Good Things Come and Go Extract

Read an extract from Good Things Come and Go by Josie Shapiro.

PENNY

At the tail end of an August night in Los Angeles, Penny Whittaker sits alone in the studio behind her house. The room smells of mint and lanolin, and a single lamp gives the blank canvas on the wall in front of her a subtle glow. Slick with sweat, Penny turns and stares out the open door. Dawn is still an hour away, but she can’t sleep. It isn’t the heat keeping her awake. Riggs has been gone for five days, and she can’t paint. When she thinks about it too deeply, she finds it difficult to breathe.

The buzz of backyard crickets wafts in, and from further away the yipping of a coyote, followed by a long, howling whine. It isn’t the first time Riggs has disappeared, though this is the first time he’s been gone longer than a day or two. She looks at the untouched canvas and feels the sting of a disappointment so intense it burns inside her chest. In three weeks, she’ll be forty. She’s acutely aware that the years she might have created her best work are probably behind her and her fiancé is an addict who can’t keep a promise. Riggs will eventually come home, yet she’s tempted by a strong, shameful desire to get in her car and drive somewhere, anywhere, to live some other kind of life, instead of fixing the one she has.

She won’t do it, of course. If she ignores Riggs’s tendency to vanish, and the grief she works hard to hide, her life isn’t bad. The lovely house and studio he bought in Woodland Hills, a pearlescent-blue swimming pool nestled between the two buildings. She’d be an ungrateful idiot not to see how good she has it. And all of it — the house, the studio, her being in this city — it’s all thanks to Riggs. After Rose died, and Penny wanted to quit her part-time job at Sketchy’s Art Supplies so she could try one last time to succeed as a painter, he’d said okay, I’ll support you. When they’d left New Zealand, and she had no money, no education, no plan, he said he’d take care of her. He asked only that she stick with him. Which she has done, on the whole. After they left New Zealand, once they were on the plane, it was only him. She has been loyal and true. Perhaps that makes her a fool.

She opens a sketchbook, takes up a stick of charcoal and sketches outlines, ideas, shapes, movements. Page after page, scribbling and sketching. Eventually she slides the paper away in disgust. Offers up a prayer to Catherine de’Vigri in desperation. I’ll do anything, give me one more chance. For me, for Rose. Let me do this.

Before she could walk, before she knew what other things life might hold, Penny was given a pencil and encouraged to draw. And then, from pencil to pen, from felt-tip to crayon, from pastel to paintbrush, seeing the joy it brought her parents, feeling a pulse-rushing pride in her developing talent, she knew she would be an artist. As a child, she painted the way she breathed: in a way that suggested she could not live without it. And that has not changed. Now, in fact, she isn’t entirely sure she can live without it — not after Rose. If this too is gone, what is there worth living for?

She repeats the prayer, feverish and quick. Desperation makes you do crazy things, doesn’t it? She opens her eyes. The paintbrush is over there. Still can’t use it. The prayer, like everything before, hasn’t worked. Why did she bother, anyway? She doesn’t believe in god, or saints, or herself.

Where has her talent gone? All this time and freedom, this glorious studio, and she can’t paint. All these years of work, tears and thankless effort, and no gallery or art collector wants her — what a useless waste. Can’t call herself an artist, not anymore. An embarrassment, definitely that. Her father would be horrified. Used to be she couldn’t stop with the ideas. Saw the whole world in colours and shadow, line and shape. That’s gone now, along with Rose, and gets worse every time Riggs takes off. As though he steals it from her. Well, she wants it back.

The tantalising dream of driving off, burning this all to the ground, strikes her again, and she smiles at the absurdity of it. As if talent and inspiration would be on the roadside somewhere in northern California. Besides, how would she survive without Riggs? She has no qualifications. They left New Zealand before she completed her final year of high school. The only job she’s ever had is that one at Sketchy’s. Not exactly in-demand work experience. She was born with a brush, her father liked to say, and she’d had no formal training, unless living under the same roof as Sir Damian Whittaker could be considered an education. Watching him. Imitating him. Outclassing him. She will have nothing if she leaves Riggs. She has to stay.

But — the next time he disappears she might not stay. Next time she might leave.

She turns away from the canvas and her sketchbook and gazes out toward the house. Creases of pale peach have settled into the eastern sky. The day has begun. She gathers up her notebooks and her sadness and walks across the paved courtyard to the main house. The air is laced with the bitter edge of smoke. There must be a fire close by. She takes a deep breath. She’s always liked the smell of burning.

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Good Things Come and Go

by Josie Shapiro

A novel about friendship and betrayal, ambition and grief, Good Things Come and Go is also a study of homecoming and heartbreak and an ode to taking risks no matter the consequences.

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