Jennifer Crusie - Faking It

“Just saving you a trip to the pound,” Tilda said. “Have a lovely day.”

She carted her paint box and the dog out to her beat-up yellow van, simmering with exasperation and another emotion she didn’t quite recognize but thought might be fear. It put an acrid taste in her mouth, and she didn’t like it. Once on the passenger seat, Spot simmered, too. “Oh, calm down,” she said to him, as she put the van in gear. “Anything’s better than jail.” Spot looked at her strangely. “The pound. I meant the pound.” She talked to him all the way home, and by the time she pulled into the fenced lot behind the Goodnight Gallery, Spot was asleep and she was calmer. When she shut off the motor, he jerked awake, his eyes like marbles, and she carried him, now heaving with anxiety, into the shabby gallery office and deposited him on the floor in front of her mother and niece, both of them looking blonde and blue-eyed and cute. So not like me , Tilda thought. Behind them, Gwennie’s bubbler jukebox played “No, No Not Again,” by the Three Degrees.

“This is Spot,” she said to Gwen and Nadine. “I’m finding him a home where people will treat him with dignity and not sell him down the river while his back is turned.”

“Well, I’m sorry ,” Nadine said, her pretty face defiant under her mop of pale curls. She was wearing a black T-shirt that said bite me in Gothic letters, but she still looked like Shirley Temple in a snit. “Nobody told me we couldn’t sell paintings. We’re an art gallery, for cripe’s sake.” She crouched down on the worn Oriental rug to pet Spot, who backed away, still heaving, his eyes peeled for a getaway. “What is wrong with this dog?”

“So many things,” Tilda said. “About the painting?”

“While you were in Iowa,” Gwen said to her, “Nadine broke curfew and Andrew sent her down to clean the basement as a punishment.”

Tilda took a deep breath and thought of a few choice things to say to her ex-brother-in-law.

“You can stop looking so mad,” Nadine said. “Dad didn’t let me in the locked part. I still don’t know what’s in there.”

“Storage,” Tilda said.

“Right.” Nadine rolled her eyes.

“Nadine.” Tilda pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and looked down at her, and Nadine swallowed and sat up a little straighter. “You are not in a position to push your luck here. The painting.”

“Dad made me clean the back storeroom,” Nadine said. “It was full of furniture painted with animals. Dad said you did it when you were my age. It was pretty cool, especially the bed when we’d cleaned it off and set it up-”

“We?” Tilda said.

“Ethan and me,” Nadine said. “You didn’t think I cleaned that whole place out by myself?”

“So Ethan knows.” Tilda consigned Andrew to the lowest circle of hell for criminal stupidity, in sending not only his daughter down there but also her non-family best friend.

“Well, he knows there’s furniture down there, yeah,” Nadine said. “What is it with you and the basement? It’s furniture .”

“Right.” Tilda realized her lungs were closing up again and got her inhaler out. “Are we close to the painting yet?”

“It was in there,” Nadine said. “It was wrapped in paper and stuck in a cabinet, the one with the turquoise monkeys on it. Did you really paint all those animals?”

“It’s junk. I was going through a phase.” Tilda hit the inhaler. “So you pulled the painting out and then what?”

“We thought it was good,” Nadine said.

“So you sold it,” Tilda said.

“No. We put it back in the cabinet and put dustsheets on everything and went to Cup O‘ Joe’s. And then today, Grandma had to go to the bank, and this Mrs. Lewis came in and asked if we had any paintings by somebody named Scarlet, and I said no, all we had was Dorcas Finsters.” Nadine turned to Gwen. “Are we ever going to get rid of those? I know she lives here, but they’re really depressing, and I think we could-”

“ Nadine ,” Tilda said.

“ Okay .” Nadine crossed her arms. “And Mrs. Lewis said no, she wanted paintings that looked like a kid had painted them, and she started talking about checkerboard skies and stars, and Ethan was here and he said, ‘That’s like the one we found in your basement,’ and she would not leave until we showed it to her.”

“Ethan said that,” Tilda said.

“Or maybe me.” Nadine squinted at the ceiling. “I’m not sure. Ask Ethan.”

“Like Ethan wouldn’t lie down on burning coals for you,” Tilda said. “So you went and got the painting…”

“And she offered me a hundred dollars for it and I said no,” Nadine said virtuously.

“And yet, the painting is not here,” Tilda said.

“She kept offering and I kept saying no and when she got to a thousand I caved,” Nadine said. “Now will somebody tell me why that was bad?”

“No.” Gwen sank down on the couch next to her granddaughter, looking much like Nadine was going to look in forty years, pale-eyed, graying, and gamine.

“Where’s your mom?” Tilda asked Nadine. She turned to Gwen. “Why wasn’t Eve watching the gallery?”

“She had a teachers’ meeting,” Gwen said. “Summer school. She’s aiding again. Look, this Lewis woman is not going to return it. And the more fuss we make, the more suspicious we look.”

“Suspicious about what ?” Nadine said. “Nobody tells me anything .” She reached down and scooped Spot off the faded rug, and his tremors picked up again. “If you don’t tell me stuff, you can’t blame me when I screw up.”

She stuck her chin out at Tilda, defiant as she patted the dog, and Tilda thought, She’s right . She pulled out the ancient desk chair so it was facing Nadine and sat down, wincing as it creaked. “Okay, here it is.”

“No,” Gwen said. “She’s sixteen.”

“Yeah, and how old was I?” Tilda said. “I can’t remember a time I didn’t know.”

“Hello?” Nadine waved. “I’m right here. Know what?”

“Do you remember how successful the gallery used to be, when Grandpa ran it?” Tilda said.

“No,” Nadine said. “I was a kid when he died. I wasn’t really into the gallery thing then.” She relaxed her hold on Spot, who struggled out of her lap, hit the rug with a splat, and recovered by putting his paws up on Tilda.

“Well, one of the reasons we were successful was that Grandpa sometimes sold fakes,” Tilda said flatly.

“Oh,” Nadine said.

“That’s good,” Gwen said, her hands gripped together in her lap. “The more people who know that , the better.”

“I won’t tell,” Nadine said.

“Some of the paintings that were real were by a man named Homer Hodge,” Tilda plowed on, “and Grandpa made a lot of money off him legally. But then he and Homer had a fight, and Homer stopped sending him paintings, so your grandpa got the bright idea of inventing a daughter for Homer named Scarlet, and he sold five paintings by her, making a big deal out of the fact that she was a Hodge.”

Gwen slumped back against the couch and stared at the ceiling, shaking her head.

“Invented a daughter?” Nadine said. “Cool.”

“No, not cool.” Tilda picked up Spot, needing something to hold on to for the next part, and Spot sighed and curled his long, furry body to fit her lap. “The painting you sold was the first Scarlet, a fake painting by a fake artist. And that’s fraud and we could go to jail. And people are going to realize it’s a fake because Homer was from a farm in southern Ohio, and the painting you sold is of this building.”

“I thought it looked familiar,” Nadine said.