Always Florence (7 page)

Nate looked her over with sudden sympathy. “Do you want to stay?”

Dylan replied for her. “She’s going to show me what to do with some of the stuff she gave me,” he said, and went to the table where his art bag hung over the back of a chair.

“And she’s going to help me with my picture.” Sheamus pulled out a chair at the table, then said gravely to his uncle, “Maybe she should have a cup of coffee, Uncle Nate.”

“You’re right. Coming up.” Nate turned back to the counter as Sheamus pushed Bobbie toward the chair and Dylan sat opposite her.

“I love all the stuff you gave me.” Dylan frowned suddenly and handed her the square eraser. “But I don’t know how this works.”

“Here. I’ll show you.”

Nate got a mug down from the shelf and watched her and the boys.

“This is no ordinary eraser,” she told Dylan, pulling and tugging on it, warming it with her hands until the rubber was malleable. She rolled it between her palms to form a ball, then pulled out a small section almost into a point.

“This is almost like having another color,” she went on. “It allows you to take out what you don’t want in a sketch and leave white space. And when you manipulate it to make it skinny like this...” She made a mark on a piece of paper with one of his pencils, then removed a small part with the tip of the eraser. “...you can get the tiniest spot out of a very small space.”

She rolled the rubber back into a ball, then used it to remove the entire mark.

Dylan looked on in surprise. “Wow!”

“Isn’t that cool? You should work it in your hands when you start. I do it while I’m looking at a sketch and planning what I’m going to do next.”

Dylan looked up at Nate in obvious delight. Then, realizing what he’d done, he glanced away again.

“Cool,” Nate said simply. He put a cup of steaming coffee in front of Bobbie. “Cream or sugar?” he asked.

“No, I drink it straight,” she replied. “Thank you.” She took a quick sip and set the cup back down.

Sheamus sat across the table from Dylan and beckoned her over to look at his project. She saw that a sheet of drawing paper was attached to a board with stationery clips. “This is cool,” she said.

“Uncle Nate made them for us.” Sheamus reclaimed his art. “I haven’t gotten very far,” he complained, tapping his pencil against the same head and trunk circles he’d drawn in her class.

“We just have to think about this.” She leaned toward his drawing. “So, we know he should have hair. What do you think his hair looks like? What color is it?”

“Your color,” he said.

She found the black pencil in the array spread beside him and handed it to him.

“Is it curly?”

“No. It sticks up. Like punk hair.”

“Okay. Give him some hair.” She peered closer. “Make it just like you see it in your mind.”

He made large, irregular spikes atop the head circle. “Like that?”

“What about his nose?”

With the same pencil, Sheamus drew a big circle in the middle of the monster’s face. He added dots for nostrils.

“Very good,” she declared. “Does he have lumpy ears, too?”

The boy shook his head. “Pointy ears.”

“Okay. Let’s see what they look like.”

Sheamus carefully made bat ears, then leaned back to study his work. “Yeah. That’s about right. And he has big shoes with a big buckle on them.” He drew the feet, one considerably larger than the other, then added straps and a lopsided but clearly defined buckle on each.

“All right. He’s really taking shape.”

Sheamus turned to her and said gravely, “He needs a tool belt.”

“Really. Why a tool belt?” she asked.

“Because I heard him working in there.”

“I thought he was humming.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but maybe he’s using power tools.”

“Is he building stuff? Is there anything new in your closet that wasn’t there before? Like another shelf, or something?”

He looked at her with a “duh!” expression. “I don’t know. I can’t go in there, remember?”

Flawless logic. She nodded in apology.

He handed her the pencil. “I don’t know how to draw a tool belt. Can you do it?”

“Sure.” She took a long pull on her coffee, then moved the board toward her, considering a minute before she began to draw. She created a belt with dangling pockets around his bulky middle, a power drill sticking out of it, and a power hammer dangling from a loop. Bobbie had both tools in her own arsenal in the garage.

Sheamus was delighted. He stood and leaned over her shoulder to watch her work. She could feel his little heart beating against her arm.

Nate came to stand over them. “Handsome dude,” he said. “But he doesn’t have eyes.”

“We’re getting to that.” Bobbie handed him her half-empty cup. “That’s really good stuff. May I have a warm-up?”

“I’m on it. Anyone want cocoa?”

Sheamus shook his head. “I want to finish Shrek first.”

Bobbie looked up, completely distracted by Sheamus’s reply. Her eyes met Nate’s. She could tell they shared the same thought. Shrek was seriously nonthreatening as monsters went. That seemed like a good sign.

“You want to finish your monster instead of having cocoa?” Nate asked with a smile. “Does that mean you’re getting to like him?”

“Uncle Nate, Shrek is an ogre,” Sheamus corrected.

“What’s the difference between the two?” Bobbie asked.

“Um...” Sheamus thought.

Dylan, hard at work on his own sketch, looked up to explain. “Ogres are humanoid. Monsters are really big and usually animal, or parts of animals, or sometimes part people and part animal.”

Again, Bobbie’s eyes met Nate’s in amazement. He patted Dylan’s shoulder. “Atta boy,” he said. “Dazzle us with your smarts.”

Dylan gave the barest of smiles. “Justin has the Monster Slayer game. You have to have different weapons to get different monsters.”

“So, you think my monster should have a different name?” Sheamus tried to reclaim attention.

“How do you know what’s in your closet is a monster and not an ogre?” Dylan asked. “Or a troll?”

“’Cause I know,” Sheamus insisted.

“’Cause you made him up.”

“Dyl,” Nate warned.

Dylan went back to work, ignoring the monster construction.

“I think he’s
your
monster,” Nate said, “and you can name him whatever you want.” He angled his head for a better look at the sketch. Bobbie turned it so that he could see. “But maybe he should have a special name. One that just belongs to him.”

Sheamus thought. “Like...Bill?”

Bobbie bit back a smile.

“That doesn’t sound very scary,” Nate said.

Sheamus shrugged, apparently thinking that was all right.

Dylan looked up again. “His name should be something creepy, like Skeletor. I know that’s already taken, but something like that.”

“No, I like Bill.” Sheamus was stubborn.

“Okay.” Dylan leaned over his own work again. “But it’s dumb.”

“What color is Bill?” Bobbie held up a green pencil. “Same color as Shrek?”

Sheamus leaned his elbows on the table. “Brown. Like a bear. He’s part people, part bear.”

She held up a yellow-brown and a dark brown. Sheamus picked the dark one, so she crosshatched color onto Bill’s round face, rotund body and squatty arms and legs.

“Do you think he should have a jacket? You know, since he’s in the closet where your winter clothes are.”

“Yeah. One of my jackets is green with a hood. I don’t like it, so he can have that one.”

“Right.” A green zippered jacket with a hood took shape. She added a smiley-face button to the collar. “What about a hat?”

Nate took a seat at a right angle to her and watched the drawing progress. When she glanced up, he did, too, and something completely unexpected happened. Electricity. As though the pencil in her hand had become a bare wire. Their eyes connected again. She felt his gaze like a touch.

He looked as startled by the impact as she was.

“I hate to wear a hat,” Sheamus said, unaware of anything but his monster. “I bet he does, too.”

She refocused on the monster, who was becoming less and less threatening as she built and clothed him. Which was precisely what she’d hoped for.

Sheamus pointed to Bill’s throat. “I have a yellow scarf my mom made hanging inside the closet door.”

A mild but palpable tension invaded the room.

“Should we put that on him,” Bobbie asked gently, “or should we save it for you? When you can open the closet, that might be the first thing you take out.”

He considered that, his eyes troubled.

“You have a blue scarf in there, too.” Nate spoke softly, leaning closer to study the figure. “It has red and yellow dinosaurs on it, remember? I brought it back for you when I went to New York. Bill would look cool in it.”

Sheamus smiled broadly as he remembered. “From the museum. Dylan got a red one with blue and yellow dinosaurs.”

“That’s right. That was a couple of years ago. You were just little guys.”

Dylan didn’t look up.

Sheamus turned to Bobbie. “It’s kinda little. Can we make it fit Bill?”

“I think we can.” She set to work with all the colors Nate had mentioned, and made it fit snugly, its two short ends sticking out of the knot at the side of Bill’s throat. The dinosaur pattern was small but visible.

“He should have mean eyes!” Enthusiastic again, Sheamus jabbed a finger at Bill’s face.

“At last!” Nate exclaimed, slapping the table. “I was afraid we’d have to teach him to read braille.”

Bobbie did as Sheamus asked, but made the eyes comically angry. An inverted eyebrow added tension but in the end he looked more disgruntled than mean. She added color to his cheeks, then drew a snarl that was also more funny than frightening.

Sheamus unclipped the sketch from the board and held it up. He looked unsure at first, but finally smiled. He turned to his uncle. “Can I tape this to the closet door?”

“Sure.”

“Will you help me put it up when I go to bed?”

“Yes. Meanwhile, why don’t you put him on the refrigerator? We can get used to him before you go to bed.”

Sheamus took a yellow power company magnet shaped like a lightbulb and secured the portrait under several postcards and a school lunch menu. Bill was impressive. His dimensions were large, his pose blustery, but his general impression was one of vulnerability.

“Doesn’t he need fangs?” Nate asked, a smile in his voice.

“Yeah!” Sheamus agreed.

Bobbie went to the refrigerator with the black pencil and a yellow one. She gave Bill one regular fang, then colored the other yellow. But when she stood back to study it she wasn’t happy. “I wish I had a gold pencil,” she complained. “That looks more like yellowed decay than a gold tooth.”

“Here.” Dylan offered a marker she had put in his bag of supplies. Nate took it from him and passed it to Bobbie.

She uncapped it and turned the yellow fang gold, even added a few sparkle lines to depict glitter. She stood back again and laughed aloud. “That’s perfect! Thank you, Dylan.” She handed the marker to Nate, who passed it back.

“Thanks, Dyl. Just what it needed.”

“Sure.” He smiled thinly, then added, “Bill’s still a stupid name.”

Sheamus ignored that. “How come a gold fang?”

“In the old days,” Nate explained, with a hand on the boy’s shoulder as they studied the portrait together, “dentists used gold to fill teeth. Pirates usually have at least one gold tooth.”

Sheamus studied Bill closely. “I kinda like him,” he said. Bobbie silently cheered. Mission accomplished. Almost. He still had to open the closet door.

The living room clock chimed eight. Sheamus poked Dylan on the shoulder. “
Suite Life of Zack and Cody
is on.” He turned to his uncle. “Can we go watch TV before bed?”

“Sure.”

“And now can we have cocoa?” He smiled winningly.

“Go ahead. I’ll bring it in a minute.”

Bobbie noticed that Dylan had turned his sketch facedown before getting up. “Can I see what you’ve done?” she asked, before he could follow his brother.

Dylan stopped in the doorway to consider, bounced a glance off his uncle. “It isn’t finished.” He nodded reluctantly. “Okay. But don’t laugh.”

She frowned at him. “Artists never laugh at each other.”

He followed Sheamus into the living room.

Bobbie turned his sheet over and studied his sketch with pleased surprise. It was elementary so far, just nicely defined lines indicating beach, ocean and low mountains in the background. There were rocks on the shore, and a bird suggested in the sky.

She went to straighten up and ask Nate what he thought, then felt his face right beside hers, his eyes riveted to the drawing.

“So, he’s good, isn’t he?” he asked.

“He’s good,” she confirmed. “Those expressive lines are the sort of thing you can’t teach.”

“He’s been working on that a lot since you gave him the supplies.” Nate turned his gaze from the paper to her eyes, and she felt that electricity at work again.

She delved deeply for a full breath. “The more he works, the better he’ll become. I’d love to see how this develops.”

“Incidentally...” Nate didn’t touch her, but his eyes somehow held her immobile. How did he do that? She should look away, just to show him that she could, but contrary to all good sense, she didn’t want to. He exuded strength and concern—and crankiness, true, but at the moment he seemed to want to connect with her. “Thank you for helping Sheamus with Bill,” he said, his voice rumbling in the quiet room as he emphasized the monster’s name. Then he grew serious again. “You were brilliant, drawing all that out of him. I’ll bet we’re on the road to a closet breakthrough.”

She thought so, too, and was almost as happy as he was. “Sheamus was just ready to put a face on the monster. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes him to open that door.”

“I’ll bet it’s just days.”

“I hope so. He’ll want to get that yellow scarf.”

“That was inspired, Bobbie.”

She felt her body respond, wanting to reach out to Nate, wondering what that forearm would feel like under her fingers.

But they were two very different people with two very different paths to follow. “I have to go,” she said with a forced smile. She tried to come up with a reason, but there wasn’t a lucid thought in her head except
Get out. Get out now!