Chapter 39
Brody shakes his head. “He had a long day yesterday. He needs his sleep. If we both left and he woke up alone, he’d be worried, don’t you think?”
Evie pouts, unconvinced.
He tries a different tactic. “I have to get my booth set up, and once I do, you and your daddy can come visit me, okay? He’ll take you up and down the boardwalk and you can look at all the art, and you can get something to eat, like…I don’t know, funnel cakes and snow cones and ice cream.”
As he lists off the carnival food, her eyes grow wide with excitement. He doesn’t know if they’ll sell such things at the art show, but this is a beach town, after all. Someone somewhere is going to have ice cream, and they’ll find it if she really wants it.
“So let me get ready to leave,” Brody tells her, “and you let your daddy sleep, and when he wakes up, he’ll bring you down to the art show—“
“And the beach!” she cries. “I want to go in the ocean!”
“And the beach, yes,” he agrees. “For now just eat your pizza and watch cartoons, and you’ll get to go out in a little while. Will that work?”
She mulls it over for a minute, then nods vigorously, her sloppy ponytails bouncing around her mussed head. “As long as you promiseI can go in the water later.”
“You can, I promise.” Because he isn’t sure that’s enough, he holds up his hand, all his fingers curled into a fist except his pinky, which is hooked out towards Evie. “Pinky swear.”
Her smile shines like the sun as she hooks her pinky around his. 30
With the help of some of the skaters hanging around the shop, Brody manages to get all his artwork for sale to his vendor space in just one trip. The art show committee provided a table and two chairs, and Gavin loaned Brody another, smaller table to help fill up the space. Brody has display boards he props up at the back of the tables to hang his favorite sketches so they’ll be seen as people pass by. He’s separated everything else into boxes by content—one box contains celebrity drawings, another nature images, a third abstract artwork. These he sets on the tables in front of the displays, allowing enough room in the boxes so people can flip through the frames easily. He also has three binders full of unframed sketches in protective sleeves; these go on Gavin’s small table where people can browse. Under the table is a box stuffed to overflowing with recycled plastic bags he and Gavin saved from their trips to the grocery store. A stack of business cards with his name and phone number on it—to be handed out to anyone interested in commissioning a piece—and his booth is ready to go.
Just in time, too. Though the show officially opens at nine, the boardwalk is open around the clock, and people start streaming past as early as quarter after eight. A few are just looking, but several pause in front of Brody’s tables to look over what he has to offer. One lady points to the sketch of the birds he was drawing the day he first met Evie and asks, “How much is this?”
“All the framed pictures are twenty-five,” Brody tells her. “Unframed, fifteen.” After he sent in his vendor application, he and Gavin spent days going back and forth on the cost of everything. Brody wanted one flat price to keep things simple. Originally he thought ten bucks and done, but Gavin said he was undervaluing his work. Plus, there’s the added cost of the frame itself to consider.
Luckily Brody’s sketches are all done on letter-sized paper, and he managed to get a steal on frames at a local dollar store, so he’ll make back what he put into them by selling just two framed pieces. He still thinks twenty-five dollars is too high for something he can do without even trying very hard, but Gavin assured him they were worth that and more. Pricing the unframed sketches at fifteen was Gavin’s idea, too. If Brody were on his own, everything would’ve gone for five bucks. He might sell a lot that way, but Gavin said he’d be selling himself short. “You have this amazing talent,” Gavin told him. “You don’t want to just give it away.”
Brody argued, “I don’t want to just stand there all day looking stupid and have to pack everything up and bring it home again when nothing sells.”
“People will pay for your pictures,” Gavin said. “Trust me. You’ll see.”
Now the customer is frowning at the picture as if trying to envision it hanging in her home or office somewhere. Taking a step closer, she reaches out towards it but her fingertips don’t touch the glass. “What medium is this?”
“Medium?” Brody asks with a frown. As much as he likes to draw, he doesn’t consider himself an artiste, and part of him fears he’s going to be asked things today by people who know more about artwork than he does. He hopes he doesn’t come off sounding dumb. No, really, I drew all these,he thinks defensively. But I’m not a real artist. I can’t talk technique or art history or shit like that. Hell, I don’t even have a G.E.D.