Page 5 of Devil

“You need to stop doing these kinds of jobs. You’re the artist in residence at Evelyn College! They’re going to renew your grant for another year! You need to be spending your time making art so you can build a strong portfolio and start selling your work outside the Midwest. Not making chairs and tables that only a few people will ever know exist.”

I smoothed my hand over the table I’d painstakingly sawn, sanded, and finished for her. Considered my words. “The residency stipend isn’t very large, Kaitlyn. And the adjunct pay isn’t that much either. I need the money.”

She snorted and turned away and then turned back again. “You netted three thousand dollars for that Saint Joseph statue last year, but you could have taken home double that if you’d listened to me.”

“I don’t feel right charging a small church much more than that…” I started, but she wasn’t listening. She was turning away again, walking to the sink and flipping on the water with an annoyed gesture.

Kaitlyn was a lawyer—for Evelyn College actually, an associate in the Office of General Counsel—and although she was deeply and rigidly pious, she had a lawyer’s mind when it came to money. A negotiation was about how much you could extract from any given situation, and it was up to the other party to defend themselves, even if they were a group of beer-brewing Benedictines or the kindly old priest of a rural parish. Kaitlyn thought I left money on the table whenever I sold my carvings, andthat, to her, felt like a sin as willful as giving my sister money when she clearly didn’t deserve help for the umpteenth time.

I didn’t think it was a willful sin to undercharge churches and monasteries for my work, and I truly didn’t mind making furniture as small, one-off projects, but I couldn’t argue with Kaitlyn about how much of my time went to things that weren’t art. It was necessary but it was also a burden, a purgatory of sorts. I wanted so desperately to commit myself fully to my work, to live and breathe it, to have the sawdust and splinters made holy because of what they were for. Faith made manifest in wooden robes and wooden hands and wooden eyes.

This scraping, grasping, workhorse life wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but that didn’t mean life would be this way forever. Every morning, I woke and prayed the rosary with one whisper in my heart—Please, please don’t be forever. Please let it be different.

The Virgin would intercede for me, I was sure of it. She would see how faithful I was, how diligent, how hardworking. She would make sure that Busy managed to hang on to any money that came from the sale of the cabin. She would ask her eternally loving son to help the farm sell after months of languishing on the market. She would make it different. All I had to do was have faith.

There wasa pomegranate on my desk that next Tuesday.

Another one on Thursday.

I ate them both.

3

BIRDIE

February came bitter and icy,and March only reluctantly lurched into a wet, gray truce with the coming spring.

April came with rain and the curled buds of new leaves and something like hope. The big coats were put away for good, Lent was over, and I’d actually had time to work on a new statue, a Madonna and child cut from basswood.

Isobel had stayed after a studio session to thank me for teaching the class my guiding principle for sketching, which was to let whatever you were drawing speak for itself—as true for drawing fruit as it was for drawing a bird in a cage.Don’t draw an apple stem; draw the lines and shadows in front of you, and trust that it will show itself to be an apple stem. Don’t force your idea of stemness upon it; let it speak for itself.After she’d thanked me, I’d retreated to my car and felt like maybe I wasn’t a failure at this teaching thing after all. Maybe the Virgin had chosen to answer at least one of my prayers.

Hope, that guttering flame, had been burning steadily for a few weeks since, which was how I should have known to expect the worst.

I walked into the studio that day nearly smiling. The sun was still out, and I knew there’d be a fresh pomegranate on my desk, just as there had been every class day since the first pomegranate. Money had been a little easier since I hadn’t heard from Busy lately, and I’d been able to linger over the pomegranates lately instead of devouring them, arriving earlier and earlier to the arts building just to take my time plucking and savoring the seeds.

I still didn’t know who was leaving them for me, but I also didn’t know how to find out, short of camping in the building all day. Maybe I could find a way to leave a note on the desk Wednesday night or Thursday morning, although there was no guarantee one of the other teachers who used this room wouldn’t move it or throw it away before my anonymous benefactor could see it. Plus, while Kaitlyn’s house wasn’t terribly far from Evelyn, I had to be mindful of how much gas I used, and I couldn’t really justify the extra drive just to catch my fruit giver.

Maybe they’d reveal themselves at the end of the semester. That would be nice.

My hopeful mood vanished the minute I saw someone sitting on top of my desk, a lit cigarette in her mouth and my new pomegranate in her hand.

“This thing for you?” She somehow kept the cigarette filter trapped between her lips as she spoke. “It’s fucking huge.”

“Busy.” My voice was a panicked whisper. It sounded like a hiss. It didn’t sound like my own voice at all. “You can’t be here.”

Her brows pulled together. “Why the fuck not? Am I excommunicated or something?”

“You’d have to be communicated with the Church first, and alsoyou know why. This job depends on my having ‘moral clarity.’ That’s in my employment contract. You?—”

She cut me off as she ashed her cigarette into a disposable coffee cup sitting next to her. From the hiss it made, I gathered that there was still coffee in it. “Your job depends on you having theappearanceof moral clarity, and as long as Princess Kaitlyn doesn’t bestir herself to leave her legal throne room, you’re fine. No one else in this self-righteous dump knows who I am.”

I looked at her, cross-legged in boots and an old jacket stolen from a boyfriend several boyfriends ago, her eyeliner smudged, her hair loose and messy down her back, and I pressed my lips together.

Then I gave a response anyway. It was an unkind one, a judgmental one, and I hated myself for it the moment I said it, but I really couldn’t lose this job. “You don’t look like moral clarity, Busy. That’s the problem.”

She didn’t take offense at that. She gave me a mocking smile instead. And that was my same face smirking back at me, a face pale and freckled, apple-cheeked with a slightly cleft chin. Those were my not-dark-enough eyelashes and my too-thick eyebrows. We had the same eyes: a light blue in the middle and a dark blue like a storm-choked sky around the outside. We had the same hair, penny red and indecisively curly.

That was about all that was the same about us now.