Page 17 of One In Vermillion

There was a flash in his eyes I’d seen before, but never toward me.

He looked around. “Forget it.”

“Were you spying on me?”

“I was driving by on my way to the hairpin turn.”

“To sit and mope?”

“To sit and think. It was a tough day. Why were you there?”

“Molly told me he was going to make wax figures of me and Mickey Pitts as part of some Burney museum there.”

“That’s stupid,” Vince said. “And Cash just happened to have that pink hardhat you were wearing?”

Yeah, I’d already realized Cash had set me up with that story and been waiting for me to show up, which pissed me off even more.

Vince looked around. “Is there anything to eat?”

“Good question,” I snapped. “What do you have planned? It’syour kitchen.”

I saw that flash again, and he muttered something I couldn’t make out and was very sure I didn’t want to because I would go for him then. He left, and I followed him to the arch into the original diner to watch him rummage through the under-counter fridge for leftover take-out. Loudly. Making a point.

That he was a little kid.

“So what happened that put you into this mood?” I asked. “Aside from me paintingyour bedroom.”

He pulled a can of Coke out of the fridge, cracked it, and took a long swallow. “O’Toole fired George today.”

“What?” I said. “Son of abitch. Why—”

“The senator,” Vince said, and he sounded tired beyond words.

“Why—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

I thought about bringing up the partners thing again but talking about George was clearly in the same category as painting his bedroom, so I cleaned up the paint tray and the roller silently. It’s hard to ignore another person in such a small space, but we managed for a while. He was tired and angry, and I was thinking and angry.

It was his bedroom. It was always going to be his bedroom.

But I wanted a blue bedroom. Hell, I wanted a bedroom of my own. Which was nuts, I’d never wanted one before, no dream house in my dreams ever, but . . .

A bedroom of my own that I could paint blue. It kind of took my breath away. I’d never had a room of my own, that belonged to me. Virginia Woolf, that nineteenth century hothead who’d said that a woman who wanted to write fiction needed a room of her own, would have been appalled with me.

“I need a shower,” I said finally, and went and stood in Vince’s shower, letting the hot water pound down on me, thinking about factory papers, and George getting fired, and the blue bedroom I wasn’t getting, and the fact that I was in Vince’s shower, not mine, and Virginia Woolf, and my sudden desire for walls to paint blue. Fuck.

I hate change, but . . .

I put on clean jeans and a t-shirt that read “In my Defense, I Was Left Unsupervised,” and he didn’t crack a smile when he saw it, so I said, “I’m going to the Red Box for dinner. You sit here and sulk about your blue bedroom.”

“Oh, come on, Liz,” he said, as if I were the one at fault.

And maybe I was. After all it washis bedroom.

“Later,” I said, and left to get my burger.

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