Briana shook her head. “No, nothing like that. Craig was Robert’s best friend going way back. He was there for me that terrible day, helping with the arrangements. I don’t know if I could have gotten through the funeral without him. But we’re just friends.”
She could tell he didn’t believe her and wondered why she wanted him to. Her relationship with Craig was none of Slade’s business. Yet knowing he’d witnessed that kiss bothered her. She disliked having given the wrong impression. “I discouraged him from visiting me here, but he came anyhow. I don’t know why, since I’ve told him repeatedly that there can’t be anything between us but friendship.”
“Why can’t there be?” Slade had been watching her closely, wondering if she, too, felt she could somehow say things to him that she might not have before yesterday, when her defenses had been stripped raw. He doubted that she saw Craig Walker the way he did, as a man intent on moving in on a beautiful, vulnerable woman.
Briana shrugged. “Because he was Robert’s friend, not mine. And because the last thing I need in this world is to get involved with anyone, much less someone I feel nothing for except gratitude.”
Slade’s expression relaxed. Maybe she did see through Craig. “I admire a woman who knows her own mind.”
She couldn’t take credit for that. “I wish that described me. On the subject of Craig I do, but on very little else lately, it seems. Half the time, I feel as if I’m floundering, uncertain which choice is the right one.”
Slade nodded. “I understand that perfectly, which brings me to my problem. The owner of that art gallery in town called earlier today. She claims she’s got people clamoring for Jeremy’s paintings. I’ve been trying to sort through them, but I don’t know which ones to take in. Will you come upstairs and have a look?”
“Sure, although I don’t know how much help I’ll be.” She followed him up the stairs, her eyes straying to muscular legs, her thoughts again giving her pause. Annoyed with herself, Briana walked into Jeremy’s storage room, intent on concentrating on paintings.
“Oh, my,” she whispered, gazing about the large cool room as Slade turned on the lights. Jeremy had had it customized so that three of the four walls were filled with narrow cubicles, each containing a painting that slid into its own slot and stood upright on the edge of the canvas. Glass doors closed off each section, preventing dust from harming the art. “There have to be over a hundred paintings in here,” she commented, awestruck anew by Jeremy’s output.
“A hundred eighty to be exact,” he told her. “And another fifty or sixty in his studio downstairs where he did his actual painting and framing.” Hands on his hips, he gazed around the room. “You see my dilemma?”
“Yes, I certainly do.” She walked over to the far end and opened that glass door. “Maybe they’re stored according to subject matter or perhaps by date. Did he sign and date all of them, I hope?”
“From what I’ve checked, yes, he did. Does that make a difference?”
“It sure does.” She eased out a large canvas depicting a seascape resplendent with colorful sailboats. “This looks as if it might be a scene he painted right out front here.”
“Every one I’ve looked at randomly appears to be painted around Nantucket.” He walked to the opposite wall. “Except for this small group.” Opening the glass door, he pulled out a canvas no bigger than nine-by-twelve. “Portraits. Do you know who this fellow might be?”
A soft smile on her lips, Briana walked over and stood gazing at the white-haired man with the craggy, tanned face, a pipe stuck in his mouth, laugh lines crinkling the corners of his blue eyes. “That’s Gramp,” she said, swallowing around a sudden lump in her throat. “That’s how he looked, oh, even last year, before the awareness slipped from his eyes.”
Slade put it in her hands. “It’s yours.”
“Oh, no.” She continued looking at the portrait, her admiration for Jeremy’s talent evident. “I can’t accept this, Slade. It’s worth a great deal.”
“That isn’t the point. It’s mine to give, apparently, and I want you to have it.”
“Look, I’d like to have this because I believe paintings should reside with people who love them, and I love this. But I’ll pay you for it.”
“I’ll tell you what. We’ll arm wrestle for it. Winner gets his way.” Slade watched another of her infrequent smiles form, and felt he’d done the right thing. He bent to pull out another canvas of an old man, this one tall and thin, slightly stooped, walking along a tree-lined street using a bentwood cane, a white cap with a dark bill on his head. “Do you recognize him?”
Reluctantly taking her eyes from Gramp’s painting, she shifted her gaze. “That’s Sailor Bob, a character if ever there was one. He rented boats to tourists as far back as I can remember and told stories about how he used to sail the high seas in his younger days. He died about five years ago. I had no idea Jeremy did portraits, too.”
“Do you know if Sailor Bob has family here? They might like to have this.”
Setting down the painting she still held, she stared at him. “Are you going to methodically give all these away?”
Slade straightened, gesturing around the room with one hand. “Look at this room, Briana. According to Fern Brokawer, some sell for five thousand, more as high as ten, and a few of the smaller ones go for two or three thousand. And that was
before
Jeremy died. She claims she’ll be able to get more for each now. Don’t you think I can afford to give away a few?”
“Yes, I guess you can.” She had to remind herself that he had no sentimental ties to Jeremy Slade, and the reminder saddened her. “Would it bother you to tell me what happened to estrange you and your father?”
In a way, he supposed it would bother him. But hadn’t she opened to him, showed a far more vulnerable side? He rarely talked about Jeremy, but what could it hurt?
He considered her question. “I wish I knew what happened back all those years ago.” He returned Sailor Bob to his cubicle. “I’m not trying to be cagey because I honestly don’t know.” There was only one window in the room, covered with wooden blinds kept closed to keep the light to a minimum. Beneath it were two navy canvas boat chairs. Slade strolled over, lifted a wooden slat, and gazed out. But instead of seeing blue sky and tumbling waves, he was remembering another time as if it were yesterday.
“I’d just come home from school and there was my father, back from one of his almost weekly trips. He was a traveling salesman. Only instead of his usual smiling greeting, he walked past me all tight-lipped and angry, carrying his bags out and loading them in his car. I knew something was terribly wrong. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer me, so I went inside to get an explanation from my mother. She was sitting by the window crying, and she wouldn’t talk to me, either. The next day was my tenth birthday.”
Briana wondered if he knew just how heartbreaking he sounded. She walked over to join him, sitting down in one of the chairs and looking up at him. “And up to that point, you hadn’t had a clue that something was wrong between them?”
Slowly, Slade shook his head. “I thought we had an ideal life, but what does a kid know? We had a nice house in this small town outside Sacramento, with a big yard and a pool. Dad was gone a lot, but when he was home, he taught me to swim, to ride horseback, took me camping. Mom was always laughing. We were happy. Then, without a word of explanation, without a backward glance, he drove away. I stood on the porch long after his car was out of sight. I didn’t cry. I think I was in shock.”
“And your mother, did she say anything later, give you some reason? Maybe they had a quarrel?”
“I never heard them argue, not once. I never heard my father raise his voice, not to me or to my mother. No matter how many times I asked her why he left, she never gave me a reason.”
Briana had known Jeremy to be closemouthed, but to walk away from his only child like that. It was shocking. “Your mother must have taken it hard, too.”
He let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, you could say that. She’d married young, wasn’t trained to do much besides clerical work. She no sooner got a job than she lost it. We moved out of the house, probably because she couldn’t afford to keep it. We were always moving after that, one crummy apartment after another.” Abruptly, he turned and sat down, feeling weary.
“Surely, if there was a divorce, Jeremy had to pay child support. You were so young.”
“He did. The envelopes arrived every month, like clockwork, despite our many address changes. No note, just the check. But still, there was never enough money.” He reached for the glass of iced tea he’d set down before answering the door. “You’ll be happy to know I’m off the sauce.” He swirled ice in the glass, staring at it.
“You see, we kept moving to stay ahead of the bill collectors. We couldn’t pay even the rent half the time because my mother decided the bottle was her best escape.” He took a long swallow of tea. “Maybe that’s why I gave booze a try recently, to see if I could discover what pleasure she found in passing out night after night so I’d have to put her to bed. Or wandering off to bars and forgetting to come home so I’d have to go looking for her.” Another grim laugh escaped from him. “Damned if I know what it was because all I found was a major hangover.”
“She’s not the first person who’s tried to find the answer in alcohol, nor the last. What pain she must have been in.”
“She suffered, that’s for sure.” He gazed around, his eyes bitter and angry. “And all the while, he was sitting in this expensive house stockpiling money and paintings.”
She studied him as he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his stubborn chin set, his gray eyes stormy. “You hate him very much.”
It wasn’t a question, he knew. He set down his glass and let out a rush of air. “I’ve sure as hell spent a lot of years trying. I hate what he did to us, but I keep thinking he had to have had a reason. I need to know mat reason.”
He’d tried to hate, but wound up hurting instead. It might have been easier on him if he could have kept that edge of anger. “Have, you looked through his papers? Maybe he left you a letter or some explanation.”
“I haven’t gone through everything, but I did separate his legal papers into piles. There’s no letter.”
She wanted badly to offer him some hope. “Maybe, in reading everything thoroughly, you’ll find an answer. I’m surprised your mother, if she drank so much, didn’t slip and tell you.”
“I used to try to get her to open up when she’d been drinking, thinking the same thing. All she ever said, over and over, was that she loved Jeremy, but he didn’t believe her.” He looked over and guessed what she was thinking. “You think he came home early and caught her with another guy, right? Could be, I suppose. But I want you to know that never in all the time between him leaving and her dying the week after my nineteenth birthday did I see her with a guy. Not once. Even in the bars, she sat alone, she drank alone, she staggered home alone.”
“Heartbreaking. What did you do after she died?”
“I joined the navy to see the world. I pretty much did, too. It wasn’t such a bad four years. They let me finish college, taught me to fly.” He’d come back stronger, tougher, but just as unhappy.
A misfit, Slade had decided, that was what he’d been. A man without a family, without a home to come back to or a city he could call his own. He’d tried one job after another, one town after another, one woman, then another. Too many. None seemed right, no place ever seemed like home. Then one day, he’d met a guy who’d pointed him in a positive direction.
“After the navy, I became a firefighter, flying planes to put out all those California brushfires. It was exciting work and paid well.”
“I had the impression you were a fireman on the ground.”
“I was, after I quit flying.” That was where he’d found his real calling. For five years, the guys at Number 105 Engine & Ladder Company had been like his extended family. Hell, they’d been his
only
family. Then had come the incident that had sent him into a new kind of hell, one of his own making.
“You said yesterday you wouldn’t go back to firefighting again.”
Slade sat back, realizing he’d talked more about himself in the last half hour than he had in the last five years. He hadn’t even told the company shrink as much as he’d revealed to Briana today. He looked over at her, afraid he might see pity in her eyes with all she’d learned about him. But he saw only understanding and a hint of what looked like admiration. “You listen awfully well, you know. Too well.”
She guessed what he was feeling and touched his arm gently. “Do you regret confiding in me? Please don’t. It’ll go no further. I think my behavior yesterday was far worse than anything you’ve said today.” She saw in his eyes that he was remembering that scene in the kitchen, the one she wished she could erase from both their memory banks. “And don’t be ashamed of what you’ve been through, Slade. It took courage, a great deal of courage, for a ten-year-old to survive against those odds.”
“I didn’t feel particularly courageous. I remember being scared shitless most of the time.”
“Undoubtedly, but you survived. You’re a survivor. Someone recently said that about me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be. Things happen sometimes and you feel as if it’d be easier to just give up, that it wouldn’t hurt so much. But my dear friend, Irma Tatum, said that there are two kinds of people in the world, the quitters and the survivors. And that you can pretty much tell at an early age with a child which way they’ll turn out.”
“You believe that?”
“Yes, I think I do. Or maybe I just want to. How about you?”
“I’ll have to give it some thought.” Slade drew in a long breath, then stood. “So, are you going to pick out some paintings for me to take over to the art gallery? Or do you want to get started on the house and we’ll do this later?”
“Let’s pick out half a dozen paintings now. That should hold Fern for a while.” Briana rose and walked to the end row. “Maybe you should choose one from each year, starting with the oldest, for six years. And make them just a little different, a seascape, maybe a street scene, then a lighthouse view. I know Jeremy must have several lighthouse paintings. I used to see him set up his easel down the beach and sit for hours on end.”