Page 47 of The Boss I Can't Stand
“Have you ever thought about giving any of your pieces away?”
I snorted. “When people display art, they want it to be beautiful. Perfect. My pieces are anything but, so why would anyone want one of them?”
“I guess for the same reason I keep wondering when you’ll give Finn ‘The Face’ Lockhart a rest,” she said, wandering past me to examinesome of the larger sculptures I’d left on a tall metal shelf to air dry. “Because people like things that are a little imperfect.”
I scowled after her. “That’s not true.”
“Sure it is,” she insisted, delicately running her hand around the rim of a large pot. “Imperfect things have character. They’re relatable.”
“They’re flawed,” I said.
“That doesn’t make them any less valuable.” A spiral of uncomfortable heat shot through me. She looked over her shoulder, and I froze with confusion, because once again, it sounded like she was saying she’d rather spend time with me—the real me—than with the guy who impressed everyone else.
“Sounds like something you got out of a fortune cookie,” I said, trying to shrug off her words.
Sierra chuckled. “Actually, it’s something my mother used to tell me back when I was just starting out in the costume world. When I’d mess up on a costume and have to rip stitches or look back on my work and find nothing but flaws, she’d remind me of how much I’d learned from those pieces. How much I’d grown as a person over the course of the project. And I’d start to find meaning in all those little mistakes.”
I swallowed hard and glanced back at the formless mound of clay on the bench, her words settling in a place that felt dusty and hollow inside me. Unused. “Hard to imagine you ever making a bad costume.”
“Tell that to fourteen-year-old Sierra who made the costumes for the school play,” she said, chuckling. “Peter Pan looked way more like the Jolly Green Giant than he should have. What’s this?”
I turned back. She’d wandered to the corner of the room where an old polaroid had been framed on a shelf.
Sierra picked it up without waiting for an answer.
I surged after her, prepared to yank it from her hands, to tell her to be careful because it was the only picture of my parents together that I had, but she was holding the frame carefully by the corners to avoid getting her fingerprints on the glass.
Her head tilted as she turned to me, and her eyes lit up. “Is this Cathleen?”
“Uh, yes.”
“And the man…” she said, her eyebrows pinching together. “I’m guessing he’s your father?”
The words stagnated in my throat. Telling other people about the struggles with my mother was hard enough, but talking about my dad…That just didn’t happen. But the way Sierra was looking at me now, eyes wide, her good intentions clear, it was like nothing in the world was more important to her at that moment.
I cleared my throat, staring down at the photo. “My brothers and I found this one picture of our mom and dad together. It was in an old box of trinkets we stumbled upon as kids. We looked for more but could never find anything.”
In the photo, they were seated on a stone bench in a sculpture garden, Mom’s head on Dad’s shoulder. “He ditched when we were really young, and my mom didn’t take it well.”
Sierra frowned. “She, uh…It sent her into a major depressive episode. And she’s spent most of her life since then trying to climb out of it. So I always assumed she hid everything else about my dad away or destroyed it.”
“I’m sorry,” Sierra said, her lips stretching into a thin line.
I shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I don’t even remember the man. If it weren’t for this picture, I doubt I’d even remember what he looked like.”
“They look happy together,” she said softly.
I’d noticed that too, which was maybe the reason I’d held onto the photo all these years. That and the fact that I looked more like my dad than my brothers did. Liam and Connor shared some of my mom’s softer features. But I shared Dad’s dark hair, hazel eyes, that same sharp jaw, the same prominent nose.
I’d always wondered if my mother saw him when she looked at me. And I’d vowed to be a better man than that deadbeat. To show the world the best version of myself: perfection, success. To be everything he wasn’t.
Sierra examined the photo closer. “These sculptures remind me of yours…only bigger.”
She handed me the frame. “My mother never answered any questions about this photo, but for this one moment in time, they looked so damn happy together. I guess when I first started sculpting, I wanted to capture a bit of that moment—that joy. But it obviously didn’t last.” It was an imperfect relationship, just like my imperfect sculptures.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Sierra said.
I placed the frame back on the shelf. “It’s history now.”
