Chapter 5
I didn't touch dinner, and Grant stopped trying to persuade me, simply waiting for me to be back to normal the next day.
I sat in the guest room all night without sleeping.
Every so often, the sound of Brooke ripping packing tape drifted up from downstairs.
Sharp. Grating.
At six in the morning, my phone rang. It was the cleanout company.
The dispatcher's voice competed with the roar of machinery.
"Tessa, the last load is still at the south-side transfer station."
"It goes into the shredder in an hour."
"If you want to check for your things, you need to come now."
I grabbed my coat and headed out.
Grant stood outside the guest room, fully dressed, car keys in hand.
"I heard," he said, coming over to take my arm. "Give me five minutes."
"I just need to go over a few shipping details with Brooke, then I'll drive you."
He always did this.
No matter what happened, his sister's needs always came before mine.
I pulled free.
"No need."
I didn't wait for him.
I called Naomi, and she was at the corner ten minutes later, while Grant was still talking to Brooke.
The sharp smell of rotting wood and machine oil filled the transfer station.
An enormous shredder roared in the distance.
A worker pulled back a plastic tarp covered in grease.
"This is all of it."
"It got rained on last night. There isn't much left to salvage."
Beneath it lay a heap of broken wooden frames and torn canvas.
I pulled on a pair of thick knit gloves and crouched in the mud.
One piece, then another.
Sharp splinters pierced my gloves and dug into my fingertips. I couldn't feel the pain anymore.
Thirty minutes passed.
Nothing but mud and wood chips.
The worker checked his watch, impatience crossing his face.
Then I spotted a dark corner deep in the gap between two thick wooden beams.
It was a painting panel, snapped in two, its broken edge jagged.
I held my breath and pulled it free.
Blackened mud coated the front.
Large patches of paint had blistered and peeled.
The portrait had been scraped away, leaving nothing but gray-black gouges.
Not a single feature of the face was recognizable.
With shaking hands, I turned it over.
Rainwater had soaked into the wood grain on the back, but deep pencil marks remained near the break at the lower right.
03/14/2019—G&T
Grant's handwriting from all those years ago.
Our initials.
The year my mother died, I went three full months without being able to paint a single stroke.
Grant had painstakingly sanded this panel smooth in the garage.
He'd held my hand as we wrote the date, one number at a time.
He'd said, "Tessa, paint your mom, and she'll always be with you."
Now those words were soaked in the mud of a garbage dump.
I flipped the panel back over.
I stripped off my gloves and frantically scraped at the dirt in the lower-right corner with my trembling fingertips.
Mud packed beneath my nails as I rubbed the grime away, little by little.
A tiny patch of a distinctive dark blue-gray emerged beneath it.
It was the color of the collar on the old linen shirt my mother had loved to wear.
The blue-gray I'd mixed after trying more than twenty shades.
This was it.
It was destroyed.
My knees gave out, and I dropped hard onto the gravel and filthy water.
I clawed through the trash around me, desperate to find the other half, something that would fit the broken edge.
All I found were a few fragments with splinters still attached.
Naomi hurried over and crouched beside me.
Her voice shook. "Tessa… did you find it?"
I didn't answer.
I clutched the cold, filthy piece of wood to my chest.
Everything I'd been holding back broke loose.
I buried my face in the splintered wood and mud.
And finally, I sobbed.