Page 22 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

“Hers,” she repeats, and waits.

“Her name on the paperwork. I don’t want it in my apartment. I want it in her gallery, or her house, where she can look at it every morning while she’s getting ready for the day.”

“Oh, you poor man,” Bea says, with enormous satisfaction. “You’ve got it very badly indeed.”

She writes the receipt out at the table on a pad from a bank that closed years ago, and she asks me twice how to spell Farrow, though she knows how to spell Farrow. Then she holds it against her chest before she hands it over.

“Everybody stands in front of that painting and tells me what a beautiful field it is,” she says. “It’s the hill above the Bellingfell road, at about four in the afternoon in October, and I painted it the week my husband died, from the top, looking at the gap in the cloud, which is the only part of it I got right. Kimmie’s the only person who’s ever looked at it and asked me who I’d been with.” She puts the receipt in my hand. “Are you going to tell her what you’ve done?”

“I suppose that depends on whether or not she says ‘yes.’”

“Mm,” Bea says. “I think she’ll say yes.” She taps my chest a couple of times.

“Go on. My coffee isn’t as nice as that at the Purr & Pour anyway.”

I lift her hands to my lips and kiss her knuckles.

“Thank you, Mrs Rebecchi.”

“It’s Bea, dear. Just Bea.”

Kimmie

In the four hours since Natan said he had to leave, I’ve moved the copper, then moved the copper back to exactly where it was on yesterday. I ate some left-over fruit standing over the storeroom sink like a raccoon with a business license, and I have looked out of my own window so many times that Mrs. Vasey waved at me with the slow deliberation of a woman making a note for later.

When he arrives, taking up the whole frame the way he does, it’s with a piece of paper folded into quarters in one hand.

“The Rebecchi’s yours,” he says.

“The Rebecchi is Bea’s.”

“It was.” He crosses my floor and puts the paper on the desk.

I unfold it. It’s a receipt off a duplicate pad, written out in handwriting that climbs uphill, because everything about Bea climbs uphill. My name is at the top. Farrow, Kimmie, underlined twice. Under that there’s a number with a comma in the middle of it, and beside the number, in brackets, she has written that the gallery commission has been paid separately and in full.

I sit down on my stool.

“You bought the painting.”

“Yes. I bought it from the woman who painted it, and I paid your twenty-five percent on top so you wouldn’t lose a cent. She wanted it written down so you’d know I hadn’t gone around you.”

“You did go around me. That’s what the paperwork is for. That’s the whole job, artists bringing me work and me finding the person who ought to have it, and the second collectors start driving out to people’s houses with cash in an envelope there’s no reason for any of this to exist.” I hear my own voice going up the register and stop it. “Sorry. That was a lot of words.”

“It was accurate.”

“Why, then? You know how important this is to me.”

He pulls out the chair on the other side of my desk and sits down in it with his elbows on his knees, and I understand that we are about to have a conversation he decided to have somewhere on the road back over the bridge.

“Johansson,” he says. “The skinny one who left the card. He’s Vestbro Holdings. Vestbro owns the laundry at the top of the street, some other properties on this street and in this area. Including the parking lot.”

“The lot where you park.”

“The lot where I park. He’s been buying Calloway one unit at a time for three years and waiting for whoever’s left in the middle to get tired. He did the same thing at the marina in Bellingfell, to a wine bar that wouldn’t sell.”

My arms have gone cold. I look around the gallery before I can stop myself.

“The white van this morning,” I say.