In Sickness and in Lies novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Shirt Piece

A collector buys two of Gwyneth's pieces for $31,000. She pays the deposit herself, and Desmond walks into her mother's room with Cilla on his arm.

I slept in the plastic chair beside my mother's bed.

At seven on Monday morning my phone rang with the gallery's number.

"Gwyneth, don't hang up," the gallery owner said. "I know it's a terrible weekend. But I have a collector who walked through your show Sunday and couldn't stop talking about it."

"I can't do this now."

"She wants two pieces. The indigo panels and the shirt piece. She'll pay thirty-one thousand dollars, full price, today."

I sat up so fast the chair creaked.

"Say that again."

She said it again.

The shirt piece was the one I had never priced.

It hung at the center of the room, four hundred square inches of my father's old work shirts, cut and stitched into a single wall of faded blue and grey.

He'd worn them at the plant for thirty years.

I hadn't known if I could ever let it go.

I looked at my mother asleep with her mouth slack on one side.

"Yes," I said. "Both."

"Are you sure? You told me the shirt piece was not for sale."

"It's for sale."

I drove to the West Loop and signed the sale papers at a long white desk.

The collector had already sent a cashier's check.

It was my money, with my name on it, and nobody had asked me to photograph a single shoe for it.

The gallery owner walked me out to the sidewalk.

"You didn't look at the price. Why?"

"My mother needs a rehab bed."

She put her hand on my arm, and did not say anything bright.

By noon I was standing at the desk of the program in Oak Park with a folder and a pen.

"Twenty-four thousand," the woman said, and I put the check on the counter.

She stamped the page.

"Her bed opens as soon as the hospital discharges her."

I walked back to the car and sat with both hands on the wheel.

I was shaking, and it wasn't from fear.

It was my father's shirts.

They had gone into the dye vat, and the stitching, and a hundred nights of my life, and now they were paying for his wife to learn to walk.

I thought he would have signed the check himself.

When I came back to my mother's room, Dr. MacGlynn was at the foot of her bed reading a tablet.

"Her speech therapist starts tomorrow," he said without looking up. "She's already trying to say words."

"She said my name this morning."

"Good." He turned off the tablet. "Billing told me the deposit cleared."

"It did."

"Interesting." He looked at me. "On Saturday you stood in my hallway with nothing in your hands."

"I sold something."

"What?"

"My father's shirts."

He considered that.

"Then I hope the buyer knows what she has," he said.

It was the closest thing to a kind sentence I'd heard from him.

I could not think of an answer, so I took the seat by my mother's bed and held her good hand.

At four o'clock the door opened behind me.

I smelled the lilies before I saw them.

Desmond stood in the doorway in a pressed grey suit with an enormous bouquet in his arms.

Cilla was at his side, in a cream coat with her hair freshly done.

She was carrying a covered pot in both hands.

"There she is," Desmond said, loudly and warmly. "Gwyneth, you look exhausted."

I stood up.

My mother's left hand tightened on mine.

"We came as soon as we could," Cilla said. "I made chicken soup, Gwyneth. Myrna always liked my soup."

She smiled at me, wide and kind.

She did not look at my face for longer than a second.

She looked at the chart in the plastic holder at the foot of the bed.

Desmond set the lilies on the windowsill.

"Now," he said. "I think we can sort all of this out like adults."

"Sort what out?"

"Your tantrum." He said it gently. "Cutting off the cards. The way you spoke to me on the phone."

"You cut off the cards."

"Because you were upset, and I didn't want you spending in a panic. I'm here now, and I'll handle everything. I always do."

He looked at the nurse in the corner, at my mother, and at the doctor beside the window who had not moved.

He seemed to believe they were an audience that had come to see him be generous.

"How much is the deposit again?" Desmond asked, and he already had his hand in his jacket.

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