Angie was already known to be as difficult as she was talented. That would legitimately make her very testy, indeed. Our women friends often pointed out: Guys who hustled in the service of careers were called “movers, shakers, comers.” Girls who tried were “pushy manipulative bitches, sleeping their way up.”

One snowy day, on my way to the laundromat, an acquaintance told me he’d just heard a bigtime dealer describe Angie as “her own worst enemy and the classic ball breaker.” As usual, I defended Ang. But I’d begun to feel more and more tired of doing so. It seemed unfair to both of us, how people brought their worst Alabama stories straight to me. I urged them to simply look at her work. They did, but her paintings were so fresh and strange, so laden with exemptions, her art irked them even more.

My favorite laundromat stood just opposite a row of awninged Old Englishy antique shops. I had shifted my folding chair closer to the dryers for warmth. As I flipped through an outdated celeb magazine instead of the serious manuscript I now carried everywhere, I saw her. Angie stood window-shopping at an expensive little store across the way. Snow now flitted down in windblown drifts and everyone was bundled, mid-December. Unaware of being watched, her back to me, Angie had eased up onto tiptoe, kept leaning against a bay window full of nineteenth-century toy soldiers arrayed atop lead forts.

She then dodged into an adjacent doorway, pulled off one red mitten, counted her money. She’d trot back—breath all blue—and stare some more. Once, using her coatsleeve and mitten, she cleared the frosted window of her own observer’s vapors. She stared up and in like some waif from Dickens. The prissy owner signaled her away. “Shoo,” he said, and waved ringed fingers to one side.

I knew, to the bone, she was hoping to buy overpriced Christmas gifts for Robert and me. For some reason, she was convinced—from Robert’s affection for the word “Lad”?—that we both adored costly Anglo-Scottish lead soldiers. I felt such a twinge at seeing this “ball breaker” about to overspend on us.

When I later opened my gift, wrapped in tartan paper, a note was attached: “You deserve a regiment. This year, can’t afford one. So settle for my company and these McLovers instead?” And there rested two lead kilted soldiers, all softened with nicks and lovely painted plaid, two warriors like something from a Robert Louis Stevenson boyhood poem. I placed one at either side of my typewriter.

If I worked to defend Angie from others, I still couldn’t make her feel defended. My praise, my faith, never seemed exactly enough. She expected those around her to help advance her career and when she hit a lull—as we all did, long ones—Angie Byrnes commenced to flame throw in our directions. Even Robert caught it for treasonable disloyalty.