—
Sometimes she had friends over from work.
They had clean fingernails.
Both women and men.
It was a long way from construction zones.
Michael was painting a lot in the garage, too, so his hands were either powdery or stubbed with color. He drank coffee from the kettle, they drank it from machines.
As for Abbey, her hair was increasingly cropped, her smile business-like, and in the end, she was brave enough to leave. She could touch his arm like years gone by, with a comment or a quip. Or joke and wink and smile at him—but each time was less convincing. He knew very well that later on, they’d be in separate states of the bed.
“Good night.”
“I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Often, he’d get up.
He’d go to the garage and paint, but his hands were so damn heavy, as if caked, cemented in. Often, he took The Quarryman, too, and read pages like a kind of prescription; each word to ease the pain. He would read and work till his eyes burned, and a truth beside, then on him.
There was he and Buonarroti.
One artist in the room.
* * *
—
Maybe if they’d argued.
Maybe that’s what was missing.
Some volatility.
Or maybe just more cleaning up.
No, it was pure and simple fact:
Life was pointed elsewhere for Abbey Dunbar now, and a boy she once loved, behind her. Where once he painted her and she loved him for it, now it seemed only a lifeline. He could capture her laughing over the dishes. Or standing by the sea, with surfers at her back, post-wave. They were still lovely and rich, those paintings, but where once there was only love in them, now it was love and neediness. It was nostalgia; love and loss.
* * *
—
Then one day, she stopped, midsentence.
She whispered, “It’s a shame…”
The suburban almost-quiet.
“It’s such a shame, because…”
“What?”