did was wrap it in brown paper,” she mused out loud. “Secured it with plain old Scotch tape. I was expecting some big production, like . . . big box, thousands of those Styrofoam peanuts. But no.”

  The actual transaction had taken place in a back office at the
UIUC museum. The female clerk—no sign of that first man—hadn’t blinked when Becky produced her crinkled envelope of cash. Becky had had a whole story plotted out—my grandmother’s seventieth, we all chipped in—but in the moment of truth she forgot it all.

  “I was so dumb,” Becky said to her dad. “She held it out to me and I didn’t even take it at first. I thought maybe someone else was supposed to carry it to the car. And, like, tell me how to transport it.” Or approve her setup, at least. She’d stuffed a lot of pillows in the back seat, including the ones in cornflower print behind them on the bed right now.

  “It won’t bite,” the woman had said, with a dry single laugh, a little impatient. She’d had a cold sore at the corner of her mouth.

  “I know.” But Becky hadn’t even been sure how to hold the thing—flat like a pizza? In front like a shield? In the end she’d seized it any old way, on fire just to get out of there.

  Here with her father, though, she was the expert. She rested a hand on his curved back, on the wool blazer she’d chosen for him tonight, and urged him to appreciate how different it was to have a real painting in the house, why it gave her regular old room a whole new feel. And that he shouldn’t worry about the money. She was doing real well at the office. “Not everyone gets a bonus at the end of the year.” She rubbed the slack muscles along his neck and shoulders.

  “Storm.”

  “No, it’s clear tonight.” But he meant the painting, he was looking into the painting where the background’s slate blue with scrapes of white did lighten to a summer-tornado shade of yellow green.

  “That’s a storm?”

  Did he mean, had she spent five hundred and forty (diverted) dollars on a drawing of a gully washer? “Maybe,” Becky muttered, a bit sulky.

  The woman with the cold sore had insisted on rattling off facts about the artist’s dates, influences, and methods while the painting stood propped on the office easel and Becky crushed the envelope of cash in her lap. I said I’d take it, she wanted to say. Was this a kind of test? Why hadn’t she learned anything about the artist before showing up here?

  “And of course, it’s the silo image itself, both archetypal and reminiscent of the farm in childhood where the artist—”

  “What is?”

  “The silo.” The woman stopped in her presentation. “The subject matter.”

  “Oh. Right.” So that was what you called it, that part. Becky supposed she had registered the shape of a silo in the painting and now that it was mentioned, the forms of a sagging fence and a stand of cypress trees, but these images were somehow only tangentially related to the thing itself. Subject matter, she repeated silently. In all those fevered weeks of acquisition, she hadn’t known what the painting was about.

  Holding her father’s hands, Becky stepped backward to guide him down the hall, then waited outside the bathroom until the flush, then shuffled him to his turned-down bed, where she’d laid out his pajamas. He could take it from there, more or less. She made sure to put his glasses on top of the alarm clock—the one he used to set for 4:40 am—and plug in both night-lights.

  Back in her own room she hurried into her own bed. What did it matter if her father didn’t see what she did in the painting? That old lava lamp on his dresser, that’s what made him smile. Hell, even when he’d been fully with it he never cared about any kind of pictures, never remarked on one that she could remember.

  So why this queasy sadness? She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t give in to the sudden images pressing down on her: no college, no boyfriend, no mother downstairs wiping up the last of the kitchen after tonight’s family feast. Becky rocked herself fiercely and marshalled a barrage of new thoughts like a deck of cards rainbowed out for her mental pleasure.

  There she is in the office, catching up the phone on its first half-ring. Turning in the week’s report a full day early. Overhearing Mr. David say, That new girl’s shaping up to be a real powerhouse. Now she’s slicing through a tangle of invoices, back straight at her own metal desk. Making Mrs. Harris’s day with a pouch of shrimpy kibble for the tabby who lost part of his tail in a garage door mishap. Her neatly labeled record books, her own carton of yogurt in the break room fridge, the good mornings exchanged with everyone, even old Mayor Thomsic if she happened to pass him in the lobby.

  Becky rolled onto her side so she could look at her painting. Hers, it was hers now, and who cared if anyone else recognized its power? Night winds started the cottonwood branch brushing, scraping. She clicked off the light. She lay in bed urging the painting along.

  Go on, go on, change me.

  4

  Pierson

  1984

  Almost 9 pm and the server still hadn’t cleared their entrée plates. Becky knew that her new boss, Karl Price, would insist on ordering a selection of desserts for the table—To share! C’mon, a bite won’t kill you. Then someone would say, All right, I guess I’ll have coffee. Then Karl would insist on a glass of “dessert wine,” something horrible and sweet that nonetheless he’d spend half an hour sipping from and talking about. Who knew that the most tedious part of her promotion to assistant comptroller would be these endless restaurant meals? If you’d told her three years ago she’d get paid to eat steak and laugh at bad jokes, Becky would have said that sounded just fine.

  Karl had a penchant for holding client meetings at restaurants, and by now, just a few months into her new position, they had cycled through all of Pierson’s and most of the surrounding counties’ “fine dining” establishments (steak houses or Italian). Tonight they were back at Mama Sofia’s, where Becky had quietly reminded Karl not to order the fish. So he’d steered all of them, including the two reps from Malten Industries, specialists in municipal wastewater treatment, toward the lasagna. Becky sadly poked at her enormous amount of leftovers. Dad would love it, there was enough for two more meals, but she had a policy of no doggie bags. Karl took food home, and the reps often did, but Becky had her own standards.

  “I hear you have a family business, too,” Bill from Malten said, angling toward her. He’d gamely tried to turn the conversation toward work throughout dinner, even though Karl mostly wanted to opine about the White Sox. “Out on your place?”

  “Yes. Well, sort of.” Becky had almost entirely wound down Farwell Agriculture Inc. She’d stopped taking standing orders last year, stopped insurance, and finally had let go their half a dozen seasonal workers. The inventory was mostly gone by now, as were leftover building materials and pallets and shelving. Every night Becky parked in the shadow of the barn extension and wished they hadn’t taken that on. They still owed nine grand on it, empty and beautifully painted.

  “A lot of times,” Bill said, his voice lower now, “we offer add-on residential or commercial services as a perk. With a town contract. Think of it as a bonus, something to hang on to.”

  Becky nodded tiredly. She hoped he wasn’t going to say cash back or cash benefit or cash anything. This was about the time during every dinner when a rep would try to bribe her, with varying levels of subtlety. At least Bill stayed in his lane. Someone from food services once tried to give her a year’s membership to Weight Watchers because “all the girls loved it.”

  “The council has final decision,” she told Bill. “We’re really just getting to know the people behind the names.”

  “But you make the recommendation,” Bill countered. “Why don’t I have someone come out to your property for a free assessment and a future credit? You can always cash it in later if you don’t—”

  “Excuse me,” Becky said. Often it was the only way. “I need the ladies’.”

  In the hall outside the restrooms she tried her father from the pay phone. It rang eight times and then lapsed into the answering machine message, her own embarrassingly girlish voice. Becky hung up without saying anything—Hank barely acknowledged the machine—and then tried Mrs. Nowak next door. Again, no answer. Did this mean that her neighbor had already gone over to check on her father? Or had Mrs. Nowa
k fallen asleep again, in front of her own TV? For the fiftieth time Becky wished the old biddy would take the twenty dollars she tried to give her, instead of waving it off irritably and claiming no one needed to pay her to do a good turn for a neighbor. The thing was, it was hard to enforce a good turn. When you were paying, you could complain.

  He’d be fine. He almost always was. And surely they were about to wrap up. The Malten people had to drive back to Green County, after all.

  Becky went into the ladies’ to check her lipstick. In the mirror she tugged at her suit jacket so the frayed lining stayed hidden. How would one cash in a wastewater treatment service? she wondered.

  She flicked water at the mirror to obscure her reflection. She could act all high and mighty for not taking bribes, but she’d taken from Pierson, with that doubled check. Acting out like that had been childish, irresponsible. Not to mention incredibly dangerous. Even as she slid back into her seat—plates cleared, finally—Becky breathed a tight little prayer of gratitude, yet again, that she hadn’t been caught. If only she could pay it back, that stupid $542. Even though the town accounts would never actually miss that mistaken refund.

  She would never, never, never again risk so much for so little. A painting. Of a stormy day. In exchange for her job, this promotion, her new office: an actual office! (Shared.) Even these dinners became unbearably precious when viewed in that light. Not to mention the paycheck, which was the only thin wall propped against the bills bombarding their mailbox every week, every day.

  The problem was—and here Becky’s eyes slid automatically around the walls of the restaurant even as she smiled at Karl’s “You didn’t fall in, did you?”—paintings were everywhere. Art was everywhere, once you were awake to it. Not great art, granted, but even the weaker stuff held interest if you looked. These landscapes ringing Mama Sofia’s, for example—fuzzy Mount Vesuvius from a dozen vantage points, each in off-putting shades of muddy brown and fake teal. Each with a perspective error, and a large, cheap-looking, gold-tinted frame.