Tommy picked up before the first ring finished.
"Brock—"
"Your driver's down," I said. "Head and left side, alive, needs a doctor yesterday. Two shooters hit us four blocks from pickup. They're dead. I'm bringing Darren in—you're gonna have to tell me where, because I do not know this city well enough to find your Dominion Hall on a count of three."
A beat of silence on the line. When Tommy came back, his voice had gone flat and hard, all the light I'd grown up with gone out of it.
"Jesus." I heard him moving, heard a door. "Okay. Okay. Stay on the line, I'm gonna talk you in. And Brock?—"
"What?"
He was quiet a half second too long. Again. That same pause that had been crawling up my neck since the first phone call.
"Nothing. Just—" A breath. "Glad it was you in that seat."
I drove the hillbilly-mobile through the dark of a city I'd been in for one day, with a bleeding man beside me and two fresh dead behind me and a woman's warmth still somewhere on my skin under all the blood, and I thought the only thought that fit.
What in the hell had a couple of run-down hillbillies wanted bad enough to ambush me on a quiet Charleston side street—and who'd cleaned out their pockets before they sent them to do it?
17
MARY CATHERINE
Diane wanted to meet later in the week.
She said it the way people said things when they'd been waiting a while and had the grace not to show it. We talked for twenty minutes on the phone with the Atlantic moving below the pier and the pelican somewhere off to my left doing its Sunday things. By the end of it, I had an appointment at her gallery on upper King Street and a strange new feeling in my chest that I eventually identified as momentum.
Forward momentum. Mine. Pointed somewhere I had chosen.
I sat on the bench for a while after and let it settle.
Then, I drove back to Wentworth Street.
The studio looked different in the full light of Sunday morning than it had in the city-glow dark of the night before—smaller, more ordinary, the sofa visibly battered, the hot plate optimistic rather than charming.
The canvases were still everywhere, and they were still good, I could still see that, but they also looked like what they were:years of work done in private that had never been asked to be anything more than private.
That was about to change. The thought was terrifying and correct in equal measure, which I was beginning to understand was how the right things felt.
I made a second coffee and sat on the floor with my back against the sofa—Brock's impression still in the cushions, which I noticed and did not make anything of. I opened my sketchbook to the drawing I'd made on the pier.
The two figures on East Bay Street.
I looked at it for a long time. Then, I turned to a fresh page and started to work properly, not the freestyle automatic drawing of the pier but real work, intentional—loose studies of the pieces I had finished, thinking about how they read together, whether they told a story as a body of work or just as individual paintings.
This was the part I had never done. The curation. The stepping back far enough to see the whole shape of five years of solitary making.
By the time I'd filled six pages with notes and thumbnail sketches and the beginnings of an organizational logic, I had something that looked, cautiously, like a show. Not a finished one. Not a certain one. But the skeleton of something that could become one, if I was willing to do the work of taking it apart and rebuilding it with an audience in mind.
I had never made anything with an audience in mind.
The idea was more exciting than it was frightening, which surprised me.
I needed groceries.
That was the practical reality of Sunday morning. The ordinary forward motion of a person who had decided to keep going. I texted Colleen while I was still sitting in the studio, nothing elaborate, just:I'm okay. Really okay. Talk soon.
She responded within a minute:I believe you. Call me when you're ready.
