The Truth About Delilah Blue by Tish Cohen Read Free Book Online

rubber band and he sat up taller, sucked in his belly.
    She stopped. “Are you the owner?”
    “Me? No, I’m his assistant.”
    She moved on.
    Life-size sculptures crowded the center of the room, with drawings and paintings lining the walls. Prices varied from the $47,000 bronze sculpture of an old man the assistant dusted just prior to the woman’s arrival, to the series of inexpensive pencil sketches the gallery owner’s pampered niece had eked out last month at college.
    The woman wove her way through the statues, looked up briefly to ask the price of a small lithograph. When the assistant told her she frowned, looked again. “You’re not charging enough. It’s insulting to the artist.”
    When he shrugged, she moved toward the walls. She looked moneyed, the assistant thought to himself. Had that thrift-store patina of the very rich. Only those living paycheck to paycheck pulled out their finery to check out the gallery. The others, the ones that might drop a hundred thousand dollars in an afternoon, were nearly impossible to spot. Her scuffed ballet shoes raised his hopes, creased as they were by years, possibly decades, of use. Every suburbanite and her sister owned them these days, but the assistant knew only the very fashionable, and, hopefully in this case, very flush, had been wearing them all along.
    She drifted closer to his desk, staring all the while at the art lining the long brick wall. She passed the corner and came upon the graphite sketches. For a moment she appeared unimpressed. Not surprising—the assistant was certain the owner’s niece was a talentless hack. He wondered if he should speak up lest she think he had bad taste; let her know that the display was nothing more than nepotism and that she’d be better off checking out the pricier pen and inks on the opposite wall. He was, after all, on full commission.
    The woman moved closer to one of the sketches and her posture changed. Stiffened. She turned, palefaced, toward the assistant. “What do you know about this nude?”

Five
    Lila stood in front of the mirror in underwear and a sports bra and stared at her face, puffy and red from a rough October night.
    In spite of its breezy locale high up the hillside, in spite of visible slivers of the sky where the cabin walls weren’t flush with the ceiling, in spite of adventitious air streams that inevitably accompany such primitive construction, the Mack house wrapped itself around the squirming heat and held it down as if forcing an apology. As soon as the late-afternoon sun settled across the roof shingles, they worried and throbbed with the swimmy waves of a highway mirage, heating up the living quarters well into the night. The brick floor that ran throughout, probably installed with the intention of cooling overheated occupants, instead digested the soaring temperature and enveloped the family with aninescapable degree of closeness. In cool winter months, this intimacy was homely and sure. In the heat of California autumn, it grew yeasty and thick, making the simple act of falling asleep a formidable task.
    And then there was the Angels’ dog, who’d been up serenading the canyon much of the airless night. There had been three glorious acts: a beseeching episode of wailing just after one o’clock; another, more fed up installment of what sounded like a jilted teenage girl weeping into her pillow around four-thirty; and then the crescendo—a frenzied climax of groaning and warbling that started up around five-forty, just as Lila began to drift off again.
    As for her school situation, something had to give. Student loans were out of the question. Victor had flat-out refused to allow her to submit one piece of personal or household information to the government, citing immigration red tape that still hadn’t been cleared up since they’d moved from Canada. Besides, he’d said, coming out of art school hip-deep in debt was like starting a race with not one but two feet encased in