My Gallery Granddaughter

by Gretchen Tessmer

They say one of us needs to be moved to storage tomorrow morning. There’s a new acquisition coming in. Something edgy, no doubt, as the Curator is looking to increase foot traffic in our section of the gallery.

It won’t be me. Although, if he gave us a choice, I’d offer to go. I’m used to being alone. I’ve sat here, at my rough-hewn kitchen table, head bowed and hands clasped, for as long as I can remember. I have only scored bread and a bowl of lukewarm soup for company. There are no windows in my scene, none visible anyway. And from where I sit, I know the door behind me is shut up tight, so I can’t see what’s outside. I don’t know what’s out there. But I expect it’s all cold winds and bitter weather.

My expression’s just as bitter. Loneliness is etched into my rafters and scratched into my floorboards. My prayer gives off an air of desperation. The Curator likes this. He says it gives the piece a sense of conflict.

Bernadette and Sophie hang just beside me, two women at a Parisian café, drinking gin from teacups and laughing gaily in fashionable hats and Mary Jane shoes. They titter on in accented voices. The Curator says the conflict in their painting comes from the way Bernadette leans over and whispers in Sophie’s ear, intimating sisterly secrets.

The mademoiselles find me décevant. Sophie often suggests, “Isaac, cher, must you be so dour all the time? If you would just smile once in a while…?”

But if I were meant to smile, wouldn’t I have more laugh lines? The brushstrokes around my mouth are obscured by a shaggy white beard. Deep furrows are drawn on my forehead, making my countenance forever sullen and severe.

The little girl in the painting across from me is the exact opposite. Grace wears a smile always, sitting on a porch flanked by rose bushes and apple trees. It’s summer. There are planters along the railings filled with pansies and marigolds. She’s on the top step, her back to a screen door. She has a plate of gingersnaps beside her and her mother’s sewing scissors in her hands. She’s cutting green ribbon in long pieces, tying a pretty bow around the smoky-grey kitten perched on her lap.

Her scene is domestic and youthful, free of any angst.

No conflict, the Curator muttered earlier, while examining Grace’s painting too critically and shaking his head from side to side. It needs conflict. And by the end of the day, he hadn’t changed his mind.

So it’s Grace who’s bound for storage tomorrow. She’ll be in the basement by breakfast, unceremoniously removed from her wall hangings and carted down by one of the summer interns. The thought makes my heart ache and my fingertips dig into my folded hands. She’s too young to be shut up in such a dark and gloomy place. If I could just…

Or if the Curator could only see her now, face in her hands and braids sticking to damp cheeks. She’s crying buckets. There are no smiles for Grace tonight. She knows where she must go and she’s homesick already. The kitten beside her doesn’t understand why she’s so upset, gingerly placing his forepaws on the hem of her yellow sundress.

“But I don’t want to leave.” Her voice is small and choked with tears. It’s after hours, so her cries echo ghost-like through the night gallery, quiet except for the distant sound of rain falling on roof tiles and wet tires in the street. The halls are dark except for headlamps from passing cars and the faint, ethereal illumination cast off our scenes. I’ve added a candle to my kitchen table and the French girls are now sitting under a string of firefly lights. Grace’s house is still bathed in its own internal sunshine, ever late afternoon. But it may as well be midnight.

“Maybe you’ll make new friends?” Sophie offers, always one for optimism. But Bernadette is more blunt, stage-whispering to her sister, “They lay the stored paintings flat in a box, back to front. No sunlight, no space. C’est horrible.”

Grace sniffs, “Oh, please don’t make me go.” The kitten jumps into her lap again. She hugs her furry friend close to her chest, begging, “Please?”

But Bernadette and Sophie, for all their good-natured smirks and easy laughter, can do nothing more. They empathize with her plight, of course, but what good does that do? They nod sympathetically but soon return to their gin-flavored tea, chatting over cheerier subjects.

The others are even less inclined to help. On one side of Grace, there’s a sea-soaked captain barking orders to his half-drowned mates, their ship ever-listing and in danger of foundering. On the other, Mrs. Smith is in her nightdress, curlers in her hair and preoccupied scowl on her face. Her ear is pressed tight to the receiver of a rotary telephone. The sailors are too busy riding out a gale and Mrs. Smith murmurs a vague “mmhmm” into her phone before putting a finger to her lips at Grace’s plea, silently encouraging the girl to shush. Soon, she turns and walks further into her bedroom, eventually wandering out of sight.

“Please, Isaac.” Grace seeks my comfort, even though I think she’s been afraid of me sometimes. But not tonight. She wipes her teary eyes with the heel of her hand. “Do I have to be sent away?”

I’m the grim and stoic grandfather of this gallery. That’s my role here. I’m supposed to tell her that this is the way life goes. That needs must. That our fates are painted in much stronger stuff than watercolor. That we don’t hold the brush. That we must accept our four corners and learn to live within them.

But my bitterness has grown into discontent recently. I’ve started asking questions I probably shouldn’t. Why must she leave? Why does the Curator get to choose who stays in the light and who gets shut up in the dark?

It’s the way of the Gallery. It’s always been this way. But it’s much harder to swallow in the face of a child’s pain. Especially one who has never been anything but pleasant company, even when I haven’t deserved it.

“Do you think you can be brave, Grace?” I ask, wondering if I’m not about to heap more misery upon her poor head. From experience, I know the misery of false hope is worse than no hope at all.

But she must think I’m asking whether she can be brave about going to storage—hearing a reprimand in my naturally gruff tone—for she mutters, sorrowfully, “Yes.”

“No, I don’t mean—” I begin again, more gently this time. I’ve unclasped my hands and am gripping the table edge, holding onto to the solidness of what I know. Like Thomas putting his hands at Jesus’s side. But there’s more than just my table and these four walls around me, isn’t there? For Grace’s sake, I must have faith that it all extends further, beyond what I know to be true. Beyond what I hear and what I see. Stubbornly, I force myself to believe. “Do you think you can open the screen door behind you?”

She casts a slow, hesitant glance behind her, eyeing the door with wariness.

“My grandfather’s in the house,” she says, timidly. “Well, I… I think he is. I’ve never seen him. But I’m not supposed to disturb him.” She says this last part in a very low voice.

“He won’t mind.” I’m confident in this, if nothing else. I tell her, “Just try the door.”

I would have tried mine a long time ago if I’d been brave enough, if I’d ever trusted that laugh lines might be hiding beneath my beard.

But Gracie is braver than I’ll ever be. And I love her for it. Loneliness and solitude may have been my lot, but seeing her sweet grins all these years, hearing the laughter and chatter as she and that kitten play their games and have their porch-step adventures just across from me has worked a sort of healing magic on my heart that I can’t bear to lose.

The Curator doesn’t understand. How could he? He seeks out conflict and friction. He thinks contentment is tedious and smiles are only for the young and naïve. And he’s probably right… but I’m old enough to know that it’s not always so simple.

Well, no, that’s not right either. I suppose some things are simple. We just don’t realize it until they happen.

Moving the kitten from her lap to her shoulder, Grace rises from those porch steps. She takes one, hesitant step up, and then another, sucking in a little breath between her teeth just before she grasps the handle. She steels herself for what comes next. Letting out that same breath, she slowly opens the door.

At the same moment, I hear a latch turn just behind me.

***
Bernadette and Sophie always get steady traffic from gallery patrons. They’ve always had that je ne sais quoi. And the new piece is even more popular, for a while at least. But lately, the Curator’s noticed that the visitors tend to turn away from his new acquisition—a war mural, rather violent, unavoidably bloody—to the painting directly across.

It’s a simple scene of a grinning girl using sewing scissors to trim her grandfather’s shaggy white beard. She wears a yellow sundress and has her hair in braids tied with green ribbon. A smoky-grey kitten sits on the kitchen table beside them, his pink tongue lapping at a bowl of cream soup. There’s a plate of gingersnaps there too, some cookies, some crumbs.

There’s no conflict in it, not really, but everyone seems to like it just the same.

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Gretchen Tessmer lives in the deep woods of the U.S./Canadian borderlands. Her short stories and poems have been published in many places, including Nature, America, Bourbon Penn and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart, Rhysling, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars awards.

Author’s Note: Isaac’s “painting” in this story may be familiar to some readers, as it is heavily inspired by Grace, the 1920s-era photograph by Eric Enstrom (and the state photograph of Minnesota).

“My Gallery Ganddaughter” by Gretchen Tessmer. Copyright © 2025 by Gretchen Tessmer.

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