discouraging — gently, then not gently. Art was not a life for a serious man. Art was the loud shirt writ large, the ultimate spectacle, everything Dad’s world had taught him to fear. Eric had wanted to go to art school at eighteen, and Dad had refused to pay, had pushed him toward something “stable,” and Eric had spent twenty-five years in a sensible career that paid the bills and slowly starved the brightest part of him. He’d made peace with it, mostly. He told himself the art had just been a young man’s dream.
The fund in that lining was enough to change that. Dad had been putting money away for decades — since Eric was a teenager, it turned out — into an account labeled, in Dad’s own hand, for the art school he’d refused to allow. He’d spent Eric’s whole childhood saying no to the bright thing, and spent Eric’s
