“He did. He looks scary with the motorbike and all, but he was a nice guy.”

  The bushes that surrounded Annette’s porch hadn’t been trimmed in years, she noticed. The vinyl seats of the swing were cracking. “We’ve lived there alone since my dad died last year.”

  “I know. We’d just moved in. I remember it. I saw the ambulance and . . .” Her voice trailed off, and Annette was grateful. There was nothing left that she wanted to say about it.

  A little plane took off and glided over the farm field across from them. A transport truck stopped at the stoplight. Annette knew both of these things without turning to look.

  “So what do you do?” Annette asked. She meant as a job rather than how Sadie passed time in general, although she was hungry for either bit of information.

  Sadie paused and ran her tongue along her top teeth. She had a tongue piercing—a little piece of metal poked through the powerful muscle to gleam like a beacon. “Come on in,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  Annette followed her through the front door. The thrill pooled in her stomach to finally see the details. Hardwood floor. Freshly painted walls. Thick scarlet curtains that hung over windows that looked out on Annette’s house, which looked small and inconsequential from here. Seeing the high ceilings and the old wooden railing in Sadie’s house, Annette remembered what her father had said. Cracks in the drywall. No foundation. Before the women had moved in, an elderly couple had lived in the home. They’d hobbled to and from their vehicle, or sat in lawn chairs on the front step, watching traffic. They’d cast disapproving glances any time someone left Annette’s house.

  The front room smelled of incense and pine needles, a scent that seemed to rest on Annette’s tongue. Crimson furniture adorned the living room—a couch, an overstuffed chair, an area rug. The walls and tables were slate grey. But the furniture and the rows of exotic knickknacks that lined the shelf over the TV were nothing compared to the paintings on the perimeter.

  Large portraits sat on easels. In one, an old woman looked winsome, a sweep of white hair dipping over her brow. Her eyes were dark and watery, a weathered hand clutching the front of her dark sweater. In another, a little girl with a cloud of blonde curls and a velvet dress held a bouquet of daisies. In yet another portrait, a stern-looking man with an unfinished shock of grey hair wore a business suit. A paintbrush lay in front of the old woman’s portrait.

  “This is me,” Sadie said, making a sweeping gesture at the room. “I paint portraits.”

  Annette leaned in and examined the portrait of the old woman. Each crease was a loving stroke. “This is beautiful. How many do you do?”

  “Maybe one every month or so. It depends on the complexity. They take hours to do. Hundreds of hours.” Sadie stood next to Annette and looked on with her. Upon closer inspection, Annette saw why Angel called her “the woman with the tattoos.” She had another of a heart on the inside of her wrist. Annette was sure there were more. Maybe one on her back, or on her shoulder, like Christian and Angel. Surely there was one on her chest, maybe a smattering of ink close to her breast.

  “It’s like capturing people’s souls,” Annette said, moving to the one of the little girl. “Who orders them?”

  “Just people. People who can afford to have a portrait done.” Sadie sat on the arm of the chair. Her hands stayed firmly on her legs. She didn’t twist her hair around her finger the way Annette did, or flinch from eye contact. “What about you? Are you in school?”

  “Not anymore. I graduated high school and now I’m just kind of . . . doing this.” Annette shifted to the shelf above the TV and inspected the knickknacks. There was a little wooden carving of a giraffe, its spots a deeper brown. “I’ll go to college one day. I just don’t know what I want to do.”

  “Well, what do you like to do?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I used to know. I don’t anymore.” Annette moved down the line to a wooden doll painted with rich reds, greens, and golds. The doll’s eyes were dark and curved, its lips heart-shaped. “I don’t even have a job right now. I’m trying to find one but I don’t have a car and there’s nowhere in walking distance of here.”

  Sadie walked to the shelf and opened the doll to show a smaller identical one inside. “I painted those a few years ago. Matryoshka dolls. I’ve always been fascinated by them.” She left the lid off the larger one and set them on the shelf again.

  Annette’s hair swayed around her face as she studied them. “They’re beautiful.” She fingered the outline of the largest doll’s face, afraid to touch at first. Then she took its top half and put it back in place.

  Sadie stepped back and sat on the couch, crossing her tanned legs. Annette felt the weight of those eyes on her, and she turned on her bare feet to face her audience. Sadie made her confident, she realized. She could stand in her sundress and bear the weight of that calm scrutiny, which in the intimacy of the living room felt like something between desire and camaraderie.

  Annette sat on the couch too, crossing her legs at the ankles and looking down at her feet. She was wearing a little ankle bracelet she’d gotten at a birthday party years ago. “Where did you live before this?”

  “Toronto.”

  “You moved here from Toronto?”

  Sadie turned sideways, resting her elbow on the back of the couch, and sifted her fingers through her hair. “Sure. Why not? It’s a lot more conducive to painting.”

  Annette nudged her ankle bracelet with her toe. “But don’t you get . . . lonely?”

  Sadie shrugged at the living room.

  There it was then. Comfortable silence. They might as well have been on a motorbike, speeding down the open road.

  “Do you mind if I . . .” Annette took a breath and gathered her thoughts. Mind if she what? What exactly did she want? “Do you mind if I hang out here? Maybe a little every day.” Ordinarily, she’d feel silly not only at the openness of the question, but at the specified time period. A little every day. But somehow, she didn’t. “I could be like your assistant.”

  Sadie tucked her leg against her on the couch. “I can’t pay you, you know.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Next door, Christian’s motorbike rolled over the gravel, its engine grumbling and coming to a stop. Annette peeked through Sadie’s curtains and saw him take off his helmet. “I should go,” she said. “We’re going to eat soon.” She stood and looked back at Sadie, whose expression was unreadable.

  “Sure,” Sadie said. “Come back tomorrow then. I’ll be around.”

  “Deal.” Annette stepped forward and extended her hand, waiting until Sadie offered one back, and with the contact, her heart did a somersault.

  The grass pricked her bare feet as she ran back to the house. She found Christian standing in front of the open freezer with a cigarette in his mouth.

  “I just made friends with the woman next door,” she said. “She’s a painter. She said I could help her out.”

  “Great.” Christian tossed a frozen lasagna on the table. “I’m making that. All right?”

  Annette sat at the table and watched him open the box. From that angle, with his brow furrowed and his mouth in a straight line, he looked like their dad. She remembered the exaggerated swoop her dad combed into his hair like a 1950s greaser. He had always smelled like cigarettes and warm beer. They’d danced together when she was little, her standing on his feet as he swayed them back and forth, and she’d smelled tobacco and old leather. She clung to memories like those, any memory that would overshadow the very last one at the bottom of basement steps she couldn’t descend anymore for fear of what was there.

  “She nice?” Christian asked without looking up. He was reading the instructions.

  “Who?”

  “The woman next door.”

  “Yeah. Sadie. She’s nice.”

  “Good.” Christian dropped the empty box and stabbed the plastic cover of the lasagna with a fork. It sounded like gunfire.

  Annette traced an old coffee mug stain on the table and tried to remember how long it had been there. It seemed to her that it used to be on the other side, back when her father had slouched in the chair next to the fridge so he could tip it back on two legs and grab a beer. She remembered setting her mug of hot chocolate on that circle when she was a kid, trying to place it in the exact right spot as if her carelessness would cause another stain. It seemed to her like a table handed down through generations of Vargas, as if every item in their house had belonged to them forever. In reality, though, her dad had probably bought them at a yard sale. She recognized the second-hand nature in all their purchases, from the lime green sectional couch in the living room to the rickety metal-framed bed that trembled under her every night.

  They were down one kitchen chair, she realized. There used to be four identical ones that matched the old table. One had been replaced by a mismatched wooden chair. She couldn’t believe she’d never noticed it before.

  “Where did the other chair go?” she asked.

  Christian propped open the fridge door with his hip. “What chair?”

  “There used to be four matching ones. Now one is gone.”

  Christian grabbed a beer from the top shelf. “Oh. Yeah. Dad used one . . . you know, last year. So when we took a bunch of stuff to the dump last year, I threw it in.”

  Annette looked down at the ring. So he’d carried a kitchen chair down the basement stairs. He’d kicked it out from under him and it had sat, legs like the necks of long guns, pointed at her when she’d reached the bottom.

  “I never noticed,” she said faintly.

  “I don’t blame you. You ran away as soon as you realized what was going on.” Christian took a swig, staring off at some point in the distance. “He never would have wanted you to find him, you know. That was a fuckup.”

  She traced the ring on the table. Maybe it really had belonged to whoever owned the table before them. But no. There had to have been a time when it didn’t exist. If that was true, it meant her father’s coffee mug had burned the circle on the tabletop. It meant there really was a remnant of him there.

  “So when do you start?” Christian said, peering in the oven at the lasagna.

  “Start?”

  “Yeah. You said you were helping the painter.”

  She sat up straighter. “Oh. Tomorrow.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “I gotta go change.”

  Annette looked back at the ring. She wondered if somewhere in their cupboard full of mugs was an old cracked one with a bottom that would fit the ring exactly.

  The next morning, she put on a pair of jean shorts and a white T-shirt and strolled across the lawn to Sadie’s house.

  She found Sadie sitting on a stool, her brush shading fine details on the old woman’s face. Annette watched her from the doorway for a moment, noticing how Sadie’s tongue would occasionally peek out from the corner of her lips as she concentrated.

  Finally, Annette cleared her throat, and Sadie dropped the brush and spun around. “Sorry,” Sadie said. “I get in a zone.”

  “I don’t mind. Is it okay if I’m here? I can come back later.”

  “No,” Sadie said, waving her in. “Come in. Have a seat.”

  Annette entered and stooped closer at the painting.

  “This one is really beautiful, you know. Who is it?”

  “You know the mayor of Brant County? It’s his mother.”

  Annette didn’t know the mayor of Brant County, really. She thought she remembered seeing him in the Christmas parade one year, but otherwise, she didn’t follow politics. She nodded anyway, though. “It’s really nice.”

  “It’s one of my favourites.”

  Annette headed over and sat cross-legged on the couch, hooking her finger under her ankle bracelet. She watched Sadie take another look at the painting, and wondered if having a spectator was annoying. It didn’t seem like it was.

  “Where are your brothers today?” Sadie asked.

  “Christian’s at work. He’s a mechanic. Angel works on a tobacco farm around here. He has a motorbike too, but Christian’s trying to fix it.” Annette slid to the corner of the couch and tucked her legs against her chest. “So that other woman, did she just move out? Was she your roommate?”

  Sadie smirked as she picked up a little brush and turned it in her fingers. “No. That was Joanne. My partner. Or . . . ex-partner.” She watched the portrait as if it might speak to her, but it just looked back at her. Old. Wizened. Serene. “What about you? You have a boyfriend?”

  It was a good question. Annette’s last boyfriend had been an entire year earlier, which was an eternity compared to the dating habits of other people her age. She’d broken up with him just before her dad had died.

  They’d dated about three months. He’d been a jock at their school, the type who wore jerseys and college-style jackets and white sneakers, and who grew up on lucrative farms with clean pickup trucks. He’d come by every weekend and they’d parked down an old path on Cockshutt Road, the truck so close to a cornfield that she’d fantasized about jumping out and running down the symmetrical rows. He’d groped clumsily at her breasts, squeezing until it hurt, and had applied such furious direct pressure to her clit that the pain had made her grit her teeth.

  “I used to have one,” Annette said. “He liked me. But he was just . . .” As she struggled for the right word, she thought about riding in the passenger seat listening to Top 40 pop music and watered-down hybrid hip-hop. “Boring,” she finished. “I didn’t feel that fire. That fire that you’re supposed to feel. The fire that people write songs about. Does that make sense?”

  Sadie nodded. “It makes sense.” She set the little brush on the easel. “I’m going to get some supplies later this week if you want to come along.”

  “I do.” Annette tried not to say that quite so brightly, but it was a trip away from the corner. A trip with Sadie. “Is there anything you want me to do now?”

  Sadie stood. “You ever clean brushes?”

  “No,” Annette said, following her into the kitchen.

  This room had as much personality as the living room. It seemed to have been renovated with a retro vibe in mind. The cupboard handles looked like they were from the sixties. The oven had old metal burners. Even the fridge was new but short and rounded at the corners, the sort she’d seen in old sitcoms.

  “You run some warm water in the sink,” Sadie said, turning on the faucet to demonstrate. “Don’t make it hot or the bristles will fall out. While you’re doing that, use a cloth to wipe off the excess paint.” She already had an old cloth nearby, and she grabbed it and used it to gently squeeze the bristles of a brush from a pile by the sink. Annette watched silently, noticing how slender Sadie’s hands were when they worked. They were free of jewelry, but her wrist bore a single black strap tied with a little gold clasp that hugged tight against her skin. She smelled like something warm and slightly dangerous. Suede, maybe, and fresh paint.

  Annette watched her as she pressed the cloth against the bristles, then turned off the faucet and dropped the brush in the water.

  “You swish it around in the water and run it under the tap again,” Sadie said. “Then wipe it with the cloth. Then you take one of these old margarine containers and put some water and dish soap in it, and swirl the brush around in it. Then rinse it off again. You with me so far?”

  Annette watched and nodded.

  “Once you’ve gotten rid of all the excess paint, rinse it again in lukewarm water to get rid of the soap, then sort of use your fingers to push the head back into shape. Then leave it to dry.” She handed the brush to Annette. “And that’s it. If you have any questions, you know where to find me.”

  Annette held the wooden handle of the brush. Outside the window, she saw a field of soybeans stretching off toward the horizon. The window was open and the whirr of traffic continued outside.

  “And if that’s fun for you, I have about ten of them. And you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, you know. It’s not like I’m paying you.”

  “You can pay me in other ways,” Annette said, and after she realized how that sounded, she revised. “I mean . . . I get to hang out with you and watch you work. That’s payment. This is fun. I don’t mind.”

  Sadie raised her eyebrows. “All right then. Let me know when you get bored. I’ll just be in there.”

  As Sadie headed for the living room, Annette watched her from head to toe. Her narrow shoulder that shifted under a white shirt thin enough to reveal the faint trace of ink underneath. Her bare feet. They both had bare feet, Annette realized. They had something in common. Neither of them wore shoes.

  The afternoon wore on, sunbeams growing longer across the kitchen floor and igniting dust in their wake. The sun slipped down over the soybean field and the sound of Christian’s motorbike rumbled through the window screen. Annette went home and sleepwalked through dinner, which was frozen lasagna again. She watched Christian stab the noodles into little pieces and shovel them in his mouth, washing them down with beer.

  That night, she sat on her bed and looked out in the direction of Sadie’s quiet house. Her window was propped open with a hardcover copy of Sense and Sensibility, and crickets chirped through the screen. She watched the stoplight outside blink from green to yellow to red. Where did people go at one in the morning on a Wednesday? She imagined cars full of families returning from visiting relatives, or pulling boats as they returned from the cottage. Annette saw them often during the summer—parents in the front with sunglasses and white clothing, kids in the back peering through the window at her as if she were a zoo exhibit. Annette wondered sometimes if she’d die at the intersection between Burford and Brantford, listening to the humming engines of other people’s vehicles.

  She lay back on the bed and parted her legs as the fan blew a cool breeze over her thighs. Her night shirt pooled around her hips. The fan oscillated, reaching the door to her bedroom and blowing back to ruffle the flimsy curtains over her window. She ran her middle finger between her legs, dipping it inside as her eyelids slipped closed.