A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,28

in the city. They were poor, their neighbors poorer. Gabriel made some money selling his drawings to wealthy weekenders at the markets, and his mother began making pastries for special occasions, but still money was tight.

Gabriel must have suggested it a thousand times. Each time his father said it belonged to his mother and she said it was out of the question. After his father’s fatal heart attack, Gabriel and his mother often went hungry. He found her crying one day in the kitchen, an empty bag of flour at her elbow. “We’ll sell it,” he said. “We’ll sell it and this can be over.”

His mother wiped her eyes. “This painting is a part of our family. Selling it would be like selling a child, or trading a grandparent.”

“We know it so well,” Gabriel said. “If we want to see it, we can remember it, exactly like it was.”

“It’s not the same.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain it to you. You are an artist. You have all the talent of your ancestor, and yet you don’t see the value.”

“It’s because I’m an artist that I do see the value,” Gabriel said. “It’s a piece of cloth with some decorative oil. We need to eat. You should see the doctor. I need material to paint with. It’s not like we’d destroy it. It’ll just be on a different wall.”

“There is sustenance more important than food.” She crossed herself. Gabriel was rendered speechless by the illogic of faith.

When the scholarship letter arrived, Gabriel debated whether to tell his mother. He knew she would insist he go to France. It had been her dream to visit Paris, to see her great-grandfather’s work hanging in the musée.

As he predicted, she was overjoyed. He had to stop her from packing his suitcase that very moment, and she insisted they open the bottle of French wine that she’d been saving since her wedding day. It was vinegar, but Gabriel drank it down. The alcohol moistened her eyes. “I know you have his talent,” she said. “I hope that they will recognize it.

“My grandfather gave us the painting for our wedding. He had inherited it from his father. He was old then, and nearly sightless, but he came in a chair pushed by his young wife and he gave us Febrer and kissed my forehead. It was a love match, your father and me.”

“I’ve heard this story,” Gabriel said softly. The kitchen was lit low, one bare bulb. The cabinets he’d known for most of his life, the rustic chairs, the icon of baby Jesus that hung over the large farm sink, the chipping floor tile, were as familiar as the curve of his knee, the jut of his hip bone.

“And then we waited fourteen years for you. We had given up hope, though not faith.” Gabriel rolled his eyes in anticipation of yet another retelling of the story. Each year on his birthday she forced him to go pray at the altar of the Virgin to celebrate the miracle of his birth.

She stood and untied her apron, framed by the light. She was lumpy and formless in her widow’s dress, her ankles swelling over the tops of her shoes like overly leavened bread. Her hair in its braid had gone mostly white, and one eyelid drooped a bit. And yet he thought her beautiful, and hugged her from behind while she washed the plates, feeling the rolls of her stomach, and decided that his plan to deceive her was genius, not knavery.

He spent the summer in the converted woodshed, painting. Every morning he drank coffee in the kitchen, looking at Febrer while his mother kneaded dough for the pastries she would sell at the market. So many coffees that he thought he would begin to convulse with caffeinated anxiety. When she left for the market, he took the painting into the shed to study it closer, careful always to return it before she arrived to make supper. Each evening it hung in the fading daylight, its varnish reflecting back the staticky black and white of the television, tuned to an American sitcom, his mother’s laugh drowning in the dubbed laugh track.

Then one day he took Febrer to his woodshed studio and turned it over. He removed the nails from the frame and exposed the canvas. Connois had painted two centimeters above what was visible through the frame. He must have known the edges would be lost, and yet this part of the painting was