Page 116 of Keep

“Right. Tuesday.” Hank nodded. Picked up the lemon. Set it down. “I am going to be insufferable about this. I want you to know that. I’m telling Frannie tonight, and she’s going to tell the entire Senate dining room, and I’m going to let her.”

“Speaking of which.” Chad checked the time. “We have dinner with her in two hours, and you look like you’ve been shopping at a farm stand.”

“I have not—” Hank looked down at himself. “I changed at the office.”

“Into what?”

“This.”

“Go change again.”

Hank kissed his forehead. He went into the bedroom—the sounds of closet doors, hangers, and the quiet deliberation of a man who believed tie selection was a form of communication.

“Gray tie or blue?” Hank called.

“Gray,” Chad called back. “And the navy jacket. Not the black.”

“The black is perfectly⁠—”

“Navy.”

A pause. “Navy.”

Chad sat on the couch. The sketchbook was open on the cushion beside him, the list in his own handwriting—portfolio inventory, frames, Martin, titanium white, canvases—and below it a blank page.

He picked up the pencil.

Twelve to fifteen pieces. Three weeks. A gallery in Georgetown with his name attached to it, a woman who’d called because of the paintings, and a studio across town with a canvas on an easel that he’d finally learned how to see.

There was work to do.

CHAPTER 22

The Thorne Gallery was a Georgetown townhouse—narrow, three stories, the original brick and oak floors kept, the interior walls taken down to white. The lighting was warm from above, directional, each painting isolated in its own reach of attention. Through the front windows, M Street did its December evening thing—shoppers, headlights, wispy breaths in the cold.

Hank stood just inside the entrance with his coat over his arm and a glass of wine he’d accepted from a tray without thinking. Maybe seventy people. The murmur that gallery openings made—not party, not church, something in between. He recognized faces: Martin Abrams near the far wall, two GW faculty from the November show, a woman with a press badge who’d covered his re-election.

And Chad. In the second doorway, talking to a couple Hank didn’t know, wearing the navy blazer they’d argued about. His hands were moving. His face was doing the thing it did when he talked about color—open, animated, the sarcasm stripped away, replaced by something that was simply his. Chad had wanted the thrift-store jacket. Hank had invoked the concept of occasion. Chad had put on the blazer and not spoken to him for the duration of the cab ride, which was how Chad conceded a point.

Someone took his coat. Hank moved into the first room.

The paintings stopped him.

He’d seen most of Chad’s work before—in the studio, on the apartment wall, stacked against the radiator in Foggy Bottom. But the gallery changed them. A landscape he’d watched Chad finish at the kitchen counter—the Potomac in October, muddy greens and golds—had depth here he’d missed under their apartment’s overhead light. The composition pulled his eye along the water and up into a sky that managed to be both specific and enormous.

He stood in front of it longer than he meant to. He’d learned to do that—to stand, to wait, to let a painting work on him instead of rushing to have an opinion. Chad’s gift. Not vocabulary. Not expertise. Patience. He still couldn’t speak as to why something moved him, only that it did. The distance between those two things was Chad’s territory, and Hank was a respectful visitor.

First Kiss hung on the near wall. The two abstract figures, blues and burgundies, leaning into each other in a space Chad had made for them before they’d ever met. It had hung on Hank’s wall. It had gone to the faculty show. Now it was here, with a small white placard and a red dot beside it.

Someone had bought it.

Hank stared at the dot. He’d ask Chad later.

“Stop staring. Are you going to do this with every piece?”

Frannie, champagne in hand, materialized at his elbow with the timing she’d spent thirty years perfecting.

“I wasn’t staring.”