Chapter 28: Fourteen

Eight paintings in eight weeks.

I'd done six in four months.

"How bad?" Hutch said into the pillow.

"Eight in eight."

He rolled over and looked at the ceiling.

"Okay," he said. "What do you need?"

"Canvas. Stretchers. A lot of both. And people who'll sit still."

"I've got people," he said. "They don't sit still."

The league came in shifts, the way they had for the self-portrait.

Except this time they were the paintings.

The four mailmen came first, on a Tuesday afternoon, in their Return to Sender shirts.

I'd planned them in a row.

They refused.

They wanted to be sorting mail.

The notary brought a canvas sack of envelopes from his basement.

They sat around a folding table and pretended to sort them for three hours.

The one who drove the seventy-two fell asleep sorting.

I painted him asleep.

The others said that was the most accurate thing anybody had ever done.

The pink-cardigan senior wanted to be painted mid-throw.

"Pretend it's his head," I said.

"Oh, honey. It's always his head."

She held the pose so long her grandson had to bring her a chair.

The couple from lane eleven sat holding hands in their bowling shoes.

They'd met there in 1966.

He'd thrown a gutter ball and she'd laughed at him, and he'd been trying to make her laugh ever since.

The bartender sat at nine in the morning with the first pot of coffee and the pencil behind her ear.

The little boy from the Sunday youth league came back to show me where his new tooth was growing in.

I painted him with the gap.

Fran wouldn't sit at all.

So I painted her the only way she exists, on lane four, one leg up, pointing at the pins like they owed her money.

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