Some vulnerable soft tissue…
After a deep night’s sleep, free of hanky-panky of any kind, Ginny woke up fresh and gung-ho for the moving adventure ahead. After the evening’s gastronomic excesses, they had settled for the motel’s puny breakfast of stale croissants and overripe fruit. After her third cup of weak coffee, Amanda figured she too was ready to start the day. In spite of the terrible nightmare she’d had that destroyed her rest big-time.
It featured a ghostly cast of actors who did and did not resemble people in her real life. Women vaguely resembling Diana, Ginny and Liz had struggled upstream on a raft. The odd waterway, a menacing hybrid of alligator infested wetlands and Lake Norman, was rushing backward toward a precipitous drop over the dam at the nuclear station. The men—Trout, Trevor and Danny—tried to help from the shore, but as they chopped at trees, rang school bells and cast ropes at the river, nothing worked.
Eventually they all converged at a decaying southern mansion with holes in the floors and desperate birds dive-bombing the windows. An emaciated version of Rachel, leading a pet that was half dog, half Candy, floated through the dark hallways singing off-key. At the bottom of the grand rotting staircase, reflected in a tall, ornate mirror, Amanda saw the chiaroscuro images of Sara and Marc, the sister and brother from Metrolina, smiling and waving, as from a great distance.
“Did you sleep well?” Ginny popped a soggy strawberry into her mouth.
“Not really. I had a bad dream.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, so what did it mean? You should take dreams seriously. I do,” Ginny said.
“I don’t.” Amanda grabbed her purse, took out her car key, and moved toward the door.
The artist colony was still asleep when they pulled up at Towles Court. At least, Amanda hoped it was, because if they could get in and out quickly, without speaking to a single solitary soul, it was okay with her. She marched straight to her Nissan van, which was parked in the dappled shade of the carport, with Ginny following hot on her tail.
“Shouldn’t we let them know we’re here?”
“Nope. They’ll know soon enough.” She opened the two rear doors, and the familiar smell of steel and Rustoleum paint wafted out. The big white van had been used exclusively for transporting her sculpture and materials, while she and Rachel had used the BMW for their social life.
“Nice ride, it’s almost new,” Ginny commented. “Must have cost you a pretty penny. What’s her name?”
Amanda hesitated.
“You do name your cars, don’t you?”
Amanda blushed. “I call her Moby most of the time, but she’s Moby Dyke to our closer circle of friends.”
Ginny guffawed. “I love it!”
Amanda held a finger to her lips. “Can you please keep quiet?” She pulled out a pile of loading blankets and tossed them at Ginny. “We’ll pack the big stuff first, then go to my studio for the finished pieces.”
She led her helper to a rickety wooden lean-to adjacent to the carport, then opened its door to a dusty space filled with cobwebs. When she pulled the string to the overhead light, Ginny gasped.
“Holy shit, look at all this!” She wandered into the chaos and touched Amanda’s big flower, a six foot tall tangle of welded tailpipes topped with giant gear blossoms. The stems were sprayed green, the gears bright yellow, and the whole arrangement was anchored in a ten-gallon steel bucket.
“I call that one Sunflowers,” Amanda said.
“What about this?” Ginny flopped into a chair with tailpipe legs and a wraparound back fashioned from the organic chrome bumpers of a vintage Cadillac. Amanda had made the cushions of black crushed velvet.
“That’s Wing chair and that’s Cock Table.” Amanda pointed at the matching side table, which also had twisted tailpipe legs and an antique steering wheel set horizontally beneath a round plate glass to hold the cocktails.
“Fucking awesome!” Ginny shouted. “I want everything!”
Several other pieces of pop art furniture, including a couch and floor lamps, filled the room—along with the rusty raw materials Amanda used to make them.
“I hope you have lots of auto graveyards in North Carolina,” Amanda said.
“Are you kidding? Auto parts are what we do best. You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven, Mandy.”
“Good thing, because we can’t take everything.”
“Well, we have to bring the flowers and furniture,” Ginny insisted.
As Amanda gazed at her life’s work, it hurt to accept that she’d have to leave some art behind. They could fit a few special pieces into the van, and maybe the cardboard art tubes filled with the precious rods she used to solder the welds, but all the carefully scavenged bits of scrap would have to be sacrificed. She explained this to Ginny, along with the order in which the items would be packed, and then they got started.
They were carrying the heavy Wing Chair when Ginny offered a bizarre idea:
“When you called Rachel last night, did you tell her I was your stepsister?”
“No…” Amanda answered cautiously. “Why?”
“Because why should you? Why can’t we let her assume I’m your lover, just like they did last night at the restaurant?”
Amanda almost dropped her end of the load. “You are absolutely insane!”
“No, why not? Rachel deserves it, and it would be kick-ass fun, Mandy.”
Ginny’s whispered suggestion was sly, evil, and completely delicious. It appealed to the dark gods of pure revenge. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt if Rachel jumped to the wrong conclusion…” Amanda could almost taste the sweet justice on her lips.
At the same time, just as they’d made their pact with the devil, a dark shadow blocked the doorway. The apparition looked much like the emaciated ghost from Amanda’s nightmare.
“Hello Amanda.” Rachel’s deep voice echoed in the storage room.
“Hello Rach.” But Amanda saw that her ex was not looking at her; but rather she was glaring at Ginny.
Ginny put down her end of the chair. “Hi, I’m Ginny Troutman, Amanda’s friend.” She held out her hand for Rachel to shake.
Amanda noticed that Ginny had attached just the right innuendo to the word friend, and by the way Rachel refused Ginny’s hand, Amanda knew her ex had taken the bait. Glory hallelujah, the games were on.
“I’ve never heard anything about you,” Rachel said.
Ginny shrugged. “No problem, because I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Amanda realized the temperature in the crowded space had gone up about twenty degrees. “Look, Rach, we don’t want to disturb your routine, so why don’t you go back to the house. Ginny and I will finish up here, and then we’ll join you.”
After a long, inscrutable look—something between panic and regret—Rachel agreed to leave. She took the time to glance back over her shoulder and smile at Amanda. More than anything so far, that smile wounded Amanda in some vulnerable soft tissue she’d thought was already dead.
“Well, that went well,” Ginny said before they got back to work.
“Not exactly.” Something about this deception was stirring pangs of guilt, and it wasn’t fair that she should feel this way. “Let’s get this done, then get the hell outta here.”
Forty-five minutes later, sweaty and aching from the contortions of jigsaw-puzzling the oddly angled sculpture into the van, with little room left for more, they entered Luna Studios and went directly to Amanda’s sunny room at the front of the building. She’d already told Ginny how she had done all her welding outside, on a sheltered patio at the back of the property. She hadn’t wanted to burn the house down, after all. She had used this inside studio for assembling the small mobiles and tabletop pieces, which were Amanda’s financial bread and butter. Some she spray-painted, others she burnished so the different materials—aluminum, copper or steel—were featured in their natural beauty.
“I hope these will sell at Metrolina. They pay the grocery bills.”
“They will,” Ginny assured her.
When Amanda opened the door to her room, assuming they’d be alone, she was startled to see a young woman sitting at her desk.
Candy glanced up from her project. If looks could kill, Amanda and Ginny were dead meat.
“I suppose you want me to leave?” Candy tossed her shoulder-length blond hair and pinned them with her strange green cat eyes. She was painting her greeting cards in an assembly line, adding flower heads to them all, and then the verses.
“Pretty pictures,” Ginny snidely observed.
“They pay the grocery bills,” Candy coldly replied, echoing what Amanda had just said.
Amanda laughed out loud. In the end, whether an artist considered her work fine or funk, they all had the same goal: to survive in a business where it was almost impossible to make a living. As she threaded her way across the cluttered floor, with Candy’s boxes of paper and pots of paint scattered underfoot, she felt an unwelcome sympathy for the girl—until she opened her closet.
Someone, obviously Candy, because Rachel would not do such a thing, had thrown all of Amanda’s delicate mobiles together in a box. The resulting jumble of tangled wire parts would take hours to unwind. Amanda’s stock of small sculpture was carelessly tossed, one upon another, in a pile in the corner. Fortunately, they were more or less indestructible.
Determined to control her temper, Amanda bit her tongue, then said, “I will need about twelve boxes and some Bubble Wrap.”
“We don’t have that stuff here.” Candy rolled her shoulders and stretched.
“Well, then. Maybe you girls should go out and buy some.” As before, Rachel Lessing had magically appeared in the doorway. This time, however, she was neither emaciated nor ghost-like, but rather a substantial force of nature. “Candy, you know that storage unit place near the hardware? They have packing materials there. Ginny, you go with her to help. Take my credit card.”
Candy was huffy and affronted, while Ginny looked to Amanda for rescue, which never came. Amanda knew better than to contradict Rachel in one of her moods, so as her ex-lover handed Candy the car keys and what Amanda assumed was a fully loaded Visa, she nodded to Ginny to play along.
“Take the BMW. The supplies will fit in the trunk,” Rachel instructed. “And take your time, will you? Amanda and I need about an hour alone.”