Oliver had understood for a while that Lane was getting worse, but he didn’t like saying it out loud. He’d been in denial, he supposed. Lane would have to see a doctor, and that would be a nightmare, just getting her there. She would resist, say it was a waste of time, she had more important things to do. Oliver knew she was afraid, and who wouldn’t be? If it wasn’t Alzheimer’s it must be brain damage from the solvents and paint thinners she’d exposed herself to. The news would not be good. If things kept progressing like they had been, she’d eventually need in-home care, and that would mean she would have to quit smoking, probably. He’d seen her once during a dry spell and it wasn’t pretty. Maybe he could find her a sympathetic nurse, some old hippie who believed in medical dope.
He worried about Lane, he really did. He was the only person who really had the constitution to put up with her, and now that she was slipping, she was even more unpredictable. Ava would be a responsible caretaker. She was steady, despite everything she’d been through. Sharp, too. But what a situation for a kid to walk into.
He was starting to adjust to the idea that the girl would actually live here. Something was loosening inside him, the tight circle of his affection expanding to include Ava. It was a big change, but then, the job as he’d known it was already over—Lane wasn’t the same. Maybe he was ready for something new, anyway.
He’d felt the same way about slinging drugs, back when he first hooked up with Lane. It was a thing he fell into, in Houston, in the turmoil after Katrina. Within six months nearly everyone he dealt with was dead or in jail or gone. He’d come back home with a Jansport backpack of pills stowed in the hollowed-out backseat, and a spare tire packed with hydro. He sailed past the checkpoint state troopers set up in Lake Charles. It was practically risk free, it was common knowledge they never pulled over white guys. His plan was to unload the shit he had and start over with something new, something legal. He was twenty years old and he planned to stay alive and free in New Orleans.
It turned out easy, getting rid of the pills. He sold the whole lot and half the weed to a friend of a friend who knew a bunch of students at Tulane. Fucking college kids loved that shit. It made no sense to Oliver, spending all that money on an education and then spending more to obliterate your wits so you couldn’t learn. He didn’t get it. But college was never in the cards for Oliver. He was at the beginning of his senior year of high school when the storm happened, and that was that. He took care of his sick auntie in Houston until she died, and after that he needed money, needed to live. It’s not like he’d been Mr. A+ student anyway.
Back in the city he had plenty of cash to find a decent shithole of an apartment. He met Lane through a friend of his cousin’s and sold her his last quarter bag. When she offered him the assistant job, he said yes.
It had been rocky as hell at first. He’d almost quit on several occasions, but in the end he stayed. She paid well, and mostly it wasn’t that hard, not like his buddies doing construction, renovating houses, busting their asses in restaurant kitchens. He finally figured out that she expected him to anticipate her needs, so that she did not have to make any decisions, did not have to think about anything besides her art. As they got more comfortable around each other he came to admire her. She was like family to him: she ignored him, bitched at him, blamed him for things that were not his fault. The difference between his real family and Lane was, she really wanted him there, and she paid him. Plus she could be fun as hell to talk to.
He’d never been around an artist before. Musicians, sure, everybody was a fucking musician. But music was about tradition, community, about getting hammered at the bar. Music ended and everybody was hungover, sore from dancing, and then it all started up again the next night.
But the painting, that was different. The images stayed, you could study them whenever. He saw how long it took for Lane to get a piece right, until it looked as real as a photograph, but somehow stranger. It compelled you to keep looking to be sure it was really only color on a flat surface and not a real lamppost or a vase of flowers or whatever.
She always chose subjects that were imperfect. She painted a bouquet of gardenias, crammed into an old tomato can with a torn label, and the can was real as could be, the metal showing under the tear. And the petals were starting to go brown. Then it stayed there forever like that, never changing. The paintings were immaculate, but the subjects of the paintings were always worn, broken, about to rot.
He would have thought if you wanted to freeze something in time you’d pick the best possible version of whatever it was. Stunning flowers in a crystal vase, something exotic and expensive, not a handful of wilting blooms somebody cut off the bushes out front. He asked Lane about it once. It was after one of her great parties, early on, and she was in a good mood, a little drunk and happy.
“Who gives a fuck about beauty?” she’d said. “What counts is what’s real. We’re ugly and we’re gonna die. That’s what I paint.”
“Fuck me,” Oliver said, taken aback. “That’s a cheerful thought.”
She started to laugh. She used to laugh back then. “God, you’re young, aren’t you. Okay, how’s this then: We are beautiful and we’ll live forever. You like that better? You like lies?”
“Yes, lie to me.”
“You believe that, you’re doomed,” she said.
“You’re loony,” he said. “But you’re a decent painter.”
Lane’s decline had been so gradual that he did not always grasp the extent of it. It was only when he thought about the way she was back then that he realized how far gone she was now. Gone, not coming back. He was nearly thirty years old and all he’d done was take care of sick old ladies. His gran, his auntie, now Lane. He’d let it go too far. Should have got her to the doctor before now.