it could possibly be natural. His solid black tee shirt had white words that read, “Never Underestimate The Power Of A Sick Mind”.
“What’s up, Debbie?” he asked as he approached. His eyes automatically went to the pictures, taking them out of Debbie’s hands.
“Please, can I have those back?” Chloe asked, her voice strangled with embarrassment.
“Not so fast,” Joe replied and held the picture up higher so Chloe couldn’t snatch them out of his hand. After looking at several, he turned to look down at Chloe, obvious interest and respect shining through. “Do you have more like this?”
“Please, these are very personal. I’d rather…”
“Well of course they’re personal. They’re amazing!” He took a seat across from her, nodding to Debbie. “Yep, this is exactly what we were talking about.”
“What do you mean?” Chloe was starting to panic now that others were seeing her private work. She’d never intended for anyone to see these pictures and here were two strangers peering down at something so private it was as if she’d been stripped naked in front of a crowd.
“Joe likes making things a bit quirky around here and he thought that he could balance things like that dinosaur over there,” Debbie explained, pointing behind her to a seven foot metal dinosaur with different colored fins running down its back and an Elvis wig and sunglasses, “with some intellectual art that he could put up on the walls. You name the price and we’ll get the customers in here to buy them.”
Chloe’s eyes went back and forth between the strange looking man sitting across from her and the pretty blond waitress standing beside him with her hand on the big man’s shoulder. “You want to put them on display?” she asked, trying to take the pictures out of Joe’s hands but he simply pulled them away and picked up a few more. “You can’t!”
Joe shook his head, denying Chloe her pictures as well as her claim that they shouldn’t be on display. “Honey, these are really good. You’ve got to put them on display. And what better place then here? I get all sorts in her during the week for lunch. There’s the business people from Dallas who rush through and grab their lunch as fast as possible, but they’re standing in a line going out the door and need something to look at as they rush through my line. Then around one thirty, all the debutants come through for their leisurely lunch and they’d get a kick out of seeing something original, a new artist they can say they discovered. Around three or four o’clock, that’s when the shoppers come by, especially Friday through Sunday. They come in, have a cup of herbal tea and reminisce about all the stuff they bought, and they’d just love to top off their shopping expedition with a new photograph if an unknown artist.” He put the other pictures down and looked across the table at Chloe. “What do you say?”
Initially Chloe had been adamant that there would be no way she would display her pictures. At least not yet. But as Joe talked, and the way he looked at her pictures, she started to re-evaluate her position. Isn’t this what she and Sam had been working on for the past week? And if she displayed them here in the restaurant, she wouldn’t need the overhead expense of a private gallery. She could give back most of what Sam had wanted to invest. She could do this more on her own and be much more independent. Same would never need to know what she was up to. Her only real investment would be some quirky picture frames to capture the patrons’ attention and maybe one or two of her photographs would sell.
And even better, Sam would never see her pictures. No one would need to know that she was the artist. She could come up with a pseudonym and hide her identity. If anyone were to criticize her pictures, it would be much easier to shrug off their hurtful comments and go on about her business.
If she could do this anonymously, failure would be much easier to swallow.
But success would also be much sweeter, she thought.
“I don’t know,” she said, carefully hiding her precious pictures back into the package. “I’m not sure I’m ready.”
The waitress shook her head, glancing down at the pictures Joe was still sorting through. “Honey, you’re ready.”
Joe chuckled. “How about this. You let me hang your stuff up here for one month