LITMIR.BIZ

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behind her.

      “Labeling,” she muttered, a bit shocked that Jack Ford had gotten under her skin so completely. Labels didn’t matter. She’d known that all her life, but for some reason his attitude stung.

      “What?” George asked as Rain put the teakettle on the stove, then turned to her father.

      Yes, he was a hippie. From the long gray hair, thin on top, pulled back in a ponytail with a friendship rope that Bree, her mother, had made for him, to the rope sandals, the six earrings in his left ear and the cutoffs worn with a shirt that sported a skull and roses on it, he was a hippie. Although Rain liked the term a free, caring spirit better than hippie. He was middle-aged, sincere about helping to make the world a better place, and vastly talented as a painter.

      She glanced at the loft, a cavernous space free of any real adornments, with pillows instead of chairs, bed pads on the floor in the side alcoves, and his paintings all around, in various stages of completion. “Want some green tea?” she asked, not about to get into this with her father, too.

      He waved that aside with, “No, thanks,” and headed over to his latest canvas, a huge, four-by-six-foot work in progress that he’d labeled Experimental. Red he called it, and it was that. Very red. Lines, sweeping swirls, dots, splashes, all in various shades of red. Even though she loved her father and thought he was beyond talented, it still amused her at George’s chagrin that “normies,” as her dad called the rest of the world, actually liked his work and bought it. “The cat showed up, huh?”

      “Sure did,” she said and turned as the kettle started to whistle. As she made a mug of tea, George put on one of his tapes of lute music. She turned with the steaming mug in her hands and inhaled the combination of paint and incense in the air. “You said LynTech used that loft sometimes when their people came to town?”

      “Yeah,” George said, studying his painting, hands on his hips and his head cocked to one side. “They’ve got it set up so they can work without ever seeing the light of day,” he said. “I hear they’ll need it with all that stuff going on at LynTech.”

      “What stuff?” she asked.

      “Something big, and I don’t mean that charity ball next month.” He looked away from his canvas and back at her. “Business intrigue that no one’s talking about.”

      She crossed to the rope hammock by the fire escape window on the back wall and settled into it, cradling her tea. This was the way it had been whenever she was here with George, her sipping tea in the hammock, him with his painting. It felt good, even if she was twenty-eight years old. “What’s the big secret?”

      “I don’t know, but they called in a big gun from London, Jackson Ford. He’s dead in the middle of it.”

      “He’s also dead in the middle of the loft next door,” she muttered and took another sip of the tea.

      George looked surprised. “You sure?”

      “I just ran into him when I was feeding that cat.” Now she understood a slight hint of a certain properness in his voice. England. Yes, it could be a hint of an English accent he might have absorbed living there. Then again, maybe it just came from him being so incredibly uptight. “They must use that place a lot. It’s set up like a control center for NASA, every business machine you could want. Well, not you.”

      “Mmm,” George said as he looked back at the painting. “Next door, huh? Well, from what little I’ve been able to find out, Ford and some others are working on a big deal, and it looks as if that very big deal could fall through.”

      Rain wondered if Mr. Jackson Ford was on the edge of being booted from LynTech for some mess up on his part? Maybe that was partly why he was so uptight. “Too bad,” she said.

      “It’s all a part of the corporate mindset, that need to work your butt off and make big bucks and destroy this country in the process,” George said. “That can’t be easy on anyone.”

      She didn’t want him to get started on this. She’d heard the speech far too often, and her nerves couldn’t stand it now. “No it can’t,” she said, ready to deflect the topic, but he did it for her.

      “Do you think this is too much?” he asked, pointing at a huge blot of crimson dead in the middle of the canvas. “Too…intense, too flamboyant?”

      Everything about George was flamboyant, another character trait that she’d adjusted to a long time ago. “You’re asking me that, the person who you once said, if I remember correctly, had the artistic bent of a log?” she teased.

      He turned with a grin. “I forgot for a moment. Thought I was talking to Serenity.”

      She called her mother Bree, but George never called her by anything except the nickname he’d given her the summer they met years ago at a commune on the coast of California near Big Sur. “So, she called, didn’t she?”

      “Sure did.” The grin seemed permanent now. He always seemed to glow a bit when he talked about her. Over the years, through all the changes in both of them, she’d never doubted that her parents loved each other very much. They just didn’t commit to a relationship the way the world thought they should. “Did I tell you I’m taking off soon?” George asked.

      “No, you didn’t, but then again, when did you ever check in when you wanted to take off?” She’d just gotten here, and with the mess at the hospital, she was hoping he’d be around for a while. But George moved when he wanted to and she was used to him just up and leaving when the spirit moved him.

      “True, and that being the case, I’m assuming that I didn’t tell you where I’m going?”

      “I didn’t expect you would,” she said. “Is there a gathering or something?”

      “No, not at this time of the year.” Then he came over to the hammock and stood in front of Rain with his arms out at his sides. “So, how do I look?”

      She shrugged. “Like you usually look.”

      For some reason that seemed to please him. “Good, good,” he murmured and moved across the studio area to the makeshift dining table all but covered with stretched canvases and paint supplies.

      “So, where are you going?” she asked.

      “The Golden City,” he said, the smile deepening.

      That meant San Francisco, more specifically, Palo Alto. “Oh, is she expecting you?”

      “She’s always expecting me,” he said. “And while I’m gone, chill and get centered.”

      “I’m chilling, and I’m centered,” she said.

      “No, you’re not. I can’t remember how long it’s been since you’ve been centered. That so-called institution of higher learning might have given you a degree, but it also made you uptight.” He frowned at her. “And since you showed up on my doorstep saying you were going to play doctor in Houston, well…” He gave a mock shudder. “Girl, you need to get back to the basics.”

      She wasn’t in any mood for one of his lectures on her choices. For a person who believed in free will and live and let live, he got remarkably judgmental about her life choices. For a moment she thought that despite his attempts at being so different from the suits, he and Jack Ford had something in common. Judging her. “George, stop. You know this is a non-topic. You taught me to make my own choices, and my own choice was to become a clinical therapist for children.”

      “I know, I know, and you’re really trying to help children, just going down a different road.” He came across to her. “It’s just hard for me to think of you, my daughter, being a real professional with a real Ph.D.” He looked genuinely shocked by that. “Who would have thought it?”

      “Yeah, who would have thought it?” she murmured with a grin.

      He kissed her on the forehead, then stood back and said, “I’m leaving later this morning.”

      She

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