The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (26 page)

I squinch harder.

“Come on, now, Erick,” says Ben. “This isn't the Arctic Circle.”

“Happens,” Erick says.

“I just…” I try, through stifled tears. “I'm such a…” I don't know how to finish that sentence. “I can't do…”
anything right,
I want to say, but I'm too embarrassed to even say that.

Over my stammers, Erick raises his eyebrows high. He leans into the car. “Ben, you got this, man?” he asks. “I've gotta, um, do something else that's not talking to a crying lady.”

“I'm not crying!” I manage to shout. Erick only raises his eyebrows.

From behind me Ben says, “I should come take a look.”

“Be my guest,” Erick says with a shrug. “It's not rocket science.” He looks at me and then adds, “… for most people.”

I blow my nose loudly into a tissue I find in my purse.

“Erick, come on. She's got to get home today,” says Ben. “You guys can't warm it up in there for a couple of hours and—”

“No,” I say to Ben, stilling him with a hand waved in his direction. “It's okay.” I take a deep breath. “Erick, you do whatever it is you need to do, whenever you need to do it, and call the inn when it's done. Ben, look at the time.” I gesture to the dashboard clock. “You need to get to school. I can walk back from here.” I slide out of the truck before anyone can protest, forcing Erick out of the path of the swinging door. “Thanks for the help,” I say as I walk off into the cold, leaving the Hutchinson boys behind me in confusion. “Both of you. I'll be fine.”

Two weeks ago, when I told Renee I had been evicted, I told her the universe was trying to tell me something. She laughed and said the universe was trying to tell me to pay my bills. She was right. Evictions, legal snafus, broken-down cars—these aren't bizarre twists of fate guiding my path. These are the natural consequences of my complete failure to get my life together.

I think of Colleen, my age, motherless like me, unlucky in love and now in health too, but nevertheless running her own business, starting her own family, knowing what she wants and figuring out how to get it. Not frozen in a time ten years past when everything seemed perfect. Not trapped by the whims of a muse who may or may not ever come back. Something tells me she even changes the oil in her car
before
the light comes on.

Well, if Colleen can do that, so can I. Right?

A blast of wind picks me up from behind, pushes me forward. The sky is bright, the air is sweet and cold, the snow is freshly shoveled, the path under my feet is clear.

The problem is, it leads me only as far as the inn.

*   *   *

On the way back, dreading explaining to Colleen that I have to extend my stay yet longer, I stop in the first storefront I pass. It's the diner, an all-day-breakfast sort of joint, and I take a booth by a window and order bacon and eggs, coffee, and a pen. Then I take out my phone, call up my banking app, and look at the facts. To my great surprise, they are heartening. I'm in debt but not in declare-bankruptcy debt. If Jenny is even half-right about the value of the paintings she is selling for me, I could one day be out of debt.

On a napkin I start a running tally of numbers. I could make, when the conditions are perfect and the stars are aligned and I'm not procrastinating like my life depends on it, two paintings a month. That means, if I stop dicking around and get back my mojo, I could support myself painting, for real, no living in dumps, no using my credit cards for groceries, no deferring car maintenance and doctors' visits and teeth cleanings. I wouldn't be rich, but I would be an actual adult.

And, I could be a professional artist for a living.

That is an amazing gift, and I am squandering it.

Well, no more.

If I had my car, I would hop in it with the same energy I had the day I graduated from college. Just like then, I would point it straight toward Chicago, toward my old neighborhood, toward the first apartment with a
FOR RENT
sign out front. I would start this adult life I have sketched out on this diner napkin immediately, while I can envision it, while I still have a life to go back to. I would deal with Mitchell face-to-face, in a professional manner, with a calculator in hand. I would shake Renee and tell her I want the old Renee back. I would tell my stepbrother I love him but the bitterness has to stop, now. There would be no more elaborate flights of fancy to storybook small towns. No more fecklessness. No more depending on charity from near strangers. No more kissing men I barely know by snowy rivers.

But I don't have a car. So the adult life is going to have to start here. In said storybook small town. With said near strangers. In close proximity to said kissing partner.

And there's absolutely nothing I can do about that.

My first stop after the diner is the local bank. It's a tiny little credit union two doors from the inn, but they have online banking, so I open up an account, deposit the advance from Jenny, and immediately pay my minimum monthly payments on my credit cards. I call my old landlord and leave the scariest message I can muster demanding the swift return of my security deposit and dropping the name of Renee's firm. I send texts to Renee and a few other friends at home who should be—though they aren't letting on if they are—worrying about my whereabouts, to tell them I'll be gone for a while. I punch in a similar message for Mitchell but don't quite hit send. Him, I probably better talk to in person. Later.

Then I go to the gallery. I'm way, way too disheveled at the moment to be seen inside, but I have a key to the studio now, and a camera full of exciting new pictures from my drive yesterday. One in particular has my heart in knots. It's of an old decrepit boathouse that fell in on itself from the weight of ice—maybe this season's, maybe an icy season long past. I want to paint it with a palette of grays that speak of the middle layer of feathers on a nuthatch, a bird I see everywhere on feeders here in town despite the punishing weather. I want there to be some sparkling Carolina blue, some frosty white, and then the boathouse will be nothing but sunlit gray. I want to show the most brilliant hue of gray I can, the iciest white, the most shimmering blue. A few bold stripes of the straight, naked-from-the-waist-down pines, and underneath, three blocks of brilliant color and that is all.

I spend an hour sketching, then two, before I start to get squinty and realize I need a break. I put back on layer upon layer and turn off the pellet stove and, when nothing is exposed but my eyes and the top of my nose, I go back out into the chill for a walk.

The sun is midway through its path, about forty-five degrees above the horizon, making for a sunny side of the street bustling with what I now recognize as the Minnow Bay lunchtime crowd. The snow that fell yesterday was just enough to refresh the whiteness of everything, and trees, railings, street signs—everything has a layer of crushed diamonds atop. At foot speed I look into the windows of a bookstore and see a display of comfort-food cookbooks under a chalkboard sign that reads,
COMPLETE HIBERNATION HEADQUARTERS
. A yarn store appears after that; it is chock-full of hand-stitched sweaters that look like heaven to wear, and the tops of the windows are draped with long variegated scarves that look like streamers. I go in because one is the dusty lime–to–Kelly green progression of late summer grass I want to capture in my August painting, and find out the scarf is not for sale, but the yarn it's formed from, at just six dollars a ball, is. Yarn in hand, I pass a pastry shop, a closed-for-the-season store that apparently sells nothing but popcorn, and the outfitters where I got these mittens that are currently keeping my hands so blissfully warm. I pass a library, a shuttered gardening store, a realty agency, a church, and a pharmacy. I keep walking for a long time, until I come to the boxy brick high school. Then, ignoring that strange physics I feel for Ben Hutchinson, I turn around and walk back.

When I get to the inn, a cold mess of confusion, Colleen is standing in the foyer, looking posed, hair casually swept up, brown riding boots on, sweater loosely belted about the waist. “Oh,” she says as I push the door closed to the chill behind me. “It's just you.”

“Who were you expecting?” I ask as I start to pile my woolens on the coatrack.

“New guests. Skiers. The Nordic racing crowd is starting to come in.”

“Nordic racing?”

“Mmhmm. Also known as my only paying customers from January through March.” She pauses. “Well, I get some skate-skiers too, but not as many since there's less grooming for them in this county.”

I nod as though I know what skate-skiing is. “I was beginning to wonder how you stay open in the winter.”

“Mostly my business plan involves not accepting art as payment for weeklong stays.”

Has it been a week? “It was your idea. Anyway, how much art would you charge for two extra weeks in a broom closet?”

Colleen's eyes brighten. “You're going to stay?”

I nod. “I think I am. You've inspired me with your whole baby-making thing. To take a closer look at what I want, and how I mean to get it. I think the search starts here.”

She turns her face and looks at me sideways. “You sure this has nothing to do with the fact that your car won't start?”

I throw up my hands. “Six of one, a half-dozen of the other,” I admit. “But, really, what you told me last night blew my mind.”

Yesterday, when her sedative had worn off, I stopped driving in circles and brought Colleen straight to Jenny's gallery. There, lazing on those low chairs among the interesting, inspiring inventory, clutching cocoa and molasses cookies, Colleen told us the full story. How she and her ex-boyfriend Mason had, and I quote, “pulled the goalie” a couple years into the relationship, knowing that Mason's National Guard unit would probably soon be called up and worrying they would miss a window. And then, eight months later he shipped out, but there was no baby, so he had left some, ahem, deposits. And then when he came back on leave, there was still no baby. And then Colleen had wanted to start a medical workup, and Mason hadn't, and they'd broken up over it, and he'd re-upped.

She was matter-of-fact about all of this part last night. I get the impression that Mason was more important to her than she lets on, partly from the way Jenny suddenly produced another round of cookies when his name came into the conversation. But also, partly because Colleen said so very little about him. I am noticing that the less she says, the more it matters. And the same, I find, goes for Ben. Now I wonder, was Mason the same way? Is that part of why they fell in love?

What Colleen did tell me last night was that after a year of licking her wounds over not conceiving the old-fashioned way, she'd decided to do it herself. First there was what she called “gene shopping,” where she looked for the perfect donor. That part, she told me, had been the best—full of hope and enthusiasm. That is when she'd bought the books, and stuffed the closet full of baby gear, and started researching baby names. Then DIY insemination went nowhere, so doctors got involved, and then blood tests were done, and results waited for, and more invasive tests done, and Clomid injections started, and so on and so forth, until two more years had gone by without a pregnancy.

And, in the time that had passed waiting, she told me, she knew one woman at her gynecologist's office who had had two sets of twins.

“It was about the woman with the twins,” I tell her now. “You said you were done waiting to find out why things weren't happening the way you thought they were supposed to. Instead you were going to change your mind about the way things were supposed to happen.”

Colleen smiles at that. “Did I say that, really? I'm awfully wise.”

“Yes, you are. This morning, the car wouldn't start, and I decided I was done trying to make things happen the way I thought they were supposed to.”

“Oh, wow. Well, welcome to the club. You can stay as long as you like.”

“Are you sure? Do you have room, with the Nordic racers and all?”

“Plenty, for the time being, as long as you don't mind being bumped to steerage. What are you going to do while you're here? Now that you aren't trying so hard to leave?”

“I'm still going to leave,” I tell her gently. “But first I'm going to paint. And try not to make out with Ben Hutchinson. And pay some of my bills. And go with you to the adoption lawyer. And eat a lot of steak frites.”

“Sounds like you'll be busy.”

I smile at her and nod. Ten years in a holding pattern, ended by a car that won't start and a new friend who won't give up. “There's not a second to lose.”

 

PART III

Study From Life

 

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

“I think I have painter's block.”

Renee and I are in the Whistler room on the second floor of the Art Institute, clutching our smuggled-in iced coffees as though our lives depend on them. Outside, Chicago seethes in the high nineties. I feel winter will never come again. We will be hot, humid, plagued by mosquitos forever.

“I thought you didn't believe in blocks,” Renee says idly. She has her phone out in the non-coffee hand and doesn't seem to be looking at the art.

“I don't,” I agree. “Doesn't mean I don't have one.”

“Hm.” She scrolls past something online. “That's interesting,” she says after a beat. “What does Mitchell say?”

I start. “Why would I talk to Mitchell about this?”

Renee lowers her phone and narrows her eyes at me.

“He cannot know, Renee,” I tell her, shaking my head.

“He cannot
not
know. What are you bringing him right now?”

I twist up my mouth. The answer is nothing good. “Well. You know…” my voice trails off while I concoct some facsimile of the truth. “I am just working out that one idea. I'm calling it a series, and he seems to be going for it.”