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city.
    It turned out the modeling job involved walking around a Times Square bar in four-inch heels carrying a tray of cigarettes and candy and wearing an outfit that was basically underwear decorated with bits of fluff and a few sparkles. “A Peachy Puff Girl,” she was called. Thursday nights she went to look at the art at the Metropolitan Museum and sometimes brought a sketch pad to copy some painting she liked.
    But art school wasn’t happening. Simply coming up with rent money was enough of a challenge, particularly for a girl like Valerie, who was never good with finances, and who—every time she had a few extra dollars—did something crazy with it like buying a deluxe set of pastels or a gold leather purse she saw in the window of Macy’s, even though she had no place to take it.
    It was on her rounds as a Peachy Puff girl that she met George, who was having a drink at the bar where she worked. He told her he was a writer. He had come to the city to meet with an editor who wanted to publish his novel. They were working out a few last details of the deal. (Later, it turned out the details included a five-hundred-dollar down payment, from George to his publisher, for getting Vanquished Desire into print. But that night, at least, George was one step away from becoming the next Erle Stanley Gardner.)
    After all the traveling salesmen she’d met (though soon enough, she’d be married to one) the idea of knowing a writer struck Valerie as exciting. She told him she wanted to be an artist.
    “Hey, we should go someplace like Vermont or New Hampshire and live off the land,” he said. “I’d write best-selling novels and you’d make beautiful paintings.”
    In two weeks they were on their way north.
    Years later, when Val and George were well into their forties and living in a funky apartment near Cocoa Beach, Florida—the last place they shared before George took off for good—George went to an art auction he read about in the paper. He came back having spent most of their savings—eight thousand dollars, if memory serves me—on a bunch of artwork he told my mother they could resell for three times what he paid, or more. A few days later he arranged for an appraiser to come over and take a look at his collection.
    Among his purchases that day was a painting alleged to have been made by Salvador Dalí, and another that was by Fernand Léger, and a Frederic Remington statue of a cowboy, and a drawing the auctioneer attributed to a student of Leonardo da Vinci, with a letter taped on the back supposedly confirming this.
    It took the appraiser less than five minutes to examine the collection. They were all fakes. George had fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.
    The appraiser was just getting up to go when he spotted a portrait over our couch, of a woman in a red hat, smoking a cigarette. “Who did this one?” he said, with a tone of renewed interest. “You’ve actually got something here.”
    The painting was Val’s. We had a storage room full of more of her work. There was no market for them, however—then or ever. Eventually, in her later years, after George was long gone, she made a little money doing greeting cards and pastel portraits of people’s children. Fifty dollars a portrait, seventy-five if there were two heads in the frame rather than one.
    All in all, we were about as unlikely a family as you could imagine to have befriended people like the Planks. We didn’t exactly befriend them, of course. In fact, over the many years we kept receiving cards and letters from Plank Farm—forwarded from some previous address more often than not—Val often commented to us on the strangeness of Connie’s stubborn insistence that the two families remain in touch.
    One night Val read a letter out loud to us over our dinner of lentils and celery and beet juice, imitating Connie’s voice as she might have spoken the words, and laughing in a way that struck me even then as unfair.
    “Tell Dana for