Paint Me True: Sample Chapters

Three: Phone Call

The sight of my two story house bathed in the light from my headlights gave me another wave of discomfort. I activated the garage door and pulled my car in from the slanting rain.

This house was why I’d moved to Portland.

The car pinged as got out, reminding me to shut off the headlights before I gathered my clutch purse and went through the creaking back door to the kitchen area with its giant print of the Last Supper on the wall. Not DaVinci’s version, mine. I’d been working for almost ten years as a painter, and I did make money this way. Some, at least. I sold prints through LDS bookstores and gift shops, and had a somewhat steady stream of private commissions.

I tossed my keys on the counter where they landed with a dull crash. My shoes hit the floor with two hollow clacks and I tiptoed in my nylons to the carpeted hallway, which featured more of my art on the walls and propped up on the entryway table. Carrie, my stepmother, had bought a lot of my work while she dated my dad. Then, when they’d married and she’d moved to Utah to be with him, she’d asked me to house sit for her. The housing market was so bad, she had no hope of selling the place and I made just enough money to cover utilities.

One year later here I was, dumped by Len Hodge, living on my stepmother’s charity, and without a plan to move forward.

That, in a nutshell, was my life.

The phone rang when I was halfway up the stairs. I peered down at the entryway table, at the caller ID box and noted with a start that the phone number began with 44. I bounded back down and lifted the receiver. “Hello? Aunt Nora?” I glanced at the clock. It was nine thirty, which meant it was five thirty a.m. in the UK. Something was wrong.

“Hello sweetie.”

“Hi! How are you? Everything okay?”

“Well, I broke my arm. Silly thing for me to call you about, I know.”

“No it’s not. What happened?”

“I slipped and fell in the kitchen. Thing is, they’re not letting me out of the hospital. They want to do extra tests to see why I fell, even though I told them. I dropped a bowl of frozen peas, stepped on a few, and went down. They want to scan my brain. Me, I think they’re just trying to run up fees to make some money. I guess my private insurance pays way better than their National Health Service.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That it is. Listen, honey, is there any way at all I could get you out here?”

“Absolutely. When?”

“Well, I’m trying to talk sense to the doctors, but they won’t listen. Maybe if you and I gang up on them? Or maybe you can just think more clearly than I can. I’m so tired, honey. And I hate hospitals. They remind me of watching my mother die.”

“I know the feeling.”

“And my sister, and my other sister.”

“And my sisters and my cousin.” Our family had the BRCA 1 mutation, a gene that put the women at risk for cancer. On top of that, we had hideous luck. My grandmother, great aunts, mother, aunts, and sisters had all died before the age of forty. None of the technological advances in cancer treatment over the course of the last century made the slightest bit of difference; the cancers spread like wildfire once they showed up and they bounced right back no matter how many times doctors removed tumors or hit them with radiation and chemo. Nora and I were a rare breed, adult women in the family, survivors of a silent war. I’d sobbed when I got the results of the tests back that showed I didn’t have the mutation. “I will be there as fast as I can. I’ll go book a flight.”