Emerald Windows (2 page)

Nick followed. “Look, I didn’t hire you for this job because of any of that mess. I hired you because you’re talented. I’ve kept up with your work since you left.”

She kept walking

“I saw the windows in the church you did in Columbia. And the door you did at that restaurant in Kansas City.” She stopped, her hand on the door. “You’re doing well, but you could do so much more. My decision to hire you was a business decision; I needed someone with your talent.”

Turning back, Brooke looked up at the old broken glass that skirted the circumference of the ceiling. “I’ve never done anything of this caliber, though.”

“You’ve done plenty of this caliber,” he said. “Maybe just not this size.”

She regarded him with questioning—almost suspicious— eyes. It wasn’t often that she was recognized as an artist. Most people viewed her as an interior decorator of sorts, someone who added life to dull rooms.

“I’ve always wanted to work with you,” Nick said quietly. “Ever since you were in high school and I saw the talent you had. I know we could do something really amazing with these windows.”

“This is the first time I’ve been back to Hayden since—” She glanced up at him, steadied her voice. “Since I graduated. The gossip has had seven years to die down. I don’t know if I can stand to have it start back up again.”

Nick crossed his arms, and she saw him stiffen visibly, as if the subject was growing tedious. “Brooke, seven years can heal a lot of wounds. It’s past time to move on.”

She loathed the fact that her own wounds had not healed. “I need time to think about this,” she said.

He turned away from her, slid his fingers into his front pockets and seemed to consider the wood grain on the dirty pew in front of him. “How much time do you need?” he asked. “I wanted to get started this week. It’ll take months to do this job right, and we haven’t got a day to waste.”

Brooke looked up at the windows again. She had pinned so many hopes on them. A job like this could establish her as a serious stained-glass artist. Her boss and mentor, Mr. Gonzales, had encouraged her to take this job, even though it meant she would be out of the shop for months. He was close to retirement. When he closed the shop she’d worked in since graduating from college, she would have to open her own or work for someone else. These windows might mean the difference between being on her own and being under someone else’s thumb.

Coming back to Hayden had been hard enough. She had rolled into town, bracing herself for the debilitating reminders of what had driven her away. Working with her old art teacher would only open those wounds. “I don’t know,” she said again. “Maybe I can give you an answer tomorrow.”

Nick looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. “All right.”

She started back to the door.

“Brooke?” His voice resonated in the old, dusty sanctuary.

Brooke turned around and saw that the tension in his expression was gone. “Uh-huh?”

“It was good to see you.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was good to see you too, Nick.”

And that was exactly why she couldn’t take the job.

CHAPTER
   

N
ICK WENT BACK TO THE OFFICE
he had taken over for the duration of the renovation and sat down at the desk. Maybe this
was
a mistake. Maybe he was fooling himself to think that hiring her was strictly a professional decision. It
had
been good to see her. She seemed to have grown; in the few minutes their conversation had lasted, she had shown a quiet strength and unwavering will that hadn’t been there before. But she still had that unique, creative style of dressing, with the chains and bracelets that added an artist’s flair to her thrift-shop clothes. He’d watched the rich girls clamor to imitate Brooke in high school, and wealthy women probably envied her style now. Her hair was a little darker, and her eyes still said things she would never have expressed openly.

She’d been seventeen when he’d first seen her, sitting in the front row of his class, working on a sketch of the mangled bicycle he’d placed at the front of the room. The project had been deliberately difficult, and he’d used it to test the students’ skills and talents. Slowly he had
walked up and down the aisles between work stations, commenting on each student’s crude progress…when he had come to her.

It was her work that caught his attention first. The lines of her sketch had been so precise, so accurate, that he doubted he could have captured the bicycle better himself. But something about the drawing had reached out to him. It was the uniqueness of the image…the vision of something fresh in something so used up.

He remembered the way she had looked up at him, embarrassed that he’d been watching her.

“It’s not finished,” she had said, and he’d recognized the apology in her voice.

“It’s good,” he told her. “Have you been studying art for long?”

“Just two years,” she said, meeting his eyes directly. “Mr. Jasper taught me last year, but he didn’t let us get very creative. He was really into precision.”

“You can get as creative as you want in my class.”

Brooke laughed under her breath. “Yeah, I kind of thought you’d feel that way when I saw you,” she said. “Most stuffed shirts don’t own antique hot rods.”

If there was anything that made a friend of Nick, it was complimenting the classic Duesenberg he only brought out of his garage for antique car shows. “You saw my car?”

“I went to the Autofest Car Show last summer,” she said. “I wanted to draw some of the vintage cars. Yours was my favorite.”

He had laughed then, not really caring that others in the room were beginning to listen in. “I’m proud of that car,” he said. “My grandpa left it to me, and there aren’t many like it. It’s a real work of art.”

“Yeah, it is,” Brooke had agreed. “And you’ve taken good care of it. That’s how I knew I’d like your class.”

There had been a lot of pretty young students in his classes that year he’d taught at Hayden High School, and not all had been there because of a burning interest in art. Some of them saw art
as an “easy A.” Others competed for the interest of the new young teacher. But Brooke had been different. Her passion for art had been evident in every assignment she’d completed for him. She had fast become his favorite student.

He’d grown even more amazed when she brought in the sculpture she’d worked on at home for a year, to finish it as her final project for the class. The stone sculpture intrigued him so much that he found himself watching, mesmerized, as the piece came to life. It was the sculpture of two hands—a man’s and a woman’s—joining in a gentle embrace. There was something so tentative about the touch that it had tapped an emotion deep within him. That was what great art did, he’d taught his students. It grabbed you by the heart and didn’t let you go. He hadn’t expected one of his students to have talent that surpassed his own. Captivated by that talent, he’d offered her extra advice, extra lessons, extra help. When they reached the final term of the year, he urged her to enter the sculpture in the statewide competition for an art scholarship at the University of Missouri. The new goal had sent her into a tailspin of nerves and self-doubt.

One day, when she’d stayed after school with another student to work on her project, she had looked up at him with forlorn defeat in her eyes. “I can’t do it,” she said, setting down her chisel. “It’s too ambitious. I should have tried something easier.”

“What do you mean you can’t do it?” he asked. “You’re almost there already.”

“With the woman’s hand,” she said. “But I can’t get the man’s hand right. I don’t know how to capture the texture…the strength.”

Before he’d realized what he was doing, Nick had sat down beside her and offered her his hand. “Here,” he said. “Study mine.”

Brooke’s hand had trembled as she’d taken his hand, and she had studied it as if it were a fragile piece of china that she had no right to touch. “Feel the texture,” he’d said quietly. “Feel the bone structure. The veins. The imperfections. Notice the way the light falls over it, and the contrast of shadows.”

Slowly Brooke had begun to study his hand with the most tentative touch he’d ever experienced. He had tried to separate himself from his emotions as she nervously traced the lines in his knuckles. Then she had turned his hand over, and explored the height of the bones and the cracks in the skin. Her touch had grown less tentative as she stared down at the shadows playing across his palm and the way the light from the window moved across it. Her artist’s eyes had not missed a thing.

Startled by the realization that the emotion he was feeling was not appropriate between a teacher and a student, he finally withdrew his hand. “Now see if that helps,” he’d whispered.

He looked up then and saw the other student staring, as if she’d witnessed something she wasn’t supposed to see.

He realized that Sharon Hemphill, the daughter of the school superintendent, who came from old family money and owned half the town, had clearly misinterpreted what had just happened.

He went to her desk and looked at her project. It was an uninspired mosaic of her favorite pop star, but it looked nothing like him.

“Maybe the eyes are too far apart, Sharon,” he said, hoping to divert her attention.

The chubby girl looked up at him with round, striking eyes. “It looks more like a caricature than a portrait, doesn’t it, Mr. Marcello? Maybe I’m using the wrong medium. My mother saw it the other day and said my talent was more in line with painting on velvet. She suggested Elvis.” She said it as if it amused her, but Nick knew from living in Hayden all his life that nothing the girl ever did could please her mother.

Brooke got up and came over to her. “You can do it, Sharon,” she said. “Look…just take out this piece, and move this around…”

Nick watched with admiration as the piece took on new life. The girl’s pale face brightened. “Wow. That made a huge difference. Thanks.”

“Sure.” Brooke went back to her seat and stared down at her sculpture with deep concentration.

As he might have expected, rumors had begun to fly around the school after that. Sharon Hemphill must have described what she’d seen with an imagination he wished she’d applied to her art work instead. Nick had assured the principal that there was nothing going on—that he’d never even been alone with Brooke, that she was a very gifted student working on the most poignant piece of sculpture he’d seen by an amateur, and that as her teacher, it was his job to guide and encourage her so that she could win the state competition. The principal had chosen to believe Nick.

But that wasn’t the end of the rumors.

Brooke had shown up with her sketch pad at another car show an hour from town, and the Hemphills, Sharon’s parents, had seen her talking to Nick and assumed they had gone there together.

Another time he’d gone into a coffee shop and found her sipping a latte and working on a charcoal drawing. He had joined her for a few minutes—just enough time for two teachers from the school to see them and draw conclusions. Mr. Hemphill, the superintendent, confronted him the next morning with the threat of firing if there was “one more incident.”

Sharon had approached him at lunch, apology dimpled into her face. “Mr. Marcello, I’m so sorry about my parents. Dad was going to fire you today, but I talked him out of it. I know you haven’t done anything wrong, but to my mother, you’re guilty until proven innocent. With her on the school board and my dad being superintendent, the deck is kind of stacked against you.”

He had smiled, set his fork down, and looked at the young girl who seemed too pleasant to have come from such a family. “I appreciate that, Sharon.”

“See, my mom has always had a thing about Brooke.” She stopped and tugged at her baggy pants. “It’s almost like somebody from Brooke’s neighborhood…you know, blue collar family and all…doesn’t have a right to be talented and pretty and thin…” She looked down at the books she held. “Everything I should be, but I’m not. It really chaps her. And then there’s that appearance thing. It doesn’t matter how things really are. It’s how
they
appear,
you know? That’s why she’s got it in for you. If you were bald and had a fifty-pound paunch, she’d leave you alone.”

Nick nodded, seeing Sharon in a new light. “I’m glad you told me.”

She stood there in her ill-fitting clothes, as if she didn’t know what to do next. “Well…guess I’ll get back to class.”

“Aren’t you going to eat lunch?”

“No,” she said. “My mother won’t let me drive my car until I’ve lost thirty pounds.”

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“I wish.”

That explained why her clothes were so baggy lately, and why she looked so pale. She was probably starving herself. A case of bulimia waiting to happen.

She drew in a deep breath, then hugged her books tighter. “I’ll see you sixth period, Mr. Marcello.”

She left the room, and Nick realized that if her father and mother would be so unmerciful to their own daughter, they certainly wouldn’t go easy on him. He vowed to avoid even the
appearance
of evil.

But just before graduation, Nick got word that Brooke had won first place in the University of Missouri scholarship competition. Because he was her art teacher, Nick had presented the award on graduation night.