“Actually,” Jamie said, “I could use the practice. Call it a nickel.” Really what he could use was the nickel.
“Deal,” the man said, tough and smug again. He fumbled in his pocket, tossed a coin to Jamie. “First price is never real,” he told his girlfriend.
“Business not exactly booming?” she asked as she sat down.
He smiled. “At least I’m outside on a nice day.”
“Yeah.” She seemed unconvinced. About her boyfriend, she said, “I thought he was taking me to Playland, but he’s too cheap.”
Jamie would have to be careful not to let his instinctive dislike for these people and his sorrow over the lost tall girl creep into his drawing. In fact, he resolved to make an especially good portrait, to think of nothing but the face in front of him until he got the best version of this unpleasant girl down on paper.
With his pencils, he turned the corners of her mouth up ever so slightly, made her uneven eyes almost but not quite the same size （make someone too perfect, and the likeness becomes a critique）， left out the faint pockmarks on her cheeks. What he wanted to capture was a certain brassiness that showed through her sourness in glimpses, maybe a hint of humor.
He was well into his work when the three girls came strolling back in the opposite direction. His eyes darted away too many times, and his subject turned to look.
“If you don’t mind holding still,” he said, but her movement had already attracted the girls’ attention. They halted, looking at him, whispering.
“Oh, I see,” his subject said. She gave him a big, saucy wink, though he saw something wounded and scornful underneath it. She beckoned to the girls. “You’re distracting my artist,” she called. “Come over here.”
The blonde, the leader, pursed her lips in a why-not way and ambled in their direction, the other two in her wake. The short one, her rock candy worn down to its last nubs, circled behind Jamie and looked over his shoulder. To his model, she said, “It’s good. You’ll like it.” She put the wooden candy stick sideways in her mouth and crunched.
“I doubt it,” said the sour girl. “I never like pictures of myself.”
“How much longer?” said her boyfriend.
“Only a minute,” said Jamie.
The blond girl came around to look. “We should get ours done,” she said in a general way. The tall girl, Jamie’s girl, hung back.
“Almost finished,” Jamie said. Finally he tore the page from his pad and handed it to his subject.
She brightened. “That’s not half bad.”
Her boyfriend leaned over her shoulder. “Hey, he made you look really nice.”
“How much are they?” the rock candy girl asked Jamie.
“A quarter,” said the guy as his girlfriend stood and replaced her hat.
“My treat, girls,” the blond girl said. To Jamie, she directed, “Start with Sarah.” She pointed at the tall girl.
So he started with Sarah.
* * *
—
Sarah Fahey, he learned soon enough, was the youngest of five children, one boy and four girls, though the girls with her in the park were her friends, not sisters. She lived on Millionaire’s Row near Volunteer Park, in her family’s large house that looked to Jamie like something out of a storybook with its timbers and herringbone brick and abundance of chimneys. An expansive, luminously green lawn was trimmed as close as baize. The house even had a name: Hereford House. Jamie had not known that houses could have names. Nor did he know, at first, that Hereford was a variety of cattle.
Sarah’s brother had gone away to Harvard and was still in Boston even though he’d graduated. Everyone assumed he would come back to work for their father, though Sarah said she suspected he didn’t want to. Her eldest sister was married and lived nearby with her husband and baby. The next sister was studying art history at the University of Washington and lived at home but was away for the summer in Europe, and the sister after that, Alice, would start UW in the fall. “Mother’s big on education,” Sarah said. She herself had one more year at a private girls’ school.
Sarah’s mother was tall and willowy and had a languid grace that Jamie supposed would one day be the final form of Sarah’s gawkiness. She had been a suffragist and then devoted herself to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. After the passage of Volstead, however, she had not protested when her husband filled their cellar with a robust stockpile of wine and liquor that, more than ten years on, was diminished but far from exhausted. It was mostly the drinking done by other people’s husbands that Mrs. Fahey had objected to, and, anyway, trying to oppose the decisions of Mr. Fahey tended to be a futile provocation that improved the happiness of no one.