Nobody spoke. The taco truck outside played something cheerful with a trumpet, and a child in the living room shrieked with laughter at nothing. Tyler stood in the doorway of his own guest room with his beer in his hand, the foam running over his knuckles, and thirty of his friends crowded behind me in the hallway. I did not turn around. I looked at the two canvases leaning against the wall, with the smell of old linseed oil still rising from them. My husband had signed the back of each in pencil in a small clear hand. Jim Kincaid, Taos, 1989. And under it, in the margin, a heart.
Jenna spoke next. She is a small, tidy woman, a dental hygienist, with a voice that I had never heard raised in nine years. “Tyler,” she said, “I asked you three times where those came from. You told me you bought them from an online art gallery. You told me they were prints.”
She turned. The color had left her face, and her eyes were wet. “Then I saw the article in the paper last month. About the auction. About your father.” She put a hand on her mouth. “And I thought, no. He would not.”
Tyler put down the beer. He put it down very carefully, on the dresser, as though it might shatter. Then he looked at me, finally, for the first time that evening, and I saw my husband in him, the same long jaw, the same troubled eyes. “Mom,” he said. “I can explain.” “I know you can,” I said. “You have always been a wonderful explainer.” There was a stir behind me, and I felt, rather than saw, the friends beginning to slip away down the hallway, one by one, murmuring apologies, taking their paper plates with them. In a minute, there were five of us left in that little room.
Two canvases behind a living room couch told a widow what her son had done with the life work of his father.
He told it sitting on the edge of the guest bed, with his elbows on his knees. The yard sale had been real. He had meant to clear out the garage, and he had put out a few boxes of junk for forty dollars. But as he carried the canvases, he had turned one over and read the signature, and looked it up on his phone, and learned that a painting by Jim Kincaid had sold the year before for eleven thousand dollars at a small auction in Albuquerque. Tyler was thirty seven years old and eighty thousand dollars in debt on a failed restaurant. He kept three paintings back. He told me they had been stolen.
“I was going to sell them one at a time,” he said, “slowly. I was going to pay off the restaurant and pay you back. You would never even have known.” He looked up. “Then the auction came, and the newspaper, and I saw how much they were really worth. I panicked. I thought, if the others sell for that, these three are worth a fortune. I have never held that much money in my head. It was like hunger.” Jenna made a sound. “Ty,” she said, “you let your mother mourn a theft. You sat at her table at Christmas and let her mourn it.”
He had no answer. Nor did I want one. I sat down beside my son on the guest bed, on the very quilt that I had stitched for his tenth birthday, and I took the beer can from the dresser and set it on the floor, and I put my hand on his back. “Tyler,” I said. “I am not going to call the police.” He looked up with the face of a boy who has heard the sentence and cannot yet read the end. “But I am going to tell you what is going to happen. You are going to take the painting back from Santa Fe tomorrow, with me. You are going to return the other two. And you are going to learn what your father actually did.”
What Jim did, I told him, was paint every morning for forty one years, in a room with a north window, without a day off. He did not sell, and did not mind. He did not care whether he was famous. He cared whether the light on the mesa at four o clock could be put on a canvas so that a person looking at it would feel a little less alone. “He called it his work, Ty,” I said. “Not his art. His work. Like a man who gets up and goes to the plant. And you called it clutter.” Tyler wept, silently, with his hands on his knees. It did not sound like a child. It sounded like a man.
He returned the painting to Mr. Baca on Monday morning, with his own hand, and apologized to the old gentleman in his own halting words. Claire, the woman from the auction house, was kind. She did not press charges, because I asked her not to, but she did say something that I think went deeper than any lawyer. “Mr. Kincaid, your father was a genius, and the last man in the world who would have wanted you to be afraid of him.” Tyler worked for her all that winter, unpaid, cataloguing and photographing the last twenty paintings in the garage, one afternoon a week, and in the spring he asked if he might take a class.
The Taos Museum of Art opened a Jim Kincaid room in October. There are sixty paintings in it, hung in the order in which he made them, with the north window light falling across the floor. The portrait of me on the porch, in the yellow dress, hangs at the end, alone on its wall. On opening night, Tyler stood beside it in a borrowed jacket, with his son Eli on his shoulders, and I heard him say, softly, to the boy, “That is your grandmother. That is the work of your grandfather. He painted it every morning, before anyone was awake.” I took Jenna by the arm. We both had to look away.
