Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer

she was. The Florrie-approved doppelganger was pretty, quiet, polite, earnest, cooperative, eager to please. Larque just about hated her.
    â€œI think somebody blinked,” Sky offered shyly.
    â€œWho? Why?” Larque’s voice had gone shrill. Something about this child made her so mad she wanted to cry.
    â€œMommy, maybe. Because it was ugly.”
    â€œIt wasn’t ugly!”
    â€œYou said it was ugly. You didn’t like it.”
    â€œI changed my mind!”
    â€œYou didn’t like me when I was ugly.”
    â€œWell, phooey on me!” Larque grabbed a little stubby brush, an old favorite, stabbed at the palette’s puddle of black, and started striking in what should have been the legs of a black horse awash in mustard-colored sunshine. She painted fiercely, vehemently, more so than she had in years, trying to give back to Sky’s canvas what had been ugly and true. But the brush turned in her hand. She felt it happen. Now what should have been the black rider had become a meaningless paisley shape, a black fish most inappropriately swimming up the painting’s arid mesa.
    â€œJesus Christ!” Larque slammed down her brush, picked up the palette knife and tried to scrape off the black blob. It would not completely efface. She invoked the deity again, told herself to calm down, and tried another approach, starting to paint with white.
    Her brush, despite her intentions to depict the white-hat rider on the white horse, complemented the black fish shape with a white one. She had completed a yinyang which floated, apparently sizable and in midair, over Arizona or someplace.
    â€œJesus jumping-on-the-water Christ!” To hell with calming down.
    â€œIt’s prettier now,” Sky said doubtfully.
    Larque ignored the doppelganger. She was recklessly pulling out her largest, most expensive watercolor block, penciling in only a few light guidelines before she started to paint: an exquisitely handsome black-haired man. An ineffably beautiful man in silver-studded white. A black outlaw hat. A creamy straw Stetson. Two Popular Street cowboys.
    It was a scene that had been burning hot in her heart since the moment she had met them, and she didn’t know why. Her need defied analysis. She knew only that she had to paint this picture to save her soul.
    She couldn’t.
    What should have been a brooding, dark-browed hero might as well have been Howdy Doody. She saw it happening, and felt somebody she had once known having fits inside her, and told her shut up, okay, stop being a baby, these things happen, the reach sometimes exceeds the grasp, everybody has days when things just won’t go right. She rinsed the brush, squeezed out a little more Payne’s gray, attempted the figure dressed in white, and watched again as the brush defied forty years of marriage between her mind and her hand, turning him into a grinning cartoon, a caricature of what she had wanted to depict.
    Before it could be entirely over, Larque dropped the brush to the floor. She backed up against the studio wall and stood there leaning for support. When she had caught her breath, she whispered to the spirit-girl sitting quietly nearby, “Babe, we are in deep trouble.”
    The child turned big eyes to her but said nothing.
    Once again Hoot came home to only the most sketchy of supper arrangements. He was, however, accustomed to this, and gave his first attention to the girl sitting at the kitchen table. “Who’s this?”
    â€œSky,” Larque said in echoing tones to the interior of the refrigerator.
    â€œGet outta here!” This was not an eviction notice, but an expression of disbelief. Hoot ogled Sky. “You gotta be kidding. I wouldn’t have recognized her.” He stared some more and started to smile. “What did you do with her? She cleans up nice.”
    Sky seemed to feel no need to react to any of this, but Larque straightened up, closed the refrigerator