when the trouble had started, and now having his picture on the wall of Lester’s looked likely to be the best independent testimony to his value as an artist that he was ever going to see.
He wandered back to the bedroom. The temptation to do a little weed was strong, but with it would come the urge to lie down on the couch and flick through the million and one channels on Teddy’s cable box. To distract himself, he set out his oils and continued working on the painting that he’d started the day before Marielle had kicked his ass out of her house. ‘My’ house: that was how she’d described it, and he’d been tempted to argue the point before he realized that she was right: it was ‘her’ house. Apart from her short-lived marriage, she’d lived there all her life. She loved it, just as she’d loved their father in a way that Grady never had, just as she loved Falls End, and the woods, those damned woods. Everything came back to them. They were the only reason anyone ever came here, the only reason the town thrived.
Grady hated those woods.
So Grady had stopped shouting at his sister, right there and then. He realized that it didn’t matter what happened with the banks, or how much the house might be worth and what his cut might be. He wasn’t about to put pressure on her to take out a loan that might endanger her hold on the place, not in this economic climate. She wasn’t earning much as a schoolteacher, even supplementing it with waitressing on weekends. He’d decided to tell her not to worry, and planned to go over and clear the air the next day. When, or if, the money came through, she could send it on to him. For now he’d stay with Teddy, and paint, and try to figure out where to go next. There were still houses in which he hadn’t worn out his welcome, couches and basements where he could crash. He’d put up some flyers offering to do murals, design work, whatever it took.
His old man was dead. What did it matter?
The painting was coming together quickly. It showed the house, and his parents, and was reminiscent of Grant Wood’s American Gothic except that the couple were happy, not dour, and in the background two children, a boy and a girl, pressed their faces against the inside of their bedroom windows, waving at their parents below. He intended to give it to Marielle as an apology, and as a token of what he felt for her, and their mother and, yes, their father too.
‘He went to your show!’ Marielle had said, screaming the words at him as the tattooed girl pulled on her jeans, realizing that she was in the middle of a serious domestic meltdown and there was no percentage in her hanging around to see how it all panned out.
‘What?’ He wished he hadn’t drunk so much at Darryl’s. He wished he hadn’t smoked that second blunt. He wished he’d never even spoken to the Fabulous Tattooed Lady. This was important, but he couldn’t get his head clear.
‘Your show, your lousy New York show, he went to it,’ said Marielle, and she was crying now, the first time he’d seen her cry since the funeral. ‘He took the bus to Bangor, and from there to Boston and on to New York. He went in the first week. He didn’t want to go on the opening night because he didn’t think that he’d fit in. He thought you’d be ashamed of him because he lived out by the edge of the woods, and he couldn’t talk about art and music, and he only owned one suit. So he went to your show, and he looked at what you’d done, what you’d achieved, and he was proud. He was proud of you, but he couldn’t say it and you couldn’t see it, because you were too out of it to understand, and when you weren’t out of it you were just angry. And it was all fucked up, all of it. You and him, the way it could have been, it was all lost over nothing but pride and booze and drugs and . . . Ah, Christ, just get out. Get out!’
I didn’t know, he wanted to say; I didn’t know. But the words wouldn’t come, and ignorance was no excuse. It wasn’t even true. He had known that his