Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,138

half an hour,” he said. “Just chill.”

In the kitchen, I wolfed down a rubbery piece of pizza I found in the refrigerator, then carried a Coke with me into the gallery. I was most interested in the work of the students Jesse had helped, financially or otherwise. I wished I could have had one of my paintings in the room with the other student art, but it didn’t really matter. The work I was proudest of would hang in the foyer, the first thing anyone would see when they walked into the gallery.

Some sculptures were displayed here and there in the student room, but I was more drawn to the two-dimensional art. I moved from painting to painting, reading the wall texts Oliver had put together for each one. I stopped at the etching of a plane, a marvel in its detail. The wall text told me that Jesse had discovered the student artist when the boy was in middle school and living in foster care. Reading the texts next to each piece touched me. I could hear Oliver’s voice in them as he described the artist’s background and connection to Jesse, and for the hundredth time, I wondered why Jesse had zeroed in on me to help.

I paid attention to my own feelings as I explored the student paintings, waiting for the yearning to paint—to create—to overwhelm me, but it didn’t. As a matter of fact, I felt a strange distance from the work in the room. I could appraise it, admire it, dissect it. But I didn’t envy the artists for being able to create it. I knew my professor had told me the truth when he said I wasn’t all that talented, and the reality was, while I loved art, I’d never truly loved creating it. It had frustrated me, never being able to translate what I could see so clearly in my mind to the canvas on my easel. I knew with a rush of surprise that what I had loved doing was restoring the mural. I pressed my fist to my mouth, nearly overcome by the realization. I’d spent so much of the last few weeks worrying about returning to prison or being angry with Trey or feeling guilty about Emily that I hadn’t let myself recognize the joy I felt in my work.

The next room was filled entirely with Jesse’s paintings, some of them familiar to me. I glanced at my phone. My half-hour break was nearly up. I would look at Jesse’s work more closely later.

I walked into the third room, this one displaying paintings from Jesse’s personal collection, much but not all of it from North Carolina artists. This was where I would really have liked to spend the time that I didn’t have today. I stood in the center of the room and turned in a slow circle, taking in all the work from a distance. There was a wintry landscape by Francis Speight. One of Ernie Barnes’s distinctive paintings, probably my favorite in the room, displayed a group of black men and women, their elongated bodies dancing against a peach-colored background. There was one of Kenneth Noland’s bull’s-eye paintings, and an intriguing black-and-white contemporary piece by Barbara Fisher. But the huge painting that anchored the room was Judith Shipley’s Daisy Chain, taken from the foyer of Jesse’s house. Although I’d passed by that realistic painting of four little girls sitting in a field of daisies nearly every day since my arrival in Edenton, I’d still never found the iconic iris Shipley would have hidden in it as a tribute to her mother. Here in the gallery, the painting had a perfectly lit wall all to itself, and I spotted the purple flower almost instantly. It was off to one side in the endless field of daisies, jutting above the yellow flowers, small and delicate. It made me smile. How nice to have a mother you wanted to honor that way.

Back in the foyer, I found Oliver in my place on the floor, carefully inpainting the weedy grass of the Mill Village. I held out my hand for the brush.

“I’ll keep helping,” he said, holding the brush away from me. “You know you can’t make the deadline on your own, right?”

I looked at the abraded grass, the disintegrating signature. He was right. Adam and Wyatt would have to stretch and hang the mural in the morning with the right-hand corner unfinished or poorly restored. How savvy was Andrea Fuller about art?