Page 38 of Finders Keepers
“You literally just had one that failed!” I protest. “You’re the one who had me go back upstairs, remember?”
“Hey, you can’t blame me for that. Isn’t my fault you didn’t execute it correctly.”
I narrow my eyes, ready to tell him to shove it. But he stops leaning on the bit of mushroom stem and starts walking away. “I’ll email them tonight and try to set up something—maybe for Friday,” he says over his shoulder. And before he turns his head back around, I notice a grin spreading slowly across his face. “If that works for you…cookiepuss.”
16
Quentin drops meback off at my parents’ house before continuing on to run some errands. The discombobulated feeling plaguing me can’t be blamed completely on the grocery store sushi I had as a late breakfast. Sure, that might account for the bubbling in my stomach, but it doesn’t explain the bizarre urge I have to run upstairs the moment I walk into the house, close the door to my bedroom, and look at the Sprangbur wedding gallery until the images are permanently burned into my retinas. It’s easy to tell myself it’s because I need to study for our upcoming venue tour, but the fact that I want to do it in secret and slight shame, like I’m a teen who’s just discovered porn, alerts me that it’s also probably not the healthiest impulse I’ve ever had. And speaking of porn…
“Is that a penis?” I find myself asking the question before I realize I may not actually want to know the answer.
“It is indeed,” Mom says cheerfully from where she has her tablet, zoomed in quite tightly on a man’s genitalia, propped infront of her on the coffee table as she uses light strokes to shade her approximation in a sketchbook.
“But. Mother. Why?”
She removes her reading glasses and sets them to the side. “I’ve signed up for a life drawing class at the new community center in Derring Heights. We’ll be working with nude models, and I wanted to practice the awkward parts on my own so I’m less flustered in person.”
“I…I think…Okay.”
“Oh, Nina! There are still a few open seats in the class. Why don’t you join me? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Ah, I’m…I don’t…”I don’t want to draw naked people with my motheris going to hurt her feelings, which I think are already a little tender after I turned down her neighborhood walking group invite this morning. “I have plans then,” I say instead. “But maybe some other time.” A lie, of course, but I’ll just have to cross the excuse bridge for that when we get to it.
“But I didn’t even tell you when it was.”
“When is it?”
“The first class is next Saturday evening. On the twenty-first. It starts at eight.”
“Yep, I definitely have plans then.” The date does sound familiar, in truth.DoI have something going on then? Other than the upcoming venue tour with Quentin, I’m not sure there’s anything on my schedule. Oh, right. That fundraiser at Hanako’s. I hadn’t particularly wanted to go, but it’s a perfect excuse. “I ran into an old classmate last week. Hanako Hughes. Remember her? The one who came right before me alphabetically, who was really good at cross-country?” I pause, waiting to see if my mom knows who I’m talking about. Since she workedat the high school when I went there, she usually remembers my classmates better than I do.
“Hmm…Oh! Yes. I think I took a pottery class with her aunt a few months ago.”
I nod. “Yeah, exactly, her. She owns a cocktail bar in a converted old warehouse near Riverside Park. Quentin and I promised to stop by for this fundraiser thing.” I admit that it feels a little scummy, all this fibbing to my mother. But the spirit—if not the details—of what I’m saying is true. We did tell Hanako we’d try to come. Even if I didn’t really mean it then, it doesn’t mean I can’t now.
Mom’s smile is so bright and unexpected that I find myself repeating my words in my head in an attempt to figure out what I said that could have been so intensely pleasing to her. As far as I know, my mom is ambivalent toward cocktail bars, converted warehouses, and Riverside Park.Quentin and I promised to stop by.Dammit. Yep, that would’ve done it. I invoked her current favorite person on earth and implied that he and I have repaired our relationship enough to make plans together.
“That’s wonderful. I’m so glad he and you have mended things,” she says, turning back to her enlarged penis image and picking up her pencil before exclaiming and sliding it behind her ear. She looks so genuinely pleased that I can’t bear to tell her that Quentin and I haven’t “mended things” so much as I’ve decided to completely suppress all of my long-carried animosity and pain (and a surprising amount of fresh physical attraction) in pursuit of hopefully getting some extra cash and the heck out of Dodge ASAP.
I respond with a brisk, “Yep, me too. Anyway, I have to—”
“That reminds me. The class instructor sent out an emailasking us to let people know they need models for the next few weeks…”
How did anything I just said remind her of that? My mother’s thought processes are a mystery. “I’m going to stop you right there, Mom,” I say, holding my hand up as if physically keeping the idea away from me. I did a lot of work with various therapists around body neutrality over the years, and most of the time I feel pretty content with myself. But posing nude in front of a bunch of people—one of them being my mother—is not a thing I’m up for at the moment. Or probably ever. “If you’re about to suggest that I—”
“No, no, of course not. I know you get nervous in front of an audience. Like when you had to sing that solo at the fourth-grade chorus concert and you fainted right off the stage.”
God, Quentin made fun of me for that one for literal years. His reenactment was an artful physical comedy piece that I would have appreciated a lot more had I not been the butt of the joke. I think that’s also what prompted me to pay his older sister twenty bucks to freeze his favorite Game Boy game inside a block of ice (inside multiple Ziplocs; I’m not a complete monster).
“I remember,” I grumble.
“Anyway, when you see Quentin again, maybe you could ask him if he’s interested?”
“Excuse me?”
“What? He’s a handsome man, Nina. And he seems confident. Just ask him for me, okay?”
“Why don’t you ask him yourself at one of your daily breakfasts, since you two have apparently become such close friends?” I immediately regret the bitterness in my voice as soon as thewords hit the air. My mother frowns at me in quiet admonishment, and I bow my head. “Sorry. I’m still a bit…Yeah. Sure. I’ll ask him.” It feels easier to break that promise—and I amnotgoing to ask Quentin to be a nude model for my mother’s drawing class, it just isn’t going to happen—than to argue.
