There was a Pollack on the wall, and there had been for forty years, and then one Wednesday in November it was gone.
Margaret noticed first. She always did. She had grown up under that painting, and she knew its smudge of blue in the corner the way other people know the shape of their mother’s hands. The blue was gone. The wall was a square of paler paint where the painting had been.
She did not say anything for two days. She was waiting to be sure.
On the third day, her brother came down for tea. He sat in the chair he had always sat in. He took two sugars, as always, and the silence stretched for as long as it took him to look up and see what was no longer there.
“Ah,” he said. He set the cup down. “You noticed.”
“I noticed.”
He told her, then, the things she had partly known and partly chosen not to. About the debts. About the auction in Geneva. About the man who had come to the house in October with a leather case and a way of looking at the walls that she had told herself, at the time, was admiration.
“You sold it,” she said. It was not a question.
“I sold it,” he said. “And I would do it again. Margaret — it was a painting. We are not.”
Margaret looked at the square of paler paint, and the brother she had loved for sixty-one years, and decided, in that moment, that she was going to disagree.