An Angel for Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad

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СКАЧАТЬ Matthew said as he noted her driver’s license number.

      “Good,” Glory said as she put her checkbook back in her purse and turned to walk back to her easel.

      “You’re not going to cash those checks, Matthew Curtis,” Mrs. Hargrove demanded in a hushed whisper as they watched Glory sit down to her easel across the store in front of the display window.

      “Of course not,” Matthew agreed as he slipped the checks out of the drawer.

      Carl Wall, the deputy sheriff, was running for reelection and his campaign slogan was No Crime’s Too Small To Do Some Time. He’d happily jail an out-of-towner for writing a bad check and brag about it to voters later.

      Ten minutes later, Glory repositioned the easel. Then she arranged her brushes twice and turned her stool to get more light. She was stalling and she knew it. She suddenly realized she’d never painted a portrait as agonizingly important as this one. The sketches she’d done of criminals, while very important, were meant only for identification and not as a symbol of love.

      “Do you want your mother to be sitting or standing?” Glory asked the twins. The two identical heads were studying the bottom of a large display window. They each had a cleaning rag and were making circles in the lower portion of the window while Matthew reached for the high corners, standing awkwardly with one crutch.

      “I don’t know.” Josh stopped rubbing the window and gave it a squirt of window cleaner. “Maybe she could be riding a dragon. I’ve always wanted a picture of a dragon.”

      “Mommie’s don’t ride dragons,” Joey scolded his brother. “They ride brooms.”

      Matthew winced. Susie had been adamantly opposed to celebrating Halloween and, consequently, the twins had only a sketchy idea of the spooks that inspired other children’s nightmares.

      “No, sweetie, it’s witches who ride brooms.” Mrs. Hargrove corrected the boy with a smile as she picked up a cleaning rag and joined Matthew on the high corners. “Maybe you could have a picture painted of your mother praying.”

      “No,” Matthew said a little more loudly than he intended. His memories of Susie praying tormented him. He knew she would be heartbroken that her death had brought a wedge between him and God, but his feelings were there anyway. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never understand how God could have answered his prayers for so long on the small things like good crops and passing tests but when it came to the one big thing—Susie’s recovery—God had let him down flat. No sense of comfort. No nothing. He’d expected his faith to carry them through always.

      Matthew didn’t feel like explaining himself. His arms were sore from the crutches and he hobbled over to a stool that was beside Glory. “I want the twins to remember their mother laughing. She was a happy woman.”

      “Well, that’d make a good picture, too,” Mrs. Hargrove said, and then looked at the twins. The twins had stopped wiping their circles and were listening thoughtfully. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

      The twins nodded.

      “Okay, smiling it is,” Glory said. This Susie woman sounded like a saint, always smiling and praying and baking cookies, and Glory had no reason to resent her. None whatsoever, she thought to herself. “I assume she had all her teeth.”

      “What?” Matthew seemed a little startled with the question.

      “Her teeth,” Glory repeated. “If I’m going to paint her smiling, I need to know about her teeth. Were there any missing?”

      “Of course not.”

      “Were any of them crooked?” Glory continued. “Or chipped? Did she have a space between the front ones?”

      “They were just teeth,” Matthew said defensively. Why did he suddenly feel guilty because he couldn’t remember what kind of teeth Susie had? He knew her image was burned onto his heart. He just couldn’t pull up the details. “Her eyes were blue—a blue so deep they’d turn to black in the shadows.”

      “Eyes. Blue. Deep,” Glory said as she wrote a note on the butcher paper she’d stretched over her easel. “And her nose, was it like this? Or like this?” Glory sketched a couple of common nose styles. “Or more like this?”

      “It was sort of like that, but more scrunched at the beginning,” Matthew said, pointing to one of the noses and feeling suddenly helpless. He hadn’t realized until now that the picture Glory was going to paint was the picture that was inside his head. He’d spent a lot of time trying to get Susie’s face out of his mind so he could keep himself going forward. What if he’d done too good a job? What if he couldn’t remember her face as well as he should?

      “Pugged nose,” Glory muttered as she added the words to the list on the side of the paper. “Any marks? Moles? Freckles? Warts?”

      “Of course not. She was a classic beauty,” Matthew protested.

      “I see,” Glory said. She tried to remind herself that she was doing a job and shouldn’t take Matthew’s words personally. “I have freckles.”

      Glory winced. She hadn’t meant to say that.

      “I noticed them right off.” Matthew nodded. “That’s how I knew you couldn’t be an angel.”

      “I see,” Glory said icily. Couldn’t be an angel, indeed. Just because Susie didn’t have freckles. She’d show him who couldn’t be an angel. “Any other identifying facial marks?”

      “I liked the way your hair curled,” Matthew offered thoughtfully as he remembered lying on his back after his fall and looking up at Glory. “It just spread all out like a sunflower—except it was brass instead of gold.” He had a sudden piercing thought of what it would be like to kiss a woman with hair like that. Her hair would fall around him with the softness of the sun.

      “I meant Susie. Did she have any other identifying facial marks?” Glory repeated.

      “Oh,” Matthew said, closing his eyes in concentration. Could Susie have had freckles after all? Even a few? No, she’d made this big production about never going out in the sun because her skin was so fair—like an English maiden, she used to say. What else did Susie always say? Oh, yes. “Peaches and cream. Her skin was a peaches-and-cream complexion.”

      “Well, that’s a nice poetic notion,” Glory said as she added the words to her list.

      “What do you mean by that?” Matthew opened his eyes indignantly. Glory had gone all bristly on him, and he was trying his best to remember all the details just as she wanted.

      “It’s just that peaches have fuzz—and cream eventually clots. The whole phrase is a cliché. It doesn’t describe anything. No one’s skin looks like that. Not really.”

      “Well, no,” Matthew admitted. “It’s just hard to remember everything.”

      “True enough.” Glory softened. She had gotten descriptions from hundreds of people in her career. She should know not to push someone. Often a victim would have a hard time recalling the features of their assailant. She imagined the same thing might be true when grief rather than fear was the problem. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll do it one step at a time. We’ll be done by Friday.”

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