Chapter 29: Sitting

"Why?" I said.

Beatrice didn't answer right away.

She looked at the mailmen sorting their fake letters on the wall.

The pink-cardigan senior mid-throw.

Fran's huge, glorious backside on lane four.

"You're painting the people who stood beside you," she said. "I didn't."

"No. You didn't."

"I'd like to sit anyway. I'll pay your price."

"I don't have a price."

"Then I'll pay the gallery's."

Hutch came down the back hall behind me with a canvas under each arm.

He saw his mother and stopped.

"Mother."

"Hutchinson."

"What are you doing in my party room?"

"Asking your Neve for a favor."

He looked at me.

He didn't say no for me.

He waited.

"Three sittings," I said. "Two hours each. You sit where I put you, and you don't fix anything about how I paint you."

"That sounds very difficult."

"It is."

Beatrice took off her gloves, one finger at a time.

"Monday," she said. "At ten."

She came at ten on Monday, exactly.

I put her on the bar stool in the north light.

She sat on it like it was a throne someone had insulted.

Neither of us said a word for two hours.

The seniors' radio played Sinatra through the wall.

She didn't move once.

At noon she put her gloves back on and left.

Hutch had stayed out of the room the whole time.

"Well?" he said.

"She sits better than you."

"Everybody sits better than me."

The second sitting she talked.

Not to me. To the window.

"I sold the house," she said.

My brush stopped.

"The gray stone house. On the bluff. It closed on Friday."

"Why?"

"Four point six million dollars," she said. "It was my son. It was my bank."

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