Every Night (Brush of Love 1)

ng to be found.

I leaned up against the doorway and watched them work. They all took shifts breaking for lunch, pressing on with work while the others bought the homeless men their first lunch on the job. I smiled at the exchange as they all crossed the street, slipping into the diner and coming out with full bellies and grins on their faces.

What Bryan was doing with his own community was astounding. He was bringing a bit of hope and beauty back into their world. A world they thought had chewed them up, spit them out, and forgotten about them.

I wanted to take a page out of his book and do the same with my gallery. I just hoped I could shovel my guilt away long enough to make it happen.

Chapter 11

Bryan

I was trying to stomach dinner with my family this evening. The art gallery project was going fairly well. We had the electrical and plumbing finally up and running, which meant we were already in the process of restoring the outside of the building. Hailey’s visions for the place left me a blank canvas for the outside, so I had mock-ups of colors and designs running through my head. It kept me distracted from the uncomfortable silence that had descended the opulent dinner table at my parents’ house, but I knew it wouldn’t last for long.

I tried to have dinner with them every couple of weeks to try and do the whole family thing. It kept me from feeling guilty that we couldn’t make our family work. It reminded me of why the family fell apart in the first place. I had a tendency to blame myself for not being able to keep everyone together.

Even though they pissed me off, they were still my family, the people who had brought me into this world and raised me. I still had fleeting hopes that I could repair the damage done and that we could all enjoy one another again. It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other. We were all just so strained. We had all been affected by the death of my brother, and I couldn’t wrap my head around why my parents reacted the way they did. I still valued them as family, and I still wanted a relationship with them, but I didn’t understand how they could write him off like that.

But, all that guilt would quickly drain away whenever my mother would open her mouth.

“You still working that job?” she asked.

“You mean owning my company? Yes.”

“Whatever. Please tell me you’re at least taking a corporate seat.”

“Nope. Still pretty hands on. Working on a job site now, actually. I told Drew we were going to add a commercial property branch to the company and expand beyond residential properties.”

“Expansion. That sounds exciting,” my father said. “Any rental properties? You know, ones that might bring in more money for you.”

“We haven’t gotten it off the ground yet. It’s still in its infancy. I’m working on this art gallery in the southern part of San Diego. It’s going to be the first in our portfolio that we’ll use to advertise our services.”

“Oh, an art gallery. Will they have Degas and Monet? Oh, I bet we could donate one of our pieces. Maybe the Rembrandt upstairs?” my mother asked.

“Actually, it’s a newly-local artist. She paints and sells her artwork and delves into art therapy. Really has a passion for helping the community around her express themselves through art,” I said.

“Oh,” my mother said. “How quaint.”

“Well, I think it’s wonderful,” my father said. “Did you cut the artist a deal? You know, to nail down the client?”

“Yep. She was appreciative of it, and it got us on board,” I said.

“See? That’s that keen business mind I keep telling you about, Dorothy. Our son’s got a good one on his shoulders,” he said.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“All right, Michael. We hear you,” my mother said. “You can calm down now.”

I had to excuse myself from the table. I couldn’t stand the way my mother was so fucking close-minded. An art gallery only had her attention if expensive works of art hung on the walls like their fucking hallway that guided you toward the damn bathroom. Rembrandt and Van Gogh hung from the walls like they were fun little ornaments, decorations to sigh over before getting to the more important stuff. I’d stared at this artwork in awe as a child and had tried to mimic the brushstrokes and colorings. I learned how to shade on my own simply by trying to mimic those pictures, those beautiful pieces of heaven.

The more I looked on the walls, the more I realized something. There was prized artwork and decorations, a few pictures of my mother and father, and a couple pictures of me. But there were empty spaces, areas where the wall was a different color.

Pictures had been actively taken down.

There were no pictures anywhere of my brother, and I had to hold back my vomit as I rushed to the bathroom.

I threw the door closed behind me and vomited into the sink. They’d gotten rid of them. All of them. Like he didn’t fucking exist. Like he’d never been born to this earth. I’d never noticed it before, but then again, I’d never attempted to elongate dinner beyond what I could possibly stand anyway. I hated walking through this house. I hated the memories it bombarded me with. I hated remembering how John and I used to run these halls together with the nanny chasing after us as she tried to keep us from making a mess.

The memories alone were enough to choke a horse, and as I threw up the last of my dinner into the sink, I rinsed my mouth out and cleaned up the area around me.