Oriana understood almost immediately. “He’s calling Larry, isn’t he?”
Tanya laughed. “He’s shameless. I don’t think he cares about who he represents, as long as it brings him buckets of money. He knew the minute you made your announcement that the clock would be ticking.”
“I imagine he isn’t the only one reaching out to Larry,” another friend, Mark, said, sidling up to them on the freezing sidewalk and rubbing his palms together.
“You didn’t consider it?” Oriana asked Tanya and Mark, tilting her head back.
Tanya made a face. “If I could find Henrietta Johannes, I’d sign her in a heartbeat. But I want nothing to do with Larry.”
Mark nodded furiously. “I don’t know if everyone’s ready to give Henrietta her due,” he said. “But people who know the history of the art world and how women have always been in the background should listen up and listen hard. You’ve done something incredible, Oriana. You’re responsible for changing the game.”
“Marginally,” Oriana corrected him.
“Marginally is the best we can do,” Mark affirmed.
That night, as her friends studied the menu at the cocktail bar, Oriana snuck back outside to call Reese and check in. He answered immediately, his voice weak. “How did it go?”
Oriana’s heart felt crushed. She wished her husband were here in Manhattan with her. She wished he were strong enough to join her for one of the most important nights of her life.
“It’s over,” Oriana told him.
“How do you feel?”
“Relieved,” Oriana said. “And sad. I guess I’ll feel sad for a long time.”
“Every ending is bittersweet,” Reese said. And then he added, “I hope you’re not quitting for me. I’ve told you before. I don’t want this silly illness to affect?—”
Oriana interrupted him with an outright lie. “I’m not quitting because of you. I’m retiring so I can spend more time doing what I always wanted to do. Spend time with my family. Spend time with the people I love the most.” Her eyes were heavy with tears. Classic New York City taxis sped past, their yellows reflecting in the puddles that lined the streets.
“I love you, Oriana,” Reese said. “You’ve made my life what it is.”
Oriana bit her tongue to keep from telling him to stop talking like his life was over. She wanted to say,It’s all just beginning, Reese! We have time now! I’m retired!But she didn’t want to put pressure on him to fight what he couldn’t control.
“I love you, too,” she said. They hung up shortly after that, and Oriana returned to the jam-packed bar to celebrate a career she’d given so much of her life to. What happened next was out of her hands.
Chapter Twenty
It was no surprise to Jasmine that Walton demanded to stay in the house. He reasoned that he’d bought the place. It was all in his name. He had earned most of the money that had gone into it, and so on. It was a weak argument at best, given the fact that Jenny and Walton had been married for decades and had three children together.But Jenny told Jasmine she was too tired to fight him about the house—a house that had more painful memories than good ones, especially as of late. The only thing she planned to fight him on was custody. She wanted to be there for Alyssa and Jade, to help them through their final years of high school. She knew that Walton didn’t have the emotional capacity to care for two teenage girls.
The day Jenny came over to Jasmine’s and announced she was leaving Walton, Jasmine and Jenny picked up Alyssa and Jade from school and told them their plan. Alyssa, Jade, and Jenny would move into Jasmine’s apartment for a while, just until they could save up for a bigger place. Chase could crash for a bit, but he’d eventually need to find his own place, either with roommates or alone. He’d been saving up for an apartment for long enough, Jenny and Jasmine reasoned. Jasmine prayed he wouldn’t be far.
When they called Chase to explain to him what was going on, he’d just finished up a surfing lesson and told them he was proud of them for hatching a plan. “Things couldn’t continue like that,” he said gently, with more empathy and kindness than Walton had offered in his entire life.
Alyssa and Jade packed two backpacks each, full of stuff, and came to their grandmother’s right away. They cried quietly in the spare bedroom before joining Jasmine and Jenny for dinner. Jasmine found within herself the strength to tell stories and make jokes, trying to distract her granddaughters from their parents’ impending divorce. Eventually, Alyssa smiled, and Jade told a few stories from her day at school. By the end of the night, the four women had a rapport that felt easy and sweet.
At the beginning of March, Jasmine was hard at work in the convenience store when a storm brewed over the horizon and began to charge directly for the island. Tourists took cover in their swanky hotels and abandoned the beach. Jasmine stood at the window of the convenience store, watching the rain pelt. Something about the scene floored her. It activated an emotional core that she’d forgotten she still had.
Within a few minutes, she set herself up at one of the little tables near the coffee maker. She set a pencil to a pad of paper and began to sketch what she saw. Love flowed through her as she tore through page after page, trying to “see” with her fingers, with the pencil, with her heart.
It was four thirty, and Alyssa and Jade entered the convenience store, their hair drenched from the rain. They’d walked from school to see their grandmother. When they saw their grandmother’s sketches, they were shocked. It was bizarre to Jasmine that they’d never known her artistic soul, that she’d never shown it to them. Why had she hidden it away for so long?
“I used to love to paint,” Jasmine explained tentatively. “But back then, painting supplies weren’t as expensive as they are now.”
Alyssa and Jade eyed one another mischievously. By the following day, they’d stolen a fair bit of painting supplies from their school art department: paintbrushes, acrylics, oils, and even an entire canvas, which someone had stretched across a frame.
“How did you get this out of school?” Jasmine asked, mystified. She knew that a better grandmother would have told them that stealing was wrong and that they shouldn’t have risked their school lives for her. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell them to take it all back.
That night, as Jade, Alyssa, and Jasmine watched television in the living room, Jasmine set up her paints in the kitchen and got to work. She decided to paint the same scene she’d been sketching the day before—a stormy beach, an angry sky, palm trees tossing themselves right and left. It was difficult at first to get the base color exactly right. But she was surprised at how quickly everything seemed to come back to her.
