The Last Brushstroke

*I wanted a story about second chances that didn't take itself too seriously, something warm and a little messy, like real life. Thank you for reading; I hope the ending made you smile.*

I turned forty-two in March and I spent my birthday in a crawl space under a duplex in Schenectady, pulling old wire out of wet insulation. The homeowner had baked me a cake for it, which was nice, but the cake was on a folding table in the driveway and it was forty degrees out. Viv sang happy birthday to me while a squirrel watched from the fence.

That is not a complaint, exactly. I have been an electrician for twenty years and I am good at it. The money is decent and the work is steady and I like knowing why the lights come on. But somewhere in the last few years the days started folding into each other. Panel, outlet, breaker, repeat. I would get home at six, eat something standing at the counter, and watch television until it was late enough to go to bed without feeling like a sad person.

The painting started as a thing I did on Sundays. Then it got bigger. It is the only thing I do where I do not know the answer before I start. You flip a switch, the light comes on, that is the whole job. You put blue next to orange and you have no idea what happens until you do it.

Viv is the one who pushed me at the gallery thing. We were in her truck in a parking lot, waiting on a supply order that was late, and she had her phone out.

"There's a thing at the Hudson Clay," she said. "Live competition. Week long. They pick like thirty painters and the winner gets a solo show."

"I'm not entering a competition, Viv."

"Why not?"

"Because I paint boxes of apples in my kitchen. These are real artists."

"Uh huh. Did you look at the entry fee or are you just deciding out loud?"

I looked at the entry fee. It was forty dollars. I kept deciding out loud anyway, and she kept saying uh huh, and by the time the supply truck showed up I had paid the fee and hated myself a little. Viv honked the horn twice when we drove off, which is her version of a hug.

The week went by fast, the way weeks do, and then it was Sunday and I was standing in the Hudson Clay Gallery with a tote bag of brushes, feeling like a dog that wandered into a wedding.

The space is big and bright, an old warehouse with high ceilings and polished concrete floors, and they had set up partition walls in a grid for the painting stations. There was a registration table by the door with two volunteers and a stack of badges. Outside the windows you could see the rest of the warehouse district, all brick and fire escapes and coffee shops that used to be machine shops.

I gave my name. The volunteer typed it in and squinted at her screen.

"Karin Rees, electrician, hobbyist division. Here's your badge. Stations open at nine tomorrow. There's a welcome thing tonight at seven if you want to walk the floor."

"Thank you," I said, and I clipped the badge on like it might bite me.

And then I looked up, and across the gallery, at the far registration table where the invited artists were checking in, I saw Marguerite.

I did not know she would be there. I say this because afterward everyone assumed I knew. I did not. She was standing with her back to me at first, filling out a form, and I had maybe four seconds to decide what to do with my face, and I used all four seconds and still got it wrong.

She turned around with her badge in her hand and looked straight at me. We had not seen each other in four years. She is forty-one now, I am forty-two, and when we broke up I was thirty-eight and she was thirty-seven, and the break was ugly in a quiet way, the kind where nobody yells and nobody cheats and it still takes two years to stop being angry about it.

She was wearing a paint-stained linen shirt, which was a very Marguerite thing to wear to a registration table. Her hair was shorter. Otherwise she looked the same, and the same hit me harder than I expected.

She nodded. Just a small, tight nod, the kind you give someone at a funeral who you are not sure you are related to.

I nodded back. Same size nod. I think mine was tighter.

Then we both turned away and pretended to be extremely busy with our paperwork, and the whole exchange took about three seconds and cost me about three hours of sleep that night.

Viv found me by the coffee station twenty minutes later. I had not moved from it. She looked at my face and then at the far table and back at my face.

"Oh no," she said. "Who is that?"

"Nobody."

"Karin. You're gripping the creamer like it owes you money."

I put the creamer down. "That's Marguerite."

"Your Marguerite? The one from the stories?"

"She was never 'from the stories.' She was my girlfriend for two years, Viv."

"Right, two years, the one who said your work was 'pleasant.' That Marguerite. And she's competing in the same contest as you."

I looked at my coffee. "Yep."

"Okay, so this is either terrible or the best thing that's ever happened to you, and I genuinely can't tell which."

"Neither can I," I said, and that was the honest answer.

Here is what I could not explain to Viv, standing there with my paper cup. Marguerite and I met at a paint night thing, of all stupid places, a wine and canvas event in a strip mall. She was the instructor's assistant. She came over to correct my brush grip and did not let go of my hand for two years. I was thirty-five then and she was thirty-four, I did the math later and I was right. She was thirty-four. She moved her easels into my apartment in stages, the way water gets into a basement, and one day the whole place smelled like linseed oil and I was happy about it.

It ended because she got a residency offer in another state and I would not go, and she said I was afraid of big things, and I said a solo show at a strip mall gallery was not a big thing, and we both knew I meant something else, and there was nothing more to say. Four years ago now. I was thirty-eight. I have done the arithmetic enough times that it is worn smooth.

The welcome thing at seven was a bust for me. Frances Noble, the gallery owner, gave a speech about "the vitality of regional painting" and everyone clapped, and I stood near the cheese table and did not eat any cheese because my stomach was full of nickels. Marguerite was across the room talking with Frances, and of course they know each other, they went to art school together at twenty-one, I knew that from the old days, she talked about Frances the way you talk about a rival you secretly admire. They were laughing. Frances put a hand on her shoulder. I ate a cracker finally and left at seven forty.

In the parking lot I sat in my car for a while with the keys in my lap. The gallery windows were still lit up behind me. Somewhere in there Marguerite was setting up her station, or maybe she had left too, out another door, driving home to wherever she lives now, which I do not know, which is a strange thing to not know about a person you once shared a bathroom with.

I thought about what she had said at the end, the last real fight, in my kitchen, over a paint-spattered island. She had said, "You fix things, Karin. That's all you do. You find the broken wire and you fix it and you go home." And I had said something about how that was not an insult in my world, and she said, "It's not an insult. It's just not a life."

I did not paint anything for three months after that. Then I started again, alone, on Sundays, smaller than before.

Now she was forty feet away from me behind a partition wall for seven days, both of us chasing the same prize, and I had to decide by nine tomorrow morning whether I was going to walk in there and paint like a person or paint like a wire that needed fixing.

I texted Viv from the car.

"Still alive?"

"Barely. She was there."

"I KNOW. I saw her leave the welcome thing. She has a very confident walk."

"Thanks, Viv."

"Paint tomorrow like she's watching. Because she will be. Night."

I drove home and laid out my brushes on the kitchen table, the same cheap ones I have used for six years, and I did not sleep much, and I did not feel forty-two. I felt twenty-five and terrified, which, I later decided, was the first time in years I had felt anything at all.

Morning came fast. I was at the gallery by eight forty, coffee in hand, and Frances Noble was already there unlocking the prep room. She nodded at me. She had seen me eat one cracker last night and had the good manners to not mention it.

The stations were laid out in a grid, partition walls between them, concrete floors polished so clean you could see your own reflection in them, which seemed like a cruel design choice for a painting contest. I found mine. Station twenty-two, hobbyist division, a fresh canvas and a folding chair that wobbled. I set out my six cheap brushes in a row like I was laying out tools before a job.

Marguerite was two rows over. Nobody had told me the grid was that tight.

"Morning," she said, without looking up from her setup. She had a wooden box with real brushes in it, organized by size, and a palette knife that had clearly been sharpened on purpose.

"Morning," I said. Then I sat there for ten minutes not painting.

Here is the thing about being an amateur. It is not a feeling, it is a posture. My shoulders do it. I sat at that canvas with my shoulders doing it, and across the gap I could hear the small sounds of Marguerite working like she belonged there, because she did. She mixed a color and I could hear the exact confidence in the palette knife scraping. Twenty years of wiring panels and I could not make one mark on white canvas. It was nine fifteen. Judges walked the aisles. Frances stopped at my station.

"How are we feeling, day one?"

"Great," I said. "Warming up."

"Take your time," she said, in the tone of a person who is being polite about how bad something looks, and moved on.

I finally put down a background wash. Blue-gray, safe, boring. I could hear Marguerite's brush going steady on the other side of the partition, a rhythm like breathing. I stared at my wash and hated it. Then I scraped most of it off with a palette knife I had brought from home, one from my actual toolbox, which got a look from the guy across the aisle.

"That's not a palette knife," he said.

"It's a putty knife," I said. "It works."

"Are you the electrician?" he asked. "Frances mentioned it at the briefing. Someone who does, what was it, panel wiring."

"That's me. Karin."

"Devon. Watercolor." He gestured at his station, which had forty little jars arranged like a pharmacy. He seemed friendly, and I liked him immediately, and then I went back to hating my canvas.

Around eleven the big doors opened and I heard a horn, twice, even though she had parked. Viv does that. Two honks is her version of a hug. She came down the aisle in her work jacket with two coffees and stood behind me looking at the gray nothing on my canvas.

"Wow," she said. "Is it a sky? Is it grief?"

"It's a start."

"It's a parking lot, Karin." She handed me a coffee. "Okay, I can't stay long, I'm on a job at one, but I came to see the layout and to see her, be honest."

"Her name is Marguerite."

"Where is she?"

"Two stations over. Don't."

"I would never." She leaned around the partition, openly, like it was a window. "Oh, she's good. Look at that. She's just going for it."

"Viv."

"What? I'm observing. I'm a student of art now." She came back around and lowered her voice. "So? Is it weird?"

"It's weird."

"Do you still, you know." She wiggled her hand vaguely, which was not a hand gesture that meant anything, and meant everything.

"Still what?"

"Find her hot. Come on."

I laughed. It came out too loud and a watercolor woman two aisles down looked over. "No. That's not, we're competing, Viv. It's a contest."

"That was the worst fake laugh I have ever heard and I have heard you laugh at my jokes for five years."

"It's the truth."

"Sure." She checked her phone. "Okay, I really have to go. Paint something. Not that. Something with blood in it." She pointed at my canvas. "That wash has no blood in it!"

Then she was gone, and I sat there knowing she was right, which was worse than anything Marguerite could have said.

The afternoon was long. Painters at the stations around me started to build actual pictures, and mine stayed a gray