The Gallery

The building had been a garage, a real one, a place where men in coveralls had pulled the transmissions out of other men’s cars for forty years, and Jess Reinholt had spent most of that fall of 2012 scraping the ghost of it off the concrete, the black tidemarks of old oil that would not come up no matter what she poured on them, and she had decided somewhere around the third weekend on her knees with a wire brush that she was not going to fight the floor anymore, that the stains were the truest thing in the room and the paintings would just have to hang above them and make their peace.

She was thirty-one. She had signed a two-year lease on the place at a rent that would have been a joke five years earlier and was only possible now because the town was still on its back. Everybody her age had watched Reno fall further than almost any city in the country when the housing went, the sold signs that sat and yellowed, the half-built subdivisions out south stopped dead with their streets poured and nothing on them, the neighbors who simply drove away one night and mailed the keys back to the bank. The money had gone out of the town like water out of a cracked tank, and what it left behind, on this stretch of South Virginia below the tracks, was exactly what Jess needed, which was cheap empty rooms and nobody watching what you did in them.

People had started calling it Midtown. The word was new enough that she still heard the quotation marks around it when the older shop owners said it, but it was catching, the way a name catches once a place decides it wants one. A clothing-exchange place a few doors up had been the first, years back, hauling secondhand denim out onto the sidewalk and painting the front of the building a color you could see from a block off, and after that it had come slowly, a taqueria, a coffee place, a bar where you could get a drink that was not served by a woman in a casino uniform. Two blocks down a man named David Ah Lum had opened a small restaurant that people drove across town for, and Jess had eaten there twice and understood, both times, that he had made the same bet she was making, that the forgotten end of the street was about to stop being forgotten and that the ones who got there first while it was still cheap and half dead would be the ones who got to say what it became.

Her family had been saying what Virginia Street became for a long time. That was the part she did not put on the flyers. Her great-grandmother Clara had come off a train in 1920 to divorce a man in Cincinnati and had stayed instead and opened a dress shop on the good end of Virginia, up north, and had dressed two generations of women who came to Reno to shed their husbands. Clara’s grandson, Jess’s own father Dennis, had opened a record store on this very street in 1968, down here in the cheap southern reach where the rents were low and the kids were, and had sold vinyl out of it until the malls and then the mall’s own death took the business out from under him. Four generations of Reinholts had hung a name over a door on this one street, and every one of them had done it in a lean year, in a building nobody else wanted, and Jess had come to think of that not as a burden she was carrying but as a trade she had been born knowing, the way some families knew boats or cattle. You found the cheap room in the bad year and you made something in it and you waited for the street to come to you.

Her father came down to see it the week before she opened. Dennis was sixty-six and moved slow now and he stood in the middle of the swept concrete with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the stained floor and the white walls she had built out from the block and the track lighting she had wired herself off a video she watched at night, and he did not say anything for a while, which with her father was how you knew he was moved. He had run a store on this street when it was dying, and here was his daughter opening one while it was, maybe, against all sense, coming back.

“You know the woman up at the resale place just won a council seat,” he said finally. “The clothes place.” He said it the way he said most things, sideways, but Jess knew what he meant by it. He meant that the people who had planted themselves down here in the bad years were starting to become the people who ran the town. He meant it was working. He meant, in the only language he had ever had for it, that he was proud.

“I heard,” Jess said.

The show she hung for the opening was small, nine painters and one man who welded, all of them people she knew, all of them people who could not get a wall to hang on anywhere north of the river, and she spent the last afternoon leveling frames with a torpedo level and a fistful of nails and stepping back and squinting and moving them a quarter inch and squinting again. At six she swept the floor one last time over the stains that would not go, and she set out the cheap wine in the plastic cups, and she stood in the doorway of her garage on the turning street and looked out at the early dark coming down over South Virginia, the taqueria’s sign buzzing on, a couple crossing at the light, the whole low battered mile of it that her family had been betting on for ninety years.

Then the first ones came, two women she half knew and a man she did not, drifting up out of the dusk toward the light spilling from her open door, and Jess propped the door wide with the brick she kept for it and stepped back to let them into the room she had made, and she did not think, in that moment, about the lease or the floor or the four generations behind her. She thought only that there were people coming up the sidewalk toward her lit door, more of them now, and that the night was about to begin.

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