Page 12 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

Mrs. Prendergast has been standing in front of the small Ren for eleven minutes and her husband has been standing in front of the wine for nine. I learned enough in my previous job to know that the sale belongs to her and my job is to stop talking.

So I stop talking. It costs me something physical. I stand a little behind her left shoulder with my hands folded in front of me like a woman who has never once had an intrusive thought, and I let the boatyard do the work. Gray-green water, a hull up on blocks, and one dab of orange on the mooring buoy that Tobias put there at the very end because he told me the whole thing was drowning without it.

“It’s the orange,” she says.

“It’s the orange,” I agree.

Her husband arrives with two glasses of the red and says, “How much is the orange, then,” and that is the fourth red dot before two o’clock. I go behind my desk to write up the card with my handwriting doing something loopy and unrecognizable at the edges.

Four pieces sold. Marianne’s stoneware has a cluster of teenagers around it who keep picking things up and putting them down while Bea watches them from the corner with her arms folded, wearing the expression of a woman who would very much like to be introduced as mysterious. Daisy from the paper has photographed the long wall twice, the trestle table once, and my face at least four times, and I have no idea which of my faces she got.

I should be floating three feet off my own sanded floor.

Instead I am thinking about a stupid, empty, cardboard box.

He picked it up on his way out. The big one from the storeroom, and he carried it out through the middle of my opening like a man completing an errand. Nobody in this room saw a man being asked to leave. They saw a piece being collected, which is a thing that happens in galleries, and they went back to their wine and their cheese.

He did it for me. He did it so no one would ask questions about a handsome man in a suit who looks like he fights bears for a living.

“You’ve gone off somewhere,” Delilah says.

She’s leaning against the end of my desk with a napkin of cheese in one hand, and she’s looking at me a beat longer than is socially required. Sammie is by the window with Eduard’s hand at the small of her back as she nurses Lilah. Jasper is in front of the Rebecchi again, exactly where he was twenty minutes ago.

“I’ve gone off to a wonderful place called I’ve Already Sold Four Pieces,” I say, flashing her a smile. “Which is more than I budgeted for the entire weekend, Delilah, the entire weekend. I built a spreadsheet and everything. And all your cinnamon rolls are gone. Mrs. Vasey took three in a napkin and thought I didn’t notice.”

Delilah laughs. I smooth my hands over my skirt.

“Kimmie.”

“Mm?”

“Are you okay, really?”

Here’s the smile. I feel it arrive on my face fully formed, the wide one, the one that goes all the way up and makes my cheeks ache, and I put it on her like a woman handing over a receipt.

“I’m brilliant,” I say as the door opens and another man in a suit enters. Only this one is too skinny to be a Federov.

Delilah’s mouth flattens. She isn’t buying a single word of it, and for a second, I think she’s going to push. If she pushes, I am going to say something extremely stupid in a room containing forty potential customers and a journalist.

“Go on, then,” she says instead, and squeezes my wrist as I pass.

I do the room. I’m good at this part. I steer two women away from the buffet and into the alcove where the copper work catches the light properly. I laugh at a joke about the paint from a man who I am ninety percent certain signed the letter about the paint. I even kiss Bill on both cheeks and thank him for coming despite knowing he sent the letter about the paint in the first place.

Underneath all of it, running like a tap I can’t reach the handle of, is Natan. His face when he said the word ashamed. The way he didn’t argue with me, which is the part I keep going over, because everything I have ever been told about a man like Natan says he should have argued.

“Miss Farrow.”

The skinny man is in front of me, putting out a hand. I shake it. His skin is cool and very dry.

“Jannick Johansson. I emailed.”

“Yes,” I say, and smile. “The Rebecchi.”

“The Rebecchi.” He turns to look at it, and he does look at it, properly, which earns him more from me than I want to give. “It’s wasted in here.”

“It’s exactly where it should be,” I counter.

“It’s on a wall in a converted hardware store on a street with a cat café.” He says this pleasantly. “I’ll take it today. Name a number and add twenty percent, and I’ll have someone collect it before you close.”