Clive's Gift

“Take it easy, Shy. You’re going to make your makeup run, and then you’re going to look like a train wreck. Don’t wear it! It is a waste of money... You are fine.”

Warm, salty tears welled in her eyes until one trickled down her cheek. Deshia, gripping the steering wheel tightly, let the tear fall onto her dress, which soaked in instantly and disappeared into the fabric. Slowly but steadily, more tears followed.

The radio was playing something that sounded far too happy for the occasion, a pop singer trying to make a foray into the rap world and was, to Deshia’s experienced ears, failing miserably. She reached her finger out and used her long fingernail, painted and polished, to hit one of the preset buttons. Some man began talking in his upper crust British accent about saving money. Deshia grimaced, what did he know about saving money? His method of saving money was once a week having leftovers. His kind of rich did not know what real poor was. She hit another preset and a soft toned, whispering woman began talking. Public radio. Why Deshia had this preset, she had no idea.

As the woman rattled on about foreign affairs that did not matter to her at all right now, Deshia continued crying as she drove. Beside her the Black Book sat, unopened, wrapped with thin twine. Sniffling, she caught a whiff of his cologne, Old Spice. She felt a fresh wave of emotions about to hit. She looked around, swerved, getting a honk from a confused and angry driver who had almost hit the rear end of her old car. She barely made it safely into the parking lot of the gas station.

Not even noticing the grinding, clanking noise it made, she put the car in park. Sobbing out loud, she lay her forehead on the steering wheel as her shoulders shook and fresh tears flowed from her eyes. He was gone. Dead. It was done. After a long fight with illness that she had not even known of, he had finally given up the ghost, as he had a habit of saying.

It was his time. He was old. Yet people like him, like Clive, should not ever die. People like him should always be alive, living forever under the large oak tree painting on his canvas. His words, once spoken to her after the death of her grandmother, seemed to ring loud in her head. Using his nickname for her, he comforted her in his deep, slow, southern drawl.

“Don’t be sad, Shy… We old people, for us, dying is not scary. It’s what we do. We die. We just hope that we leave something behind for those we love. Stability, wisdom, freedom, love… leaving you nothing, that is what we fear.”

She looked up, her red eyes noticing the waning light of the late winter day. It was chilly, her heat was on and still she felt cold and naked against the world. The woman on the radio was signing off, classical music playing after her words ended.

“Clive… I just left the hospital and… I miss you already, Boss.” She said with a voice thick with emotion. “I miss the smell of your paints, the sound of you grunting or humming as you painted…”

She now realized that she was at the corner of Lincoln Street where she filled up with gas once a week. A left would take her to her second job as a cashier at Dollar Tree, a right to the college where she was studying Art, straight would take her to her home. And beyond her own small two room apartment, was Clive’s home.

She drove straight yet looking right to see through the tree line, catching glimpses of the large building that was her college. She had been studying there for almost a year, but now, the thought of painting or creating anything seemed shallow, empty, almost blasphemous.

Clive.

“What am I going to do?” She asked herself.

Yet it seemed Clive answered, his words echoing in her head again, the words from her first day at the college. She had been afraid and thinking she had made a great mistake. His words this time were not now, nor had they been then, spoken gently.

“Shy, you have been my assistant for four years now. We both know you have a need to get out what is inside you. You have to work to be able to do that. Now get up, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and do what you have to do. Stop wasting time.”

“Yes sir, Boss.”

The drive took her out of the city and through a suburb, past her own apartment complex, and onto the country roads. She passed rolling hills, fenced in pastures, cows and even some horses. She sighed, remembering how much Clive loved this place. It reminded him of his boyhood home. Although she had grown up in the city, the two found something they both loved and appreciated. Sunsets and sunrises. She glanced at the Black Book, his black notebook, the binder bent and worn, the exterior blank except a few smudges or claw marks from Mole, Clive’s cat.

Finally, she pulled into the driveway of the modest little cottage out in a fenced in pasture. The sun was setting behind it, casting it in a beautiful, orange and pink light. Clive always loved sunsets. She hesitated to get out, dreading the cold. But Mole was excited looking at her with his narrow, slanted eyes as he sat on the windowsill. She took the house key and put the Black Book in her purse. She threw her squeaky car door open and climbed out. A warm breeze blew over her. An early spring? A breeze and a sunset. Clive would have loved this.

She breathed deeply, the warm scent of spring filling her nostrils. She looked around, seeing the way the sun’s waning rays cast the area in its glow. This was Clive’s home, here, looking at light, looking at the hues of colors one could not even imagine until they saw a sight like this. This was why he was a creator, to bring out into the physical what he could only feel in his heart.

“It’s ok if you don’t get it. It is ok if it doesn’t look right the first time. Focus and let yourself fail, experiment… in the end, if you only can create one piece of work that brings out the beauty that you see in life, or the mystery, or the complexity, then it is worth it. It is not a life wasted. Remember that, Shy.”

A loud meow and the sound of Mole pawing at the windowpane interrupted her thoughts. Smiling at the cat, she hurried over, unlocked the door and quickly slipped inside. The house seemed cold, empty, without the aura of the old man. But Mole needed to eat, and at the end of the night, he would come home with her.

Mole ran up and began to rub on her, his purr seeming loud in the otherwise silent house. She tossed her purse to a chair as she stooped down, stroked him once along his back, and then rose. Deshia walked to the fireplace, where his dishes were, and gave him some food from a container. Mole began to eat hungrily, still purring, sometimes looking to her as she stroked his back.

She walked slowly around the house before sitting down in a chair. The smells of the house were overwhelming; coffee, paint, his house plants that he nurtured throughout the winter. A stinky litter box. She would have to clean that before she put it in her car, even though the car, old and used, had an odd odor already that could not be covered by the pine scented little trees that hung in front of her vents.

“If it gets you where you’re going, it has served its purpose.”

“You’re right, Boss.”

She reached for her purse to dig out her phone, but the Black Book caught her eye. It had been Clive’s constant companion. He had said that he used it for dates and events, yet he wrote in it frequently. What else lay within? She had no idea. Seven more, filled to the brim with his distinctive, messy handwriting, were hidden away in boxes in the attic. But this was the current one, almost filled up. A few blank pages still sat at the end, or so he had said only a week before his death.

It was bound in twine, a thin but sturdy brown string that wrapped around the book vertically and horizontally. A small knot at the center of the book. A small strip of paper was tied to the twine, ‘For Shy’.

Slowly, she reached for it and pulled a string that undid the knot, the twine falling to her lap. She rubbed the old leather, imagining Clive’s hands doing the same… like the day they had met, when she had run away from home and was lost. She had come upon him painting in his yard. Cold and scared, she had been afraid of him.

With little more than a glance, he had said, “Come finish this painting for me.”

It had a sunset, but no more. She added to it as he spoke gently to her. That was how the old man had taken her into his life. He had called her parents once he knew her name, but she often visited him and continued to work on that same painting, trying to finish it. She never did. It sat, unfinished in the attic, missing something. There was a tall oak tree on a rolling hill, a sunset behind it, a black cat hidden in its limbs. What could she add?

“You’ll figure it out. I know you will. You have the same passion I do.”

With a sigh, Deshia opened the book. A hundred-dollar bill slid down the first page. For a moment she stared, thinking she was seeing things. But then she smiled. Clive must have left it for her.

He knew she was struggling, even though she never said anything. She was too proud for that. But he knew. He always seemed to know, maybe by the way her car was, maybe by the way her tired eyes sometimes betrayed her worry.

Either way she touched it a moment, and then moved it to look at the writing. A small piece of paper was taped to the page. It was written by Clive’s hand, the uneven, shaky letters that she had grown so used too.

‘For you Shy, who sees life is hard but beautiful, scary but worth embracing. Never give up on your passion.’

She smiled, slowly moving a finger over those words.

“Yes sir, Boss.”

She turned the page and made a small gasp as two more hundred-dollar bills stared up at her. She turned another page and saw more bills; more page turns revealed more bills. She turned them faster, faster, tears welling in her eyes.

Twenty thousand dollars. She choked back sobs. Deshia held a trembling hand to her mouth as she turned to the last page. He had given her yet another gift. The deed to his house lay on the last page. She sat, dazed, petting Mole. His soft purrs offered her comfort, and her gentle touch gave him reassurance. Years and years of memories of Clive ran through her head and heart.

“In the end… things work out.”

Then it hit her. She knew how to finish her painting, the first painting. She knew what it needed. The oak tree, with the sunset behind it and a cat in its branches, needed a person. An old, kind man, with a paintbrush and canvas. The painting needed that life in it, that passion, that humanity. The painting of the sunset needed Clive.

And Clive needed the sunset.