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Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair
Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair Read online
VIKING
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Copyright © 2022 by June Gervais
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All illustrations by the author.
A Pamela Dorman Book/Viking
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Gervais, June, author.
Title: Jobs for girls with artistic flair : a novel / June Gervais.
Description: New York City : Pamela Dorman Books ; Viking, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021047701 (print) | LCCN 2021047702 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593298794 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593298800 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women tattoo artists--Fiction. | LCGFT: Lesbian fiction. | Romance fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3607.E7866 G47 2022 (print) | LCC PS3607.E7866 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047701
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047702
Cover design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder
Designed by Alexis Farabaugh, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_6.0_140201713_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Blackout: An Interlude
Blackout Day One
Blackout Day Two
Blackout Day Three
Blackout Day Four
Blackout Day Five
Blackout Day Six
Blackout Day Seven
Power Restored
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Chapter Fifty-nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-one
Chapter Sixty-two
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Research
About the Author
For Mom
and
for Rob
One
JULY 1, 1985
Blue Claw, Long Island, New York
How freeing it would be—how useful, how illuminating—if a fortune-teller should walk through the door of Mulley’s Tattoo.
Who else could Gina consult? For three days she’d been pacing the docks behind the shop, as if she’d catch some brilliant idea swimming in the river, just fish it out of those rainbow wriggles of oil slick. An hour ago, Dominic had said Enough, and he was the authority, the shop owner, the ten-years-older brother. He summoned her back inside to the shop’s waiting area, where he’d set up his Olympia portable typewriter on the coffee table. You’re not wasting your life here. Time to make a plan.
From the age of fifteen, Gina had done all her homework in this very room, while drifters and eccentrics told their stories over the staccato buzz of Dominic Mulley’s tattoo machine. This was the one place on Earth where she belonged. She’d memorized every design on the flash posters, their stock eagles and ships and arrowed hearts. She’d painted that mural over the couch, the centerpiece to all their flash: a muscled mermaid leaning against an anchor, holding an artist’s palette, as if she had just lettered the boldface mulley’s on the wall.
As of last Saturday, though, Gina was a high school graduate; she still had a nasty sunburn as a memento of the ceremony. Now began some other life.
Step one, Dominic had said. Write a résumé.
Résumés meant interviews meant jobs where you had to look people in the eye, and that was never easy for her like it was for Dominic. She always said the wrong thing, or the right thing in a strange way, and had to escape sometimes to the bathroom because breathing felt like sucking air through a cotton filter. It had happened when she worked at the bait shop, the movie theater, the housekeeping service, and the card store, and wherever she worked next, it would happen again.
Here she sat, though, miserably clacking out her name on the Olympia, one percussive letter at a time. If she were a typewriter key, which one would she be? The ampersand, with its crossed arms? No—a left parenthesis. The scrawny bend of her body, the shy hunch to her shoulders—
“Hey, chickie.” A customer, a biker with a blond horseshoe mustache, was snapping his fingers at her. He was getting a tattoo of a blue devil from Mackie, one of the guys who worked for Dominic. “You work here?”
“She’s the lackey,” Mackie said, pausing to dip his needle back into a little paper cup of ink. Sweat glazed his bald head; his arms swelled out of the sleeves of his T-shirt.
“I help my brother run the shop.” In truth, Gina wasn’t allowed to run anything but the vacuum. She turned her attention back to the typewriter. Hard worker seeking position as . . . what? Leave it blank for now. Strengths include—
“What I’m asking is, you do tattoos? Say I wanted some artwork down here.” Gina glanced over to see the biker moving his hand to his fly, giving her a sly look. She rolled her eyes. Dudes always made that joke like they were the first one to think of it.
Focus on the typewriter. Str
engths include attention to—
“She can’t tattoo,” Mackie said. “And if you’re that committed to decorating your dick”—he hocked a load of phlegm and bent to spit it in the trash—“I charge a hundred-dollar handling fee.”
“Dammit,” Gina said. She’d meant to type detail, and now she’d accidentally typed dick. She pulled the carriage release lever and yanked the paper out.
“So what are you, the secretary?” the biker said.
“I’m looking for a job.”
The biker scratched his mustache. “Thought you said you helped run the shop.”
“I don’t take a salary.” She liked saying it that way. Classed it up.
“So what kind of job are you looking for?”
And that was the question, precisely—the reason she needed a fortune-teller. She could not envision this new life she was supposed to create, much less the next step toward it, which made these orders from Dominic—Just picture yourself in five years—impossible. The best she could do was list all the futures she didn’t want:
Not anything that required a degree. College was a foreign land with an impossible price tag.
Not any of her after-school jobs—the kind you got because you wanted to stock the neglected pantry with more than spaghetti and ketchup. The kind you quit or were fired from within a few weeks, because whenever someone talked to you, you gaped at them like a fish.
Not her mother’s jobs: bartender by night, receptionist at a glass-and-mirror company by day. Not anything, in fact, that would resemble her mother’s life, or keep her in that house any longer than she had to be.
But also not anything that took her away from Blue Claw, because that would mean leaving Dominic. Clearly he needed her just as much as she needed him, but in some act of pointless martyrdom, he kept harping on her to get out of their hometown and strike out on your own.
This is not a real list. This is just a pile of nots. You’re making this difficult, Dominic had said. Just write down your skills.
My primary skills, she’d replied, are doing your grunt work, managing Mom, and drawing weird pictures. This only made him scrawl out his own list—
JOBS FOR GIRLS WITH ARTISTIC FLAIR
—and stick it next to the typewriter before stalking out of the shop on some errand.
“Hey,” the biker said. “Did you fall asleep over there? I said what kind of job?”
Gina rubbed her face with both hands. “I am considering”—she picked up Dominic’s list—“floral design. Window dressing. Seamstress. Candy making.”
“Gina,” Mackie snapped. “Less dit-dit-dit. More type-type-type.” He turned to run his needle in water.
“You want to come work for me? I restore elite vehicles. I just did a Lambo for Judas Priest’s drummer.” This was clearly Gina’s cue to be dazzled.
Did anyone actually impress women that way? If Gina were trying to get a girl’s attention, she would do something legitimately sexy. Like ask the girl what she loved doing, what made her lose track of time. And then listen to the answer. Or perhaps knead a loaf of bread dough, in a casual and quietly confident way, while asking the girl what sort of sandwiches she liked and making occasional meaningful eye contact. In her dream world, she could pull that off.
Gina got up and turned the typewriter so she was facing away from the biker, toward the front window. Just as she got settled, a Dodge Tradesman van pulled up to the curb, and out climbed one of the largest human beings Gina had ever seen.
Two
Gina would struggle to explain to Dominic later why she had done it. Hadn’t she heard his instructions? I wasn’t thinking. And didn’t she hate talking to strangers? I was bored. Mackie’s guy was irritating. What she couldn’t say, because it was weird: I’d been wishing for a fortune-teller, and you never know.
She rose and poked her head out the door. Seagulls wheeled above Midway Street. The air smelled like detergent from the laundromat next door and urine from the alley, where loiterers were still known to relieve themselves, though Dominic chased off anyone he caught.
“Gina.” Mackie stopped his machine. “Dominic said you don’t go out that door after dark.” If Gina got mugged, accosted, or snatched into some guy’s car on Mackie’s watch, he knew he’d be out of a job. Apart from that deterrent, Mackie wouldn’t care if the van swallowed her up whalelike and hurtled off a Montauk dock.
“It’s not dark yet.” The sky was smudging with orange and pink, an hour left till the street went black and blue. Gina stepped outside.
The van’s driver was a bear of a man whose very appearance suggested he wanted to keep his face to himself: beard made for Viking winters, blackout shades he’d slipped on as he climbed from the van, exhales of cigarette smoke like a shroud around his head. He left the van running.
Gina stared up at the underside of that Viking beard. It was only now, getting a worm’s-eye view of him, that a wave of nerves hit her. He had the earth-and-sweat smell of a gravedigger.
He took a drag on his cigarette. “Dominic around?”
“Out on an errand.” Her voice sounded too high.
“Why don’t he send you on the errands, Peppermint Patty?”
Rick Alvarez, the other tattooer at Mulley’s, had been coaching her on how to talk to people. Somebody intimidates you? he’d said. You think of one thing you can do better than they can. Change a tire. Karaoke. Rubik’s Cube.
Gina clenched her fists to hide the tremors. “Pac-Man.”
“What did you call me?”
Oh, God. “I said he’s almost back, man.”
The driver looked her over, maybe trying to figure out if he was talking to a responsible adult. “Is Dominic the kind of guy who’s going to be ticked if I leave a package with you? Because I don’t want to offend a friend of the Association, but I been driving for fifteen hours and my lady is waiting for me.”
“Leave it with me.”
The man propped his sunglasses on his head. “And you go by what moniker?”
Muffled noise came from the shop; Gina turned to look. Mackie was rising from his chair, stripping off his latex gloves, barking her name. The Viking pulled out a delivery slip and scrawled Left with Jenna.
“That’s not my name,” Gina said, but he was already turning to jerk open the van door. He dragged out a wooden crate tall enough to hold a taxidermied vulture, with Dominic’s name across the side in thick marker. Then the man heaved it onto his shoulder and carried it inside. He set the box in the middle of the waiting room, grunted something at Mackie on his way out, and peeled off.
“What the hell was that?” Mackie stared at Gina. “Give me a minute, Jack,” he said to the customer. He walked out to the waiting room, yanked Gina back outside, and pointed to the Harley parked out front. “You happen to notice my customer came in wearing a Pagans vest? Suppose that dude was Hells Angels? You gonna clean up the broken glass?”
“Why are you working on Pagans anyway? They’ve got their own tattooers.” Her voice felt as though it was forcing its way through a straw. “Dom said no one-percenters, no outlaws.”
“Don’t answer that door. Unless it’s a guy we know, or some hot friend of yours.”
Jerk. He knew that hot girls never hung out with Gina.
Back inside, Mackie dropped the bamboo shades to block the view through the front window, just to antagonize her, and resumed tattooing. Gina collapsed into the chair nearest the crate and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, knuckles digging into her chin. The thing was clearly out of place, dingy and scuffed in a shop that Dominic tried to keep clean as a dentist’s office, windows so spotless you were in danger of walking through them.
How was she supposed to concentrate on writing a résumé with this mysterious thing sitting there, begging to be opened? Gina picked up a pen and began to draw on the nearest piece of paper. She had doodles for getting thr
ough every sort of difficulty: merit badges to boost her spirits, labyrinthine spirals when she needed to disappear. Her favorite, an exotically ugly fish, was helpful for skipping over unpleasant or tedious moments. Start with the beaky mouth. Fins like fringed wings, beady eyes . . . In her mind, it even had a nature documentary voice-over: The wing-finned trancefish—an evolutionary mystery. It can’t fight; it can’t flight; its lime-green glow makes camouflage impossible. Ah—but witness its clever survival strategy: in times of threat, it dims its glow and enters a quasi-sleep state—
The bells on the front door clanked. Gina jumped, and then her whole body relaxed: there he was. Dominic was home.
His black curls were damp with the humidity. He’d always been darker than Gina, as if he’d gotten all their southern Italian genes, and she all their Irish. Now that summer had come, his skin under his patchwork of tattoos was deepening to olive as hers freckled and burned. They were ten years apart, separated by half a dozen miscarriages, and people rarely even guessed they were siblings. She was slight, he was sturdy—not like Mackie, who reminded her of a Budweiser Clydesdale; more like a quarter horse. In his clean gray mechanic shirts and black jeans—not a single rip, fray, or spot worn away—Dominic was also a better dresser than Gina. Or, for that matter, most of the people who walked into his shop.
Dominic stared at the crate in the middle of his waiting room. “Is there a body in there?”
“You want the little crowbar?” Gina stood.
“Business first. Show me how far you got.” He sat on the couch next to her and picked up a paper from the stack. Then he looked at her. “Are you sure these are the skills you want to highlight?”
GINA MULLEY
Seeking position as artist’s underling
Strengths include attention to dick
“Also, don’t say ‘underling.’ And lose the fish.” He picked up the one cover letter she’d managed to eke out and skimmed it. “This has no salutation. Or address.”
“I don’t know who to send it to.” She pointed to his Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair list. “We don’t have all these businesses around here.” Blue Claw was the county seat in name only, buffered by farms, way out east where the island forked to the sea. People came here to go to court or to go to jail or to harvest potatoes; the river mills remained only as ruins. Even the decades-old shops on Midway Street were struggling now, as malls and multiplex theaters opened farther west.