David Schwinghammer’s Reviews > My Friends > Status Update

KimKim the artist's parents and the men at the harbor where his father worked paid for his art school. "They were hard people who lived hard lives, but one damn Saturday they would go to a damn museum and see a damn painting, and that feeling would be like a damn sunrise in their chests: that they had been part of something beautiful."

Joar tells Louisa the beginning of the end of the story. Joar was in prison for badly beating a man he saw hit a woman whose daughter was screaming.

Joar tells Louisa about his missing knife. It was in his backpack but there was a bar of soap where the knife should've been.

They get art supplies for the painting.

Joar's mother is really funny. She doesn't have a driver's license. She says, "Oh, I've only been stopped once. And then I pointed to you in the back seat and said you had an inflamed appendix, and that we were on the way to the hospital."

The Taxi driver lets Ted, Louisa, Joar and Albert, the dog, off at a train station.

Louisa saves Ted from a beating. The train, with the painting left on one of the seats, leaves without them.

Louisa has a friend named Fish who is the girl version of the janitor, the artist's friend. She "drifted off peacefully in her sleep". Louisa was only 17, living in a foster home. Her ersatz parents didn't want Fish. Fish fell asleep in the library and never woke up.