“Smart is a good thing if I’m having soup with someone interesting.”
A chuckle. Mabel’s tempers tend to leave as fast as they come. “You are. And I didn’t even need to harangue you and put coaxing things in your wine.”
There are some things I really don’t want to know about her life. “I haven’t had wine for weeks.” The last ghost who hung out with us for a while sobbed every time I poured myself a glass. She also sobbed every time I sneezed or wore gray socks. It’s been an interesting winter.
I decide the blue is passable, at least for now, and reach for one of my last prepped canvases.
Tsking from the corner. “Not that one, honey. The smaller canvas or you won’t be done in time for your dinner date and poor Indigo will sit there all alone and forlorn.”
She doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to put up with that kind of treatment. Her friends might, under the right circumstances, but Indigo’s fire would scorch what it needed to be rid of. Which isn’t a category I want to fall into, so I switch out for the smaller canvas.
My fingers twitch. They don’t like constraints.
My ringtone sounds.
I scowl. I like phone calls even less.
“That will be Roger,” says Mabel calmly, as a ball of yarn floats into the air.
I make a mental note to cast on another scarf for her soon. She can manage the regular rows well enough, but getting the first one underway brings out the woman who tossed grown men out on their asses when they’d had too much to drink.
I dig my cell phone out from under a painting rag and swipe to answer. “Go away, Roger. It’s way too soon for you to be bothering me. I just shipped you a bunch of new canvases last week.”
“They’re wonderful. Full of ethereal passion and a frenetic sense of time’s passing.” The dry tones of my agent are a standard part of his brisk caretaking. “You should make more just like them.”
I snort. The visitor who inspired them is gone, and I have a lot of gray socks that need wearing. “The reviewers keep coming up with more ridiculous things to say. Who was it this time?”
“Be grateful they’re saying them. Being a starving artist isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.”
I remember. Although in my case, hunger showed up years before the art. “Is there a reason you’re interrupting my work?”
I can literally hear one of his neatly manicured eyebrows slide up a precise quarter inch, which is as surprised as Roger ever looks. “You’re painting again? So soon?”
I’ve done a reasonably good job of cultivating a quirky temperament over the years—or at least the perception of one. It helps keep agents and customers who want a canvas in very particular colors to match their new sofa off of my back. “Not for long. I’m out of canvases.”
A pithy curse. Roger might look like he stepped out of the pages of some gentlemen’s magazine, but he swears like a sailor. Or a barmaid. “I had an order sent to you. I’ll chase them down.”
They’ll likely be here by sundown. Every art supplier I know is scared of Roger Adebayo. “Big ones. The small ones make my fingers hurt.”
“The small ones are good for business and force you to work more slowly and with deeper meaning. The last ones you sent were magnificent.”
Mabel snickers over in her corner.
I roll my eyes. “Mabel thinks the big ones are better.”
A ball of yarn thunks off the side of my head.
I sigh. At least it isn’t gray socks.
Roger chuckles. “Tell Mabel that I send my regards.”
I’m not entirely sure who he thinks she is, or why he imagines that I travel with an elderly lady with far too many opinions. He’s never asked. He just sends chocolates on her birthday and regular invitations to gallery openings that, as far as he knows, she never attends. “She’ll be glad to hear it. Now tell me why you really called.”
He huffs out a laugh. “You’ve been offered a solo show. I called to see if you want to accept.”
I’ve been offered a chance to hand a gallery a rare month in the black, is more like it. “Are they good people?”
A pause as he weighs his answer. “I believe so. They’ve promoted some newer artists from diverse backgrounds and done well by them.”
That’s fancy agent speak for them not being snobs. Which was so very much