Copyright © 2026 J.P. Russell. The author asserts the application of all U.S. and associated international copyright protections and all rights to this original work of fiction. Do not reproduce without explicit written permission, etc.
Ring of Fire
Grady’s diverse skillset never failed to impress me. I learned that welding was another one for the list when we turned our attention to the ramshackle corral. It was a good thing, too, because the gate and a lot of the steel rails needed some serious attention.
We chose a day where it looked unlikely to rain, as it would need to be done outside. I helped him set up his welding equipment and asked when he’d started welding. “I was pretty good at shop class in high school,” he informed me. “And art. But nobody really saw me as a painter, and I needed to make a living, so I did some fabrication work for a while before giving it all up for dreams of coffee.”
I perked up. “You’re an artist too?”
“Was. Past tense. And I can’t say that I was ever all that good.”
“What kind of paintings did you do?”
He leaned against one of the corral’s more stable railings. “I liked portraits, landscapes, that kind of thing. Never really got into pure abstracts, but I did like to be experimental with colors, light, medium.” His expression was wistful, almost devout, like he was talking about something sacred, a golden glow I’d never seen in his face before.
“Do you still have any of your work?”
He shrugged. The glow vanished, and he was back in the world of ordinary mortals. “I gave a couple of pieces to Doug. That’s about it.”
“Seriously? I’ve been here how long and this is the first I’ve heard of your paintings? Are they here? In the house?” Every time I thought I had a handle on Grady, there was something new to surprise and delight me.
He suddenly became shy—adorably so. “Yeah, but you don’t want to see them.”
“Oh, I very much do! Please?” I gave him my best charming, flirty grin.
He rolled his eyes and knelt down beside the bent gate with a wire brush to start cleaning the broken welds near the lower hinge. “Maybe later. Got a lot to do today. You want to get the other brush and sort out that end?”
I went to the other side and copied his actions, recoiling with teeth clenched at the unholy scrape of metal on metal. “Fine, but I’m not going to let this one go, Picasso.” He snorted and went back to work, but I could see a half-smile peek out from behind his beard.
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We spent the rest of the day fixing corral panels—me prepping with steel brush and angle grinder, him with his flux wire welder—and we were late getting wrapped up, so he left me to sort out dinner while he looked after the dogs. I’d started a pork roast and the fixings in the crock pot earlier in the day and the rich, homely smell permeated the house by the time we were done outside. To accessorize I peeled some potatoes and put them on to boil, then threw some green beans in the microwave with butter and garlic and some store-bought rolls into the oven to heat up.
Not my best cooking by any means, but it was a decent enough meal, and we ate in comfortable silence. Dessert was mint chip ice cream—a mutual favorite, though he liked a splash of milk on his to give it an icy crust—and afterward we sat out on the back porch, him with a beer, me with a ginger ale, the dogs milling around us. No afternoon storm today, just dark clouds edged orange-gold in the fading light over Saddle Mountain.
Just another perfect day.
“That was a great roast, Ben,” he said, reaching down to scratch behind Bear’s left ear. “Nice to have real food again instead of cereal and sandwiches.”
“I can do better, but I’ll need to get more recipes from Mom when I go home this weekend.”
He turned to me. “Any big birthday plans?”
I shook my head. “Not really. Been too busy to think much about it.”
“Well, you should do something fun,” he nodded decisively. “Twenty-one is a milestone.”
I laughed. “You say that like you’re an old man! You’re still in your twenties yourself, granddad.”
“Sure feels like a lot more.” He didn’t say it in a sad or self-pitying way, just as a fact.
We didn’t say anything else for a little while. As the sun disappeared and the air got colder, I leaned over and in a low, conspiratorial tone, “I haven’t forgotten about those paintings.”
Grady groaned. “Seriously? Can’t I just enjoy my beer in peace?”
“No, you can’t. I really want to see your work! I can’t believe you’ve been sitting on this little nugget of information all this time!”
“Do we have to do this tonight?” He protested, but I could tell he was secretly pleased that I brought it up again.
“Yes, we do! Consider it an early birthday present!” I teased. “I had to help you deal with your gay porn stash, remember? The least I deserve is to admire some fine art from a celebrated local artist. Think of it as a palate cleanser for my overactive imagination.”
He gave a deep, melodramatic sigh. “Fine. But you wait here, okay? And you might want to lower your expectations a notch or two.”
I pumped my fist in victory and hissed, “Yessss” as he went back inside. He wasn’t gone long, and he returned with two canvases, one under each arm, each about three feet long by two feet wide.
“Just remember,” he said, “it’s been a while since I did these, so they’re not great.” He was actually nervous—he clearly cared about what I thought of his work.
“I’ll be gentle,” I fluttered my lashes and folded my hands in mock prayer. But my eyes went wide and my mouth dropped open when he turned the canvases around.
They were good. More than good—they were incredible. The first one was of an older woman, middle-aged, with hard eyes and a world-weary smile. Her greying, shoulder-length bob framed her proud features in a no-nonsense, almost imperious way. This was a woman who liked order. She wore a knitted powder-blue cardigan over a cream blouse, with no other adornment aside from a simple gold wedding ring and a single gold chain around her neck. Altogether she radiated firmness, stability, maybe even a kind of cool assessment, even command. She was sitting facing the viewer in a plain upholstered chair, but behind her the air was alive with dancing swirls of color, as if she sat in a column of painted smoke and intentionally ignored the blazing world behind her. As unadorned and formidable as the woman seemed to be, the colors behind her gestured to a more vibrant reality just beneath the surface of her world.
The other painting was of a wide-shouldered young man standing in the heart of a narrow canyon looking down at the trace of a slow-moving creek at his feet. He wore green shorts, a white tank top, and red and white sneakers, and his dark hair was messy in a stylish kind of way. His face was turned away from the viewer, so you couldn’t read his expression, but it must have been as awestruck by the landscape as I was, because the ombre streaks layering the canyon walls were rendered in such precise and glorious colors and textures that it seemed that the real world itself couldn’t be much more than a pale imitation of the vision in Grady’s brain.
I must have gasped, because he glanced up at my reaction. “These are amazing, Grady!” I said when I could find words again. “How on earth could you have given this up?”
Pride and pleasure struggled with something else in his expression. “Well, I had to pay rent, and no one in the Tucson gallery crowd wanted my work. They said it was too earnest, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
“That’s so unfair.” Outrage coursed through my whole being. “The world is fully of shitty painters who make a good living selling their shitty work to other shitty people. But you’re a real artist, Grady—your work deserves to be in the world. Your work actually makes the world better.”
Hesitantly, he said, “You really think so?”
“Yeah, I do. I mean, look at them, Grady. They’re…beyond words. I can’t explain it, but I can feel it. They’re real art.”
He held the canyon painting up. “Thanks, Ben. You know, I always liked this one. It felt like I’d captured something real there.”
“Is that you in the painting?” I asked. There was something familiar in the way the young man stood, a kind of wounded confidence that I’d seen sometimes in Grady’s posture when he didn’t know I was looking.
He nodded. He seemed surprised that I recognized him in the piece. Although I had a guess, I asked, “Who’s in the other painting?”
Grady’s expression darkened. “My mom.”
“She looks…intense.”
He nodded. “Yeah. She was…she is. She wasn’t too happy about sitting for the portrait. And when I’d finished, she wasn’t too happy about the way it made her look. She didn’t like that it was honest.” His tone was cool, distant, like he was talking about an annoying woman he’d met once on a bus rather than the woman who’d given birth to him and raised him.
“But Doug loved it, and she was happy for him to have it, so at least it had a home where it was appreciated.” He held it up and looked at his mother’s features, but if he felt anything he didn’t say it aloud.
“You haven’t really talked about your mom before,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not much to say. It was just her and me after Dad died, and she wasn’t really prepared to mother an angry kid who missed his dad and tried to dull the pain by getting involved in a lot of things he shouldn’t have. She didn’t like the person I was, so we fought a lot, and I just stayed away from home more and more. It was easier than fighting. If not for Doug, I think I’d have gotten into some real trouble.”
I glanced back at the painting of his mom. “There was a lot of love behind that, though.”
He held it up at arm’s length to give it a more careful appraisal. “There was. I worked hard on it. But Mom didn’t like it. She said it made her look like ‘some sour old Puritan.’ I don’t think she could see the color in the background—all she saw was me making her look bad. She’s never really liked the way I see things, even in my own art.”
There wasn’t so much sadness in his voice as resignation, like he’d been forced to fight for his way of seeing the world from an early age and never had the chance to put his weapons down. I kind of got it.
“Well,” I said, “I love your work. And if you decide to take up painting again I’d be happy to model for you.” I flung myself across the back of the couch. “Draw me like one of your French girls,” I intoned in as sultry a voice as I could to lighten the mood, playful but with just a hint of real invitation.
Grady gave me a perplexed look.
“Hello? Rose and Jack? Kate and Leo? Titanic?”
He shrugged. “Never saw it.”
I sputtered. “Never saw it?!? It was only the biggest movie phenomenon of 1997! Pretty well swept this year's Oscars. Made Celine Dion a wedding standard worldwide!”
He smiled. “Yeah, still didn’t see it.”
I put a hand to my forehead. “Oh, Grady, poor Grady, we really must see to your woeful cultural education. It’s a very good thing I’m here to take care of you.”
“I agree,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you this summer. What I’d do without you now.”
The playful mood fizzled—he’d suddenly gotten very serious. I tried to lighten things up again. “You probably would have hired a proper handyman to help you out; that’s what you really needed around here”
Grady put the paintings down and turned back to me, his blue gaze almost sparking with an unexpected intensity, a sudden hunger I’d only imagined in my wildest fantasies. “No, Ben. I think you were exactly what I needed around here.”
