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  She woke in the middle of the night and called Gwendolyn, who lived in Wisconsin. “I was his wife,” Maya said.

  “Who is this?” She was half asleep, her voice thick.

  “I was his wife.” Maya grabbed the hammer.

  “You were his housekeeper.” Now awake, Gwendolyn sounded resigned, as if she had been waiting for Maya’s call and was relieved to finally get it.

  “That’s what he told you, but I was his wife.” The moon appeared as a smudge through her windows.

  “His wife was my mother. She died fifteen years ago.”

  “He took me into his bed.”

  “Did he marry you?”

  “I took care of him.” She raised the hammer and considered throwing it through a window if only to see the moon more clearly. But she had given up the rug for the windows. Gwendolyn hung up.

  A week later Maya received a letter from Gwendolyn’s lawyer. The gold letterhead was raised; the paper was fine and had a watermark Maya puzzled over. The letter warned her not to contact Gwendolyn or any of Peter’s children again. The attorney noted that certain items had disappeared from Peter’s apartment; the children had ignored the thefts, but their attitudes could change.

  Maya crumpled the letter, then straightened it, then crumpled and straightened it again. She put it in the drawer in the kitchen where she kept things she didn’t know where to keep. She called Alberto and told him about the letter.

  “Don’t mess with white people,” he said.

  “He was my husband.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to take me out to dinner?”

  “Sure.”

  “I like that Mexican place, but I don’t want to hear about your wife.”

  “Okay. Don’t order enough for two days. I’ll take you out again if you like.”

  When he picked her up, he was wearing clean pants.

  “Did you work today?” she asked.

  “I finished early.” He glanced around the room. “The windows look nice.”

  “I cleaned them with vinegar.”

  Alberto opened his wallet and handed her a check for two hundred dollars. “Your pay.”

  As she folded it and put it in her purse, she thought about the mangoes and oranges she would buy. She could already feel the juices running down her chin, the fibers stuck between her teeth.

  Tattoo

  Trey knocked hard, and a slim woman wearing a Mountain Ink baseball cap came to the locked door of the tattoo shop. She gazed at him through the glass, keeping her expression blank, as polite strangers did. He knew what people saw: bulbous eyes, neck as thick as a bucket, and black moles as large as quarters splattered across his face, climbing into his nostrils and over his eyelids. Only his wife, Nava, didn’t seem to mind.

  The woman pointed to the hours stenciled on the glass and called out: “Not till noon.” Images covered her arm—a red fox, wilting roses, a flaming skull, and the words Mountain Ink spilling from a jar of black ink and forming a silhouette of the Rockies. Butterflies froze midflight on her neck.

  “Apprentice job,” he called back. He scratched his forearm though it didn’t itch and tugged at the sleeve of his black T-shirt. It had been two decades since he’d applied for a job.

  She opened the door. “I’m Alisande. This is my shop,” she said, as she led him over a gray, polished concrete floor to a barber chair. She eyed his hairy arms and pale neck. “You don’t have any, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have any ink, but you want to ink other people. Whatever. Have a seat, I guess.”

  He wanted to say if it was a requirement, he’d get a dozen, but he was afraid to sound desperate, so he kept quiet.

  Across the room, designs papered a brick wall and a sign proclaimed, “Tattoos Hurt.” Trey hadn’t thought about that.

  Two other applicants arrived, a man and woman who looked to be in their twenties, with firm skin and full heads of hair, hers short and spiky and unnaturally black, his long and ponytailed. Alisande directed them to a leather couch.

  A tiger, an elephant, and a giraffe marched from the young woman’s wrist to the shoulder strap of her tank top. On the back of her hand, the door to a small, empty cage hung open. Tribal tattoos stamped the man’s neck and showed in the vee of a T-shirt that hugged his narrow, hairless chest. The young woman stared at Trey and then snapped his picture with her cell phone when Alisande’s back was turned. Trey’s ears grew hot and he went back to examining the wall.

  Trey hadn’t told Nava the pay was almost nothing, that the apprentice’s duties included scrubbing floors and running errands, according to the online ad. As it was, she didn’t approve.

  “I can teach you how to tattoo, but I can’t teach you how to draw,” Alisande said, as she passed each applicant a black pen and a sheet of blank paper on a clipboard. “Let’s start with a three-dimensional open box.”

  Trey was first to finish. Alisande walked around evaluating the samples. “Good,” she said, when she saw Trey’s. He felt a rush of pride and then admonished himself. He had an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, for Christ’s sake. Never mind that he hadn’t sold a painting in months.

  “Now an apple on a branch.”

  Again, Trey finished first. His apple was pink. The leaves, a sunlit green.

  “How’d you get those colors?” Alisande asked.

  Holding up the pen, Trey shrugged. He was as surprised as she was. He drew a line, but the ink was black.

  “Guy’s cheating,” the young man muttered.

  Alisande looked at his sketch. “I said apple, not Frisbee.” Resting the clipboard on his thighs, he tightened his ponytail.

  She gave them each a fresh sheet. “Last one: A woman lying on a couch. You have seven minutes.”

  After three minutes, the young man balled up the paper, pitched it on the floor, and left. At five minutes, Alisande called time. “Take a drawing class,” she said to the woman. “Spend a lot of time practicing. Then come back.”

  She handed Trey a hat like hers. “You need some ink. Somewhere visible. Let’s come up with designs this afternoon. I’ll tattoo them in the morning.”

  Back in his truck at the end of the day, Trey pumped his fist.

  * * *

  “You’re going to get tattooed for a job you may not have next month?” Nava fished a pack of sugarless gum from her desk drawer. She stuffed two pieces into her mouth and chewed, foil wrappers littering the legal pad and briefs spread before her.

  Trey stood in the doorway of her home office, as always intimidated by the thick files on her desk. “She wants to be sure I’m serious.” He fanned himself with three sketches he had come to show her. “How would you feel getting a tattoo from someone who didn’t have any?”

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I want to.” When his art was selling, Trey didn’t care that what he earned barely equaled Nava’s bonus. But when canvasses stacked up hopelessly against walls and on tables in his studio, her success magnified his failure and he felt like a burden. Commissions had dried up after he produced an unflattering portrait of the city’s new mayor—flesh piling beneath his chin and light bouncing off his scalp through thinning, ash-colored hair. Critics had called his work ugly. But Trey believed his subjects’ imperfections reflected their humanity, and what could be more beautiful than that?

  Nava shared his aesthetic. It had brought them together fifteen years before in a well-lit Chicago gallery during his only one-man show. She had examined his work close up and from a distance, read his artist’s statement, and then viewed the paintings again, finally selecting a portrait of his aging father, skin draping from his neck like a curtain and veins ballooning on his hands. Attracted to her concentrated gaze, Trey was briefly jealous of his own paintings. He talked to her about the history of portraiture, and she smiled when he managed a joke. Listening to her, Trey discovered she was well educated in the arts and her opinions were original. When she looked at his
face, he could tell she saw him, not his moles, and that she liked what she saw.

  Approaching her desk, Trey said, “I don’t mind getting tattooed. It’s art people will see.”

  “All of a sudden skeletons and hearts are art?”

  Reluctantly he laid down the drawings. Alisande had sketched an artist’s palette dripping paint, forming the word Trey. A nude woman with sharp shoulders and large thighs was Trey’s work. He had pictured Nava as the model, changing details—the length of the nose, the distance between the eyes—to avoid embarrassing her. Alisande had advised him that nude tattoos weren’t popular anymore, but the human body was what he knew best. Lester, the other tattoo artist in the shop, had drawn a tattoo gun in a cartoon style.

  Nava spit her gum into a wrapper and dropped it into the trash. “I like the nude.”

  * * *

  Alisande started him with simple designs: anchors, bows, and crosses. He missed the isolation of his studio. Lester chattered endlessly above the shop’s mix of heavy metal, hip-hop, and classical music. As Trey consulted with Alisande about each tattoo, clients stole looks at his face. Still, he was learning a craft, which gave him a sense of hope and possibility, things he hadn’t felt in a long time.

  He struggled to work on flesh, which was full of irregularities and had more give than stretched linen canvas. As he stitched images into their skin, clients winced. Alisande instructed him never to apologize, only to ask if they wanted to continue.

  He progressed to cobras, openmouthed and ready to strike, and clematis and silver bells on vines.

  “I’m Melanie and this is Grace,” a client said to Trey, as she showed him a picture of her infant daughter. The child had her mother’s eyes, large and the color of a pale sky. “Two and a half pounds when she was born. But look at her now. She keeps outgrowing her onesies.” Melanie pointed to her bicep. “I want an angel to celebrate.”

  Trey sketched a winged child with pastel eyes and transferred the image to Melanie’s skin. As he dipped the needle in ink, he steadied himself. Every moment was ripe for a mistake—a crooked outline, a muddy shadow. He drew the black lines slowly. To fill in pink cheeks and gold wings, he moved the needle in small, tight circles.

  Two hours later the angel was complete. Melanie squeezed Trey’s gloved hand. “Now I can never lose her,” she said, her breath ragged. For the first time, Trey understood the power of his new art.

  Trey’s colors were more vibrant than Alisande’s or Lester’s, though they came from the same suppliers. His lines hovered above the skin. Looking at his images, people forgot they were looking at tattoos. When he inked an alligator, swamp water dripped from their skin, and when he tattooed a rose, they smelled its perfume.

  Word of Trey’s style spread after Inked magazine ran one of his nude tattoos on the cover under the headline, “Fine Artist Turns to Ink.” The nude was a woman with thin arms and a wrinkled forehead. Trey watched Nava trace the magazine image with her finger, nodding. She was sitting on the living room couch and didn’t seem to notice him.

  Stepping into the kitchen, he rested his back against the stainless-steel refrigerator and sighed, relieved she had found something in the tattoo to admire.

  But she didn’t mention the magazine during dinner.

  In bed that night, he kissed her breastbone. “I’m going to tattoo you.”

  “I don’t think so. It wouldn’t go with a suit.”

  “You don’t always wear a suit.”

  * * *

  Customers sought Trey out. They reviewed his portfolio and waited for him, even if Alisande or Lester were free. On first seeing Trey, some were taken aback, but remembering his work, their expressions softened. Trey’s confidence grew. He stopped lowering the bill of his cap to hide his face.

  One afternoon, Melanie returned to the shop. Her head was wrapped in a lemon-colored scarf and her cheeks were hollow. “Will you do my nipples?” she asked. The doctors had caught her cancer in time. But the surgeons left her with reconstructed breasts “like sightless eyes.” She clutched the back of a tattoo chair. “When my husband sees nipples, he’ll forget I was sick.”

  Nipples weren’t part of Trey’s plan. But tattoos hadn’t been, either. He led her to a back room and mixed colors against her skin, blending pinks, whites, and tans, until the tones were just right. He inked three-dimensional nipple tattoos, more real than the real thing. Melanie went home and posted photos of the tattoos on her breast cancer support group Facebook page.

  More cancer survivors came to the shop, local women who had never been tattooed, who saw Melanie’s photos online. Mindful of their modesty, Trey put them in smocks that revealed only the breast he was working on. He played their favorite music, ignoring Lester’s complaint that he couldn’t tattoo to eighties rock ’n’ roll. Understanding what it meant to be disfigured, Trey opened the shop early and closed late to ink them. He corrected work done by other tattoo artists, nipples as gray as dishwater, as small as ticks, or shaped like apricots.

  Trey’s nipples, clients said, were more beautiful than the ones they had before cancer. They not only looked real, they felt real. Soft mounds, they grew hard under a lover’s tongue. Trey basked in his clients’ gratitude, never asking how such things were possible. “You saved my life,” said one woman. “You performed a miracle,” said another. At first Trey thought they were exaggerating, but after a while he believed them.

  * * *

  “You’re the Florence Nightingale of tattoo artists. But it’s not art,” Nava said, switching on her ultrasonic toothbrush.

  “Just because it’s functional? Maybe it’s folk art.” He had to speak up to be heard above the brush. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  She shut the machine. “Mind what?”

  “Me doing nipples.”

  “They’re not real nipples.”

  He wanted to object.

  Nava applied anti-wrinkle cream around her eyes. Trey trimmed the hair on his forearm, so the nude—his first and only tattoo—would stand out.

  * * *

  Alisande sat on the edge of the barber chair, sketching. “It’s like a hospital in here. It’s a weird vibe. With your following, you could open your own shop, a medical tattoo shop.”

  On the couch, Trey sat, gripping his knees. He missed tattooing nudes, which were as close as his new art had come to his paintings. “I don’t want to do only medical tattoos.”

  She looked up. “That’s all you are doing. It’s spooking our other customers.”

  “Are you firing me?”

  “I’m not firing you. I’m suggesting you open your own place. Our numbers are way down. Not yours. Yours are fine. Mine and Lester’s. The shop’s.” She showed him the image she had drawn. It was a tombstone with the inscription RIP Mountain Ink.

  On Trey’s last day, Alisande gave him a cap with the name of his new shop, Fine, and threw a party for him. All of his clients had been invited. The medical clients admired his older tattoos: nudes and skeletons and scripted words of inspiration and loss. After a few shots of tequila, they showed off their nipples to applause.

  The new establishment thrived. Trey raised his prices. His fees were nothing compared to what doctors demanded. Symbols of health—a snake entwined around Asclepius’s rod, the Tao, and lotus flowers—adorned the walls. Knowing his clients’ immune systems were weak, Trey took extra precautions, wearing a surgical gown and mask, scrubbing often. The shop smelled like antiseptic.

  Trey began to earn as much as Nava, and for the first time in their married life he didn’t have to ask for money. One evening, Nava came looking for him. He was lying on their bed, watching PBS’s NewsHour.

  “There was a stack of bills on the dining-room table,” she said.

  “I paid them.” He waited for her to thank him.

  She massaged her neck like she did when she had a muscle spasm. “Why?”

  “Because for once I could.”

  “Where are they?”

  He was beginning
to get annoyed. “I mailed them.”

  She watched the talking heads on TV debate a point. “Did you remember to put stamps on the envelopes?”

  “Nava.”

  “Fine. Next time tell me so I won’t think I misplaced them.”

  * * *

  At a cocktail party, Trey overheard Nava tell a colleague her husband was an artist. She asked a bartender to refill her Merlot and mentioned a gallery that carried Trey’s paintings, though they hadn’t offered his work for years. Trey finished his Scotch and ordered another.

  That night, as Nava slipped out of her bra, Trey bent toward her and said, “Perhaps a little more brown.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Embarrassed, he turned away.

  She covered her breasts with her arms. “Were you critiquing my nipples?”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  She put on her nightgown in the bathroom.

  Browsing Internet porn the next day, Trey rolled his mouse over a nipple and enlarged it. He wasn’t aroused. The color struck him as too pink. He wanted to get in there with his own colors, make a correction. Just because the breast was real didn’t mean it couldn’t be improved.

  At the shop, he began tattooing healthy women. He enlarged areolas and darkened nipples. Some women brought photographs of breasts, images torn from magazines for Trey to use as models. Others left it up to him. He was the artist, after all.

  A client returned to the shop accompanied by her husband, a skeletal man whose shoulders curved inward. “What can you do for him?” she asked.

  Trey knew how light reflected off of the human body. His understanding of anatomy was as intimate as a surgeon’s. Using three-dimensional tattoos that relied on contrast and shadow, Trey added a six-pack to the man’s abdomen, biceps and triceps to his arms. When the client put his shirt back on, the buttons gapped.