Chapter 13: Three Years

Three years after I tore up my husband's note, the line outside my gallery reached the corner.

It was a Saturday in January, and the street was frozen.

Larkin Gallery had outgrown the rented shop and taken over the whole brick building on Milwaukee Avenue.

It had a skylight now, a second floor, and a waiting list for paintings signed I. L.

Nobody in Chicago knew who I. L. was.

The papers called the painter the Shy One, and the shyer I stayed, the faster the paintings sold.

Ansel stood at the door in a borrowed tie and let people in ten at a time.

I stood behind the front desk in a black dress with cobalt on the cuff, and nobody looked at me twice.

That was exactly how I wanted it.

Under the long plinth, behind the tablecloth, my son was hiding.

Rory was three years old, with brown curls and his father's gray eyes, and he had stolen the pencil from the guest book again.

I could see his sneakers under the hem.

"Mama," said a small voice from under the cloth. "I'm not here."

"I can tell you're not here," I said.

"Good."

Ansel's mother sat on a stool beside the plinth with her knitting, seeing nothing at all.

At eight, a man in a camel coat walked in past the whole line.

I knew his face from magazines.

He owned a gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street in New York, and he was famous for buying young painters cheap.

He walked the room with two assistants behind him, and he stopped at the new series, seven canvases in a row.

He put a red dot on every one of them.

"Mr. Brooks," he said, and he turned to Ansel at the door. "I'll take the wall. Forty thousand for the lot."

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