Jennifer Crusie - Faking It

“You don’t have to support them.” Tilda handed her the first piece of peanut butter toast. “I’ve got it covered.”

“Well, you can’t do it forever,” Nadine said. “Let’s face it, I’m up next.”

“No.” Tilda stopped in the middle of spreading the second piece of toast. “No you are not. You do not have to-”

“Keep Mom and Dad and Grandma from the poor-house?” Nadine said. “If not me, who? The Double Take barely pays for itself. Teachers don’t make that much. Grandma hasn’t done anything but Double-Crostics since Grandpa died, and the Finsters aren’t selling. You’re going to be nuts from doing murals by the time I’m out of high school. It’s me.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Tilda said seriously. “Nadine, really. You are not going to-”

“It’s okay,” Nadine said. “I want to. But it has to be something I like. I don’t want…”

“What?” Tilda said, knowing she wasn’t going to like what was coming next.

“I don’t want to be as unhappy as you are,” Nadine said. “I want to still be laughing when I’m thirty-four.”

“I laugh,” Tilda said.

“When?” Nadine said.

Tilda turned back to her toast. “I laughed at Buffy the Vampire Slayer last Tuesday. I distinctly remember chortling.”

“I like singing,” Nadine said. “And Burton ’s band is good, even Dad thinks so and he doesn’t like Burton. And Burton ’s good to me. So I’m thinking that might be the way I can support us.”

“You picked Burton because you want to make money as a singer?” Tilda shook her head and picked up her juice glass and toast plate. “I’d think about that some more. Listen, I have to go downstairs and get ready for next week’s mural. Can you take Steve?”

“Sure,” Nadine said, looking down at Steve’s furry little head. “He can watch me get dressed.”

“Close your eyes, Steve,” Tilda said. “Oh, and if you see Davy, will you tell him that the notes about the rest of the paintings are in the top desk drawer there?”

“Sure,” Nadine said. “Rest of the paintings?”

“You don’t want to know,” Tilda said and headed for the basement, balancing her glass on her plate. She stopped in the doorway. “Nadine, I’m not unhappy.”

“Yeah,” Nadine said, clearly humoring her.

“Right,” Tilda said and went to work.

DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, Tilda flipped on the light in her father’s studio and noticed for the first time how the white walls and cabinets gleamed back at her, glossy and sterile. “This place looks like a meat locker,” Davy had said when he’d walked into her white bedroom, and now, looking around the spotless studio, she could see his point. Monochromatic white was a great look for a studio full of paintings, not so good for empty rooms. Maybe she’d take a week off and paint a jungle in the attic, thick green leaves that covered her walls and headboard, only this time, no Adam and Eve, they were too hokey, she’d paint a jungle for Steve to hide in.

Then she shook herself out of it. She wasn’t going to have a week off for years, and when she did, she wasn’t going to paint a jungle, that was for kids, Nadine would paint a jungle. No, she’d paint the walls a nice light blue, maybe some stars on the ceiling, maybe some clouds on the walls, too, so she could sleep in the sky…

That was ridiculous, too. Time to get practical. She put her breakfast on the drawing table, went to the drawers along the side of the room, and pulled open the one marked “19th Century.” Flipping through the prints stacked there, she found one of Monet’s water lilies, coming soon to a bathroom wall in New Albany. At least the Impressionists didn’t take nearly as long to forge as the Renaissance painters, so maybe she would have time to paint her room week after next. Maybe yellow. With her kind of sunflowers lining the walls, only with real suns for heads…

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said out loud. She was not going to paint sunflowers in her room. She laid the print on the table, put Melissa Etheridge on the stereo, and turned on the lamp clamped to the edge. It cast a clean white light, nothing to taint the colors in the print, and Tilda began to eat with one hand and make color notations with the other, concentrating on the job at hand, the one that made the money, while Melissa sang “I’m the Only One.” It was a good job. She was her own boss, and she got to paint, she liked to paint, she’d spent fifteen years building a rep as a great painter. Of mural-sized forgeries.

Life could be a lot worse. She could be dependent on somebody else, she could be answerable to a boss, she could have to pretend she liked somebody in order to eat, that would be hell. She was lucky.

She looked at the print in front of her and thought, I hate Monet. And then she went back to work.

THREE BLOCKS AWAY, Clea sat at the breakfast table, tapping her fingernail against her coffee cup. It was the closest she could come to throwing the damn thing at Mason and still project loving warmth, the kind of woman he’d want to face over the breakfast table for the rest of his life.

“Could you stop doing that?” Mason said over his paper.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Clea said, pulling her fingers back. “I was thinking.”

“Don’t,” Mason said and went back to his paper.

Not good. Not good at all. First she’d had to spend the entire evening sitting in that ratty little art gallery watching Mason get all excited about old papers with Gwen Goodnight. Then Davy Dempsey had shown up, and worst of all, when they got home, Mason had said he was too tired for sex. Something had to be done.

“You’re tapping again,” Mason said, closing his paper.

“I’m sorry.” Clea pushed the cup away and smiled brightly. “So what are we going to do today?”

“Well, I’m going to work on my Scarlet Hodge research,” Mason said. “I don’t know what you’re going to do.”

“Oh.” Clea tried to sound bright and independent. “I think I’ll go to the museum and look at their primitives. I want to see how they compare to Cyril’s collection.”

“Very well,” Mason said dryly. “Cyril’s collection wasn’t exactly museum quality.”

“He thought it was,” Clea said, maintaining her smile at great cost. At least, Ronald had told Cyril it was before his death. Ronald had probably gotten that wrong, too, not that they’d ever know with the insurance company dragging its feet.

“Yes, and after he died, nobody else thought much of what was left, did they?” Mason pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m sorry, Clea, I don’t mean to be disrespectful of your late husband, but he really wasn’t a good collector.”

“He was a good man,” Clea said, surprising herself and Mason at the same time.

“Yes, he was,” Mason said, smiling at her for the first time that morning.

“Let me know if I can help you.” Clea leaned forward a little, projecting wifeliness and giving Mason a nice view down the front of her blouse.

“You know what would be a help?” Mason said.

Clea leaned forward a little more.

“If you could make breakfast,” Mason said. “We’ve been making do with toast and coffee for a week now. Can you make omelets?”

Clea felt her smile freeze on her face. “Omelets?”

“Never mind.” Mason turned away. “Maybe we should get that caterer in full time. What was his name?”

“Thomas,” Clea said, her smile still locked in place.

“Maybe Thomas does breakfasts,” Mason said and went upstairs.

Clea sat back in her chair. Breakfast. He wanted her to cook. She had flawless skin, she wore a size four, she knew every sexual position that a man over fifty could want, she was unfailingly cheerful, supportive, complimentary, and passionate on demand, and now he wanted breakfast!

Honest to God, if she had enough money, she’d give up men forever.

The doorbell rang, and Clea got up to answer it. Maybe it was Thomas, looking for work again. If they kept him full time, he could answer the door, too.

She opened the heavy oak door and blinked at the man on the step. Tall, weather-beaten, black hair graying at the temples, wintry gray eyes, angular jaw, shoulders a woman could lean on… not Thomas. It would be so nice if you had money, Clea thought, and then took the rest of her inventory: beat-up tweed jacket, worn jeans, boots that had seen better days… not rich. She let her eyes go back to his face. “We’re not buying anything.”

She started to close the door, but he put his foot in the way. “Clea Lewis?”

“Yes,” Clea said, feeling a chill. She was positive she hadn’t seen this man before, but-

“Ronald Abbott sent me,” he said. “About your problem.”

“Problem?”

“It would be better if I came in,” the man said slowly. “The longer your neighbors watch me on your porch, the better witnesses they’ll make.”

“Witnesses?” Clea said faintly. Oh, God, I told Ronald to get rid of Davy.

The man smiled at her. It wasn’t pleasant. “If anything goes wrong,” he said.

I do not deserve this, Clea thought. This is not the way my life is supposed to be.

“Mrs. Lewis?” the man said.

Clea opened the door.

DAVY WOKE UP feeling cheerful. It was a feeling he hadn’t had in months, and it persisted even when he rolled over and remembered where he was: broke and alone and about to go looking for four paintings he didn’t care about. He found Tilda’s bathroom, showered, shaved, and dressed at full speed, stopping only once, on his way out the door, when he caught sight of a sampler hung over Tilda’s white desk. He looked closer and saw a naked Adam and a naked Eve standing under a spreading cross-stitch tree surrounded by tiny animals with tiny teeth, and under them a verse: