Free Birthright by Judith Arnold

several hours. Her skin was dry, her dress unwrinkled. Looking at her refreshed him almost as much as taking a swig of iced tea.
    He indicated for her to sit in the guest chair. Then he circled the desk and settled into his creaky swivel chair. He took another swallow of iced tea, screwed the cap onto the bottle and leaned back, waiting for her to speak.
    She didn’t seem to know what to say. She met his eyes fleetingly. Then her gaze darted around the small office, pausing at the file cabinets, the computer on a small table next to his desk, the clipboards hanging from hooks beside the doorway and finally the team photos lining the walls. Aaron was in the most recent one, as coach, and he was in three old ones in uniform, as a player. When he looked at those photos—especially the first one, taken when he was a sophomore with one foot still in the world of petty crime—he hardly recognized himself. The features were the same, the lean build pretty much the same. But the eyes…God, his eyes had looked angry backthen. He didn’t want to think he still had that much anger in him.
    Lily’s gaze lingered on the old photos for a while, and then she turned back to him. “You were right,” she said, breaking the silence. “My painting was too safe.”
    Her comment surprised him. He’d thought she’d come to discuss his summer program. But hell, if there was a nice fat check at the end of the conversation, he’d talk about her painting.
    As if he could think of anything to say on that subject. He could identify the Mona Lisa if he had to, and that painting of the skinny old farmer with a pitchfork and his wife, but that was about the extent of his knowledge of art.
    Lily was looking directly at him now, her gaze almost a challenge. He had to say something. “I was just talking off the top of my head when I said that.”
    “No, you were absolutely right. Everyone always says my paintings are nice and pretty. But I’ve been thinking ‘nice and pretty’ might not be such a good idea.”
    “You think nasty and grotesque are better?”
    She laughed. “Maybe they are. My problem is that I wouldn’t begin to know how to do that.”
    “Good,” he said automatically, then grinned and shrugged. He had a feeling they were talking about two different things. The only problem was, he didn’t know what she was talking about. He wasn’t sure what he was talking about, either.
    “The nice, pretty thing for me to do would be to give you money for your basketball summer school,” she said.
    “Well, then, I’m all in favor of nice and pretty.”
    She laughed. He watched much too intently as her laughter faded and her smile grew quiet. She could never be anything but pretty, he realized. Even if a terrible accident befell her, leaving her disfigured, she would still be pretty. Her prettiness didn’t come from her features, even though they were lovely. It came from something inside her, something tender and sweet and vulnerable. Not even losing her husband in an auto accident could make her interior grotesque. She was doomed to be pretty forever.
    “Nice” was another matter, though. “Nice” was within her power to change. Aaron had learned how to be nice, more or less, over the past fifteen years. If he could learn that, he supposed even the nicest person in the world could learn how to be nasty.
    “Do you have a budget for your program?” she asked.
    “I’ve got several.” He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out his budget folder and passed it across the desk. “I’ve got a reality-based budget, a dream-based budget, and everything in between.”
    She opened the folder and began to read. “This must be the reality-based one,” she guessed as she skimmed the numbers on the top sheet.
    “Yeah.”
    “Where’s your salary?”
    “What salary?”
    She gave him a hard look. “Aren’t you paid a salary to run the program?”
    He shrugged again. “There’s no money for it.”
    “Then how can you afford