A Lasting Impression

Etched by regret, perhaps? And worry, most certainly. But worry about what? Rent being late again? Selling the expensive pieces of art he’d purchased on credit, and against her better judgment?
    She looked back at the painting. “I didn’t plan on including her in the painting, Papa. She just . . . appeared . . . from the tip of my brush.”
    For the longest moment, he said nothing. Then his breath left him in a long, slow sigh. “The truth of a painting must first be birthed in the artist’s heart before it can be given life on the canvas.”
    Claire felt a quickening inside her. Her mother’s first lesson in painting . . . but from long ago. She couldn’t believe he remembered. She, on the other hand, remembered everything her mother had taught her. If only she’d inherited Abella Laurent’s giftedness. Her mother had insisted she had, and more so. But Papa had made it clear she hadn’t.
    He’d never said it outright, of course—that nothing she did was ever quite good enough. Yet she knew he thought it, just the same. She knew it by what he didn’t say.
    Her father’s hand moved at his side, and in a briefly lived dream, Claire imagined he was going to cradle the side of her face, as she’d always wanted him to do, as her mother had told her he used to do, but Claire couldn’t remember back that far. She waited, breath trapped in her throat, feeling less like a woman and more like a child.
    He turned away. “I miss her too,” he whispered. “Never think that I don’t.”
    Feeling foolish, telling herself she should have known better, Claire bowed her head to hide the hurt. “I don’t think that, Papa.”
    There had been times in earlier years when she’d questioned the love between her parents. But mainly her father’s love for her mother. In the final days, especially. When it became apparent that the medicine wasn’t working and the doctors had given up hope, and when Claire had pleaded with him to send her mother to a sanitarium. “People like Maman go there and some of them get better,” she’d told him. But his anger had erupted. “Those places cost money, Claire Elise! Money we don’t have. Unless you can paint in her stead. Faster and better than you’re doing now.”
    So she’d worked, night and day, for months on end. Caring for her mother as her mother continued to instruct her—just as she had since Claire was a little girl—sometimes from bed, when her mother was too tired to sit or stand. But in the end, no matter how much Claire pleaded or how much she painted, Papa had held his ground, and her mother had died in this very room.
    Her father cleared his throat. “Fortunately for you, of the seventeen times Brissaud painted Jardins de Versailles, he included a different detail in each.”
    Claire nodded, aware of that fact, as he well knew. And also aware that every one of the seventeen original Jardins de Versailles —plus the four she’d painted before this one—were in circulation. If anyone ever devised a way for those four, soon to be five, proud owners of a François-Narcisse Brissaud “original” purchased from the European Masters Art Gallery in New Orleans to know details about the other seventeen . . .
    Her father gestured to the clock on the mantel, then looked pointedly back at her before descending the staircase.
    Claire retrieved her reticule and turned to follow him, then glanced back at the painting. Not giving herself time to think about the consequences, she grabbed a brush, dipped it in paint, and signed the portrait—with her name—hand shaking as she did. She’d have to change it later, she knew.
    But for now, seeing her name on something she was so proud of—and knowing Papa wouldn’t like it—felt good, if not a bit rebellious.
    As she passed through the kitchen, she saw that the door leading into the art gallery had been left open—something Papa never permitted. Stepping through that door was like stepping into another world. Plush rugs and bronze chandeliers, oil paintings and sculptures, burgundy silk paper lining the gallery walls that matched the velvet cloths draping the tables. Every item purchased on credit when they moved into this building two years earlier, and purchased with the intent of creating an air of affluence and wealth, however flimsy and paper-thin that veneer.
    Confronted again by the stark differences between the gallery and the living quarters, Claire paused at the back door. Hand on the latch, she summoned