Page 45 of Mimosa

Always, imposter syndrome hit deeply when he saw the real paintings he made the copies for. Stepping to it, holding the beam of the flashlight to slowly move from the rocky mountains in the background to the column and the two people, how serene their faces were.

Haze wondered what Parrish was feeling as he painted those two figures. Was he feeling that same way? Serenity washing through him so fully that he felt the need to share it with the world?

Or was he anxious and worried? Haze thought, well, that would actually make better sense. Feelings of stress overwhelming Haze was always when he wanted to paint a world in which those worries didn’t exist.

A lone daisy, growing through a cracked piece of concrete. A piece of paper, escaping the confinement of staples or tape and flying freely in a strong breeze.

To take a brush across a piece of canvas, that soft hum of the bristles scraping the fibers, the sudden appearance of the color in it’s wake…

“Haze, you still with us?” Goldie asked.

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“Good,” Abs said. “Because this was a fake. There’s not one thing this wire is attached to.”

Goldie helped Abs take the painting off the wall, and Haze stiffed with tension, fearing that Abs had been wrong.

There was no alarm, so Haze took out his small tool kit and began to take the painting from the frame while Abs and Goldielooked out for the maid or anyone else that might be in the house they didn’t account for.

Haze felt the canvas in his fingers once it was free of the oak frame. He felt the age of it, just over a hundred years old, and it felt alive in his gloved hands. After he rolled it, he handed it to Goldie while he took out the fake, worried, as always, that it would be discovered immediately, that the headlines would scream about the stupid hack that had painted it.

That had never happened. To his knowledge, none of the fakes he’d painted and traded for the real artworks had been discovered. But there was always that fear.

After he got the painting into the frame, and Goldie rehung it, Abs nitpicked, “It’s not straight.”

“Abs…”

“Well, it’s not. Wouldn’t it suck to be found out by some OCD dude that would notice something like that?”

“Like you, you mean?” Goldie whispered with an almost silent chuckle.

“Exactly.”

Goldie fixed it while Abs supervised and once it was perfect, they gathered their things, and Haze got the real painting into the cylinder.

They made it outside without a problem, and Abs fixed the security system. Following the same strict path back to the fence, Haze held the cylinder a little too tightly. Inside of it was a work of art, real art, the kind that inspired and made people see the world differently. Maybe that was the point of it. Art made people see the beauty of the world when they couldn’t find any in life.

Murphy picked them up at the end of the block and they were gone into the night, the cylinder on Haze’s lap, and his phone in his hand as he texted Mims.

We’re out.

Chapter Thirteen

Mimswasalittlebuzzed from the four beers he’d had, but Sonny very carefully took care of him, making him eat a second hamburger.

They sat together, and here and there, people would come to small talk with them. One thing Mims did notice was that he was no longer stared at. In fact, all of them seemed to be having a good time, and mostly forgot he was there.

Mims thought, yeah, his acting must have worked.

Sonny said the same. “You did really great,” he assured as they left just before ten thirty that evening.

“Really? You don’t think they were just pretending, to, I don’t know, make us think that?”

“They’re not that good at pretending when they’re all together. They save that for the enemies, and as far as they know, for now, you’re not. Neither is the pub. I’ll find out more next meeting without you, but…I think we’re clear. You did well.”

He was still buzzed enough to speak his mind. “Does that mean you don’t need me anymore?”

Sonny didn’t answer for a long time, but Mims did see him clenching his jaw. “Mims, I wasn’t pretending or lying when I said I liked you. Yeah, I don’t have to pretend anymore, I don’t need you for that reason, but I want you for an entirely different reason.”

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