True Colors Read Free Page B

pristine
condition seemed irrelevant. He would probably confiscate the
security deposit just for the hell of it.
    She didn’t want to discuss him with Abbie and
Tasha, but she wasn’t about to lie, either. “He’s my landlord,” she
said as she joined the girls at the work table, which held a
chaotic clutter of construction paper, cotton balls, satin ribbon,
aluminum foil, toothpicks, fabric, salvaged giftwrap, and
magazines, pages of which had been scissored to shreds. Although
Abbie and Tasha insisted they were old enough for pointy scissors,
Emma had supplied each with snub-nose scissors—they cut just as
well as pointy ones, so why tempt fate?—and a jar of rubber
cement.
    She loved having her young students create
collages, which encouraged the children to think abstractly about
shape and texture and the juxtaposition of images. Collages were
messy. They were fun. And they didn’t require fine motor skills.
Not everyone could draw or paint. But anyone could make a
collage.
    The collaging materials with which she’d
armed the girls were indeed messy, strewn and scattered across the
work table. They were messier than Emma’s hair or her clothes,
messier than the drop cloths protecting the carpeted floor. She
supposed she should be grateful that Max Whatever hadn’t come
upstairs and seen Emma’s class in action.
    The hell with gratitude. If he’d climbed the
stairs to the loft and viewed the bedlam of two exuberant
eight-year-olds creating collages, Emma’s fate would have been no
worse than it already was.
    He was evicting her. Now, he’d
said.
    “What’s a landlord?” Tasha asked.
    Emma pasted a brave smile on her face. Tasha
and Abbie’s mothers were each paying her thirty dollars an hour to
teach their daughters some basic art skills. They weren’t paying
her to whine about her imminent homelessness.
    “A landlord,” she said, bending to pick up a
linty cotton ball which had migrated from the table to the floor,
“is someone who owns a house.”
    “My daddy is a landlord,” Abbie bragged.
    “Well, it’s someone who owns a house—or a
building—and rents it out to other people to use. That man owns
this house, but he rents it to Monica and me so we can live in it.”
Using a present-tense verb to describe what the man was doing
didn’t seem quite accurate, but Emma decided a shade of dishonesty
was allowed, under the circumstances.
    She needed to phone Monica to warn her that
Max Whatever was in town—and worse, that Max Whatever was ousting
Emma from his home. Possibly Monica, too. He’d seemed mad enough to
kick them both to the non-existent curb.
    Yes, he was mad. Mad Max.
    She suppressed a bitter laugh and reached for
her cell phone. Just a few minutes ago, she’d been about to tap in
the emergency number, summoning the police to the house to save her
and the girls from an intruder. Wouldn’t that have been fun. Maybe
the cops would have carted Mad Max away before he could give Emma
the boot. A mistaken arrest would have pissed him off even more,
but the result wouldn’t have been any worse for Emma. It couldn’t
be worse.
    She stared at her phone for a moment, then
shoved it back into her pocket. She couldn’t call Monica while her
students were present. Besides, when Monica was working, she
usually turned off her cell phone, which meant Emma would have to
try to reach her through the inn’s switchboard, and that in turn
might mean having to leave a message with an assistant. This was
not a situation about which Emma wanted to leave a message.
    She checked her watch, peeled a blob of dried
rubber cement off its face and said, “Class ends in five minutes.
Let’s finish what you’re doing and tidy up the studio.” Calling the
loft a studio made the entire enterprise seem just a little more
professional.
    Which would no doubt piss Mad Max off even
more.
    While the girls scrambled to adorn their
collages with a few final items—gummed gold stars in Tasha’s case,
a