As I kept walking, only one artist’s work gave me real pause. I stopped at a painting of a small cottage on top of a hill. There was a soft morning glow hitting the side—the pinkness that comes with the first light of day. I couldn’t tell you why but it choked me up. Maybe it was the dark windows, as though the cottage had once been warm but it was abandoned now. I don’t know. But I stood in front of the painting and felt lost and moved. I stepped slowly from one painting to the next. They all delivered a blow of some kind. Some made me melancholy. Some made me nostalgic, whimsical, passionate. None left me indifferent.
I will spare you the “big reveal” that the paintings were done by Natalie.
A woman was smiling at my reaction. “Do you like them?”
“Very much,” I said. “Are you the artist?”
“Heavens no. I run the bakery and coffee shop in town.” She offered me her hand. “They call me Cookie.”
I shook it. “Wait. Cookie runs a bakery?”
“Yeah, I know. Too precious, right?”
“Maybe a tad.”
“The artist is Natalie Avery. She’s right over there.”
Cookie pointed to the woman with the sunglasses.
“Oh,” I said.
“Oh what?”
With the sunglasses-indoors look, I had her pegged as the creator of
Everyone quickly rose except for Natalie. The man with the beard and curly hair whispered something to her as he stood, but still she didn’t move. She stayed with her arms crossed, still lost, it seemed, in the essence of Hitler’s dog.
I approached her. She looked right through me.
“The cottage in your painting. Where is it?”
“Huh?” she said, startled. “Nowhere. What painting?”
I frowned. “Aren’t you Natalie Avery?”
“Me?” She seemed befuddled by the question. “Yeah, why?”
“The painting of the cottage. I really loved it. It . . . I don’t know. It moved me.”
“Cottage?” She sat up, took off the sunglasses, and rubbed her eyes. “Sure, right, a cottage.”
I frowned again. I was not sure what reaction I expected, but something a bit more demonstrative than this. I looked down at her. Sometimes I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer but when she rubbed her eyes again, the realization hit me.
“You were sleeping!” I said.
“What?” she said. “No.”
But she rubbed her eyes some more.
“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s why you’re wearing the sunglasses. So no one can tell.”
“Shh.”
“You were sleeping this whole time!”
“Keep it down.”
She finally looked up at me and I remembered thinking that she had a beautiful, sweet face. I would soon learn that Natalie had what I’d call a slow beauty, the kind you don’t really notice at first and then it knocks you back and grows on you and she gets more beautiful every time you see her and then you can’t believe that you ever thought that she was anything less than completely stunning. Whenever I saw her, my entire body reacted, as though it were the first time or better.
“Was I that obvious?” she asked in a whisper.
“Not at all,” I said. “I just thought you were being a pretentious ass.”
She arched an eyebrow. “What better disguise to blend in with this crowd?”
I shook my head. “And I thought you were a genius when I saw your paintings.”
“Really?” She seemed caught off guard by the compliment.
“Really.”
She cleared her throat. “And now that you see how deceptive I can be?”
“I think you’re a
Natalie liked that. “You can’t fault me. That Lars guy is like human Ambien. He opens his mouth, I’m out.”
“I’m Jake Fisher.”
“Natalie Avery.”
“So do you want to grab a cup of coffee, Natalie Avery? Looks like you could use one.”
She hesitated, studying my face to the point where I think I started to redden. She tucked a ringlet of black hair behind her ear and stood. She moved closer to me, and I remember thinking that she was wonderfully petite, smaller than I had imagined when she’d been sitting. She looked way up at me, and a smile slowly came to her face. It was, I must say, a great smile. “Sure, why not?”
That image of that smile held in my brain for a beat before it mercifully dissolved away.
I was out at the Library Bar with Benedict. The Library Bar was pretty much exactly that—an old, dark-wood campus library that had recently been converted into a retro-trendy drinking establishment. The owners were clever enough to change very little of the old library. The books were still on the oak shelves, sorted in alphabetical order or the Dewey Decimal System or whatever the librarians had used. The “bar” was the old circulation desk. The coasters were old card files that had been laminated. The lights were green library lamps.
