As the next few days passed, Blue told herself it was a good thing Dean was staying away because she needed all her wits to deal with Nita. Still, she missed him badly. She wanted to believe he missed her just as much, but why should he? He’d gotten what he wanted.

A good old-fashioned case of loneliness settled over her. Nita decided she wanted to be in the portrait with Tango, but she also wanted Blue to paint her as she’d been, not as she was. This involved digging through a stack of scrapbooks and photo albums, with Nita’s crimson-tipped fingernail stabbing at one page after another, pointing out the flaws of everyone she’d been photographed with—a fellow dance instructor, a slutty roommate, a long series of men who’d done her wrong.

“Do you like anybody?” Blue said in frustration on Saturday morning as they sat on the white velour living room couch surrounded by discarded photo albums.

Nita flicked the page with her gnarled finger. “I liked them all at the time. I was naive about human nature.”

Despite Blue’s frustration at not being able to get started on the painting, she found a certain fascination in seeing Nita’s life unfold from her teenage years growing up in Brooklyn during the war, to the oft-mentioned fifties and early sixties when she’d taught ballroom dancing. She’d had a short-lived marriage to an actor she labeled “a drinker,” sold cosmetics, worked as a model at trade shows, and been a hatcheck girl at various high-end New York restaurants.

In the early seventies, she’d met and married Marshall Garrison. Her wedding photograph showed a voluptuous platinum blonde with a beehive, heavy eye makeup, and pale frosted lips gazing adoringly at a distinguished-looking older man in a white suit. Her hips were slim, her legs long, her skin firm and unwrinkled, exactly the kind of woman who turned male heads.

“He thought I was thirty-two,” Nita said. “He was fifty himself, and I worked myself into a fit worrying what he’d do when he found out that I was really forty. But he was crazy about me, and he didn’t care.”

“You look so happy here. What happened?”

“I came to Garrison.”

Turning the album pages, Blue watched as Nita’s anxious-to-please smiles gradually turned to bitterness. “When was this taken?”

“Our Christmas party the second year we were married. When I’d lost the illusion that I could make everybody like me.”

The resentful expressions of the female guests showed exactly how they felt about the brash Brooklyn interloper in her big earrings and too short skirt who’d stolen the town’s most important citizen. On another page, Blue studied a photo of Nita standing off by herself at someone’s backyard party, a tense smile plastered on her face. Blue flipped to a picture of Marshall. “Your husband was very handsome.”

“He knew it, too.”