How to Tame a Silver Fox novel · Chapter 32 of 32

Chapter 32: A Year

"You're moving," I said.

"I'm breathing."

"You moved your whole face. Eyebrow, jaw, and a thing with your mouth."

"It itched."

"Four hours, Arlen. I asked for four hours."

He was sitting on a wooden stool in the middle of the carriage house, in an open-necked shirt, in a bar of October light.

The silver at his temples had spread a little in a year.

I had stopped painting it grey and started mixing it with a thread of blue.

"I have now sat for you more times than I ever sat for a judge," he said.

"You were in front of a judge once."

"And I was better behaved."

I put down the brush.

On the wall behind him hung a girl on the stairs in her nightgown, laughing.

Beside her hung my mother's lawn, with the seam in its sky.

Outside the window, the garden was brown and gold.

Arlen's mother had put in tomato plants along the studio wall in May and refused to take them out until frost.

A shadow moved along the glass.

I looked past Arlen's shoulder, and there was a man at the garden gate.

He had lost forty pounds, and the red had gone out of his cheeks.

His hair was cut very short, and it was grey, entirely grey, with no blond left in it.

He stood with both hands at his sides, on the far side of the gate, and he did not open it.

That was the term, and he kept it.

"Do you want me to go out?" Arlen asked quietly.

"No. Stay on the stool."

"I'm moving."

"Stay."

I went out into the garden.

My father looked at me through the slats, and his eyes were clear, and I hadn't seen them clear in years.

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