"Veronica!" Shelby called through the open window. "The paths look awful! I thought you said you would rake them again."
"Shelby," Veronica replied, "it is on the list." She looked up at her sister from her own seat at the kitchen table. She had been examining the household's bank statement. The balance was worrisomely low. "I will get to it. Right now, though, I have to sweep out the ballroom. You remember? The huge room you didn't sweep? The one where all the paintings will go? Where the Collective tracked in all that dirt when the crates were delivered?"
"I was busy! Can't Florence or Lulu do it?"
"No, they can't. They've got studying to do."
"But they're supposed to clean in exchange for living with us," Shelby said sulkily. "I've got studying to do too."
"They already do plenty and how do you study to draw pictures of mud? I would think herbal tinctures and the diseases they go with are a lot harder to learn."
"Girls!" Auntie Neza walked into the kitchen, thumping her cane hard on the tile floor for emphasis. "Squabbling will not get any work done."
"But Neza, we've running out of time," Shelby moaned.
"All the more reason to find your tempers," Neza replied coolly. "I will help you sweep out the ballroom."
Shelby, peering through the open window into the dim kitchen, thought of her great-aunt's crippled hands clutching a broom and felt ashamed. "No, no, no," she said. "I'll do it next. I'm sorry. I'm just so worried about the show."
"We'll be fine," Veronica said soothingly. "We've hosted plenty of shows by now for the PanU Artists' Collective and they've all gone well. We might even sell a painting or three. It could happen."
Shelby's face lit up. "Do you really think so?"
"Yes, absolutely," Veronica lied stoutly.
Neza said, "I agree. The show will be wonderful and we'll sell more paintings than ever. You'll see."
Shelby laughed and clapped her hands, her mood swinging back to joy from apprehension. "I get the ballroom walls and windows started right away. That way I'll be done when everyone gets here to sweep down the walls of the house."
As soon as she disappeared from view and her footsteps could be heard crunching down the gravel path to the front door, Veronica turned to her aunt, her eyebrows meeting her hairline.
"Do you really believe that? We'll sell more paintings than ever?"
"Not a chance." Neza snorted with wry amusement. "Those ugly things? But Shelby's sweeping the ballroom and it needed to be done."
"True." Veronica laughed, a lilting trill of amusement.
It gladdened Neza's heart that she'd been able to get her niece to laugh.
"And maybe those lazy artists will sweep down the walls without my standing over them." Veronica chuckled again. "And set up the easels and hang the paintings when they come over to prep for the show."
Neza snickered. "We can dream, I suppose. That at least is free. I will be glad to get all those crates of stands unpacked. Ballroom's full of them. Maybe we should offer to store them in the lower basement level so we don't have to deal with delivery again."
"No, then we'd have to get the Collective to haul the crates up and down two flights of stairs every time we hosted a showing. And we'd be responsible for their upkeep and maintenance. Let the Collective pay for warehousing someplace else," Veronica replied. "We shouldn't do it for free and that's what they'd expect."
Neza sat down at the table next to Veronica with a sigh of relief at getting off her feet. "Back to business. How much money do we have left?"
Veronica frowned at the bank statement. "Not very much. The mining conference started and I was really expecting we'd get a guest or two. You know how crowded Panschin becomes. And, well, this time nothing."
She handed the statement to Neza who looked, then looked again to see if the numbers would change. Her face fell as the columns of figures flatly refused to rearrange themselves to suit the household's needs.
"Damnation," Neza said. "I hadn't realized we were so close to the bottom."
"I know." Veronica sighed wearily and slumped down still further onto the table. "Those cardoon seeds turned out to be a waste of money. Half the seeds didn't sprout and the ones that did died. I shouldn't have run that ad in the Panschin Gazette. Nobody saw it. I shouldn't have bought those sketchbooks for Shelby or those new pencils."
Neza looked over the kitchen thoughtfully, observing the collection of cooking utensils hanging over the stove and the cupboards now half-full of dishes. "We could sell some of the furnishings in the B&B wing. The furniture is horribly old-fashioned but it's very well made and sturdy. The drapes are still in good condition too. We could sell some more of the china as well."
She heaved herself back up and limped over to the wall of cupboards and started opening doors on the cabinets that still held things.
Veronica thoughtfully studied the shelves in the open cupboard as Neza held the door wide. Only the lower ones still held dishes. "No, not yet," she said. "The conference isn't over. We have to have furnished rooms if someone shows up as a guest. People won't pay to sleep on the floor when they can sleep in the park for free. And they expect dishes to eat off of."
Neza smiled dryly, then carefully asked, "any chance of a magazine article selling?" She closed the cabinet doors and came back to the table, grateful to sit down again.
Veronica turned away to stare out of the window onto her constricting world. "No, another set of rejections."
She fingered her necklace, enjoying the cool feel of the gray and white beads and wished she could see a piece of the sky between the houses instead of the confining dome. She straightened up, turned back to Neza and said in a determined voice, "I've got a new crop of lettuces and some other veg coming in. I know the Dappled Yak will buy it all. We can hang on for a few more months."
"I didn't know it was that bad."
Both women turned to see Shelby, standing in the doorway, her hand on the frame to support her. Her face was pale and her eyes very wide and fearful. Her jaw trembled.
"Shelby," Veronica said, "How long have you been listening?"
"Long enough," Shelby answered hotly. "I wouldn't have asked for those sketchbooks if I knew you didn't have the money. Or those pencils. Why didn't you say something?"
After a moment of waiting, Neza answered for Veronica, who had her eyes closed and her mouth shut tight. "You needed them, dear girl."
Veronica showed no signs of wanting to talk yet, with her shoulders hunched over waiting for another blow, so Neza added, "you have real talent. Mrs. Grisson told me already how happy she was with your first portrait of her oldest granddaughter."
"Don't change the subject," Shelby said, stumbling towards the table. She pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. "You haven't been telling me things. Why not? Aren't I part of this family?"
She made a grab for the bank statement, failing because Veronica slapped her hand down on the offending paper and pulled it away from her sister's grasp.
"Don't you trust me to know what's going on?" Shelby asked. "Do you think I'm that selfish and stupid?" She wiped away an angry tear. Neza nudged her own chair closer to Shelby to put a comforting arm around her niece. Shelby pulled away, refusing the comfort she normally sought at every opportunity.
Veronica raised her head and considered her sister carefully. She thought of what Lulu had said previously about Shelby acting so young. Maybe the time for shielding Shelby from the harsher realities of life was over. Shelby was old enough to know what was going on.
For heaven's sakes, Veronica thought ruefully. She had been married when she was Shelby's age. She sighed over the mistake marrying Dean Kangjuon had turned out to be. Handsome, charming, well-connected; he had been so much fun. She had fallen madly in love with Dean and she was sure he felt the same for her since he said so all the time. They had lived a charmed life; playing house in the White Elephant, attending classes at PanU, and socializing with so many friends. Dean knew everybody, it seemed, and that meant parties and get-togethers several times a week.
And then he had cut and run minutes after the Bradwell troubles had begun. It kept getting harder to trust people, people you thought you knew, when every time you did you turned out to be wrong.
She watched Shelby sitting there, not speaking, although her unhappy silence said volumes. Veronica sighed deeply, drawing the other two women's eyes towards her. What would Shelby do when faced with the truth? It was time to find out.
"All right, Shelby," she said. "You are part of the family and you should know." Veronica pushed the bank statement to Shelby who lifted it up to her eyes. She puzzled over it, running down the column of expenditures that did not match the column of deposits. Shelby frowned and frowned and frowned hardest of all when she reached the bottom of the page.
She looked up, over the table, running her eyes across the cupboards of familiar dishes and stared out the window while Neza and Veronica watched her silently, waiting to see what she would say.
"All right then," Shelby whispered. She swallowed audibly. "I'll quit school and get a job." Her voice got stronger. "They always want waitresses and chars in Dome Six."
Veronica and Neza exchanged appalled glances. It was gratifying to realize that Shelby wasn't going to dissolve into a puddle of tears and woe, but there were things she didn't know. Veronica raised her eyebrows and looked quizzically at Neza. Did she want to address the situation they had both been avoiding since the day Shelby started classes at PanU with such high hopes?
Neza refused to meet Veronica's eyes, staring down at the tabletop. Its bamboo surface was polished smooth from decades of use and reflected her lined face like a mirror. Veronica watched her great-aunt's pursed lip reflection and sighed deeply again. She was going to have to say it.
"Shelby, that is so very sweet of you to offer," Veronica said carefully. "We appreciate it. Truly we do. But you can't quit PanU."
Shelby stared at her sister in puzzlement. Veronica regularly had plenty of things to say about the PanU art department and how it prepared its graduates for the future but almost always her statements had been negative.
"Why not?" she finally asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence. "I just walk away from the scholarship you got me at the end of the semester. It's coming up in a few weeks. They'll give the money to someone else."
Veronica stared harder at Neza's reflection, willing her to speak so she didn't have to.
"Well," Shelby asked again. "Why not?"
This time, Neza received Veronica's message.
"Because, dear girl," Auntie Neza answered unwillingly, "you didn't get a scholarship."
Shelby turned to stare at her aunt. "What? But why else would they take me? They looked at my portfolio. We didn't have any money to pay PanU. I wouldn't be going there if they hadn't given me a scholarship. I thought that's what happened."
Veronica reached over and squeezed both Shelby and Neza's hands. "That's what we tried to do, sweetie. But that bastard Vitebskin didn't like your portfolio. He refused to let you have the art scholarship."
Neza said, "but I knew you really wanted to go there. You have such talent, dear girl. I've never seen anyone who can draw as well as you can. So, I made a deal with the bursar's office. I got a discount for you on tuition by paying for all eight semesters at once in cash. I emptied out the last of my trust fund to do so."
Shelby's jaw fell and she started to shake. Her fingers made clutching motions so Neza pushed over a napkin for her to twist.
"There's no refund," Veronica added. "If you quit, we're out that investment in your future. You have to stick it out and get your degree."
After another long silence, broken by Shelby's gasping for air while her world rearranged itself around her, Neza said, "Your sister and I wanted to do the best we could for you."
At that, Shelby stood abruptly, still clutching the napkin. "What's best for me? What's best for me? Maybe you should have asked me! You could have told me. I always thought I wasn't doing something right in the studio and now I know why! It's because I was never good enough to begin with." She wiped away some angry tears.
Veronica leaped to her feet. "You are good enough, Shelby. That stupid, self-righteous ass of a professor is the problem. He's an idiot and he wouldn't recognize a decent painting if he was hit over the head with one. Look at what he wants everyone to paint! Ugly pictures that look like what comes out of a nightsoil cesspool."
Her voice got louder.
"No landscapes, no vases of flowers, no portraits, and lordy, lordy, lordy, the things he has to say about kittens are insane. He got you to parrot that stupid dross and you adore kittens! He's an idiot and he wants everyone to follow him down a mineshaft of idiocy and ugliness because he couldn't draw something recognizable if you held a knife to his throat!"
"He's a genius!" Shelby snapped back.
"He's a moron!" Veronica returned. "A lecherous, narrow-minded egotist."
"He is not."
"He is. If he was a genius, he'd make money from his own paintings instead of telling other people how to throw dirt at a canvas."
"You are wrong."
"Shelby," Veronica said. "I still have some contacts at PanU even though I didn't manage to graduate because of what happened to us when dad, well, did what he did. Vitebskin's got everyone in the art department fooled. He's got tenure and he knows where all the bodies are buried."
She did not add what she had heard via this source of information about Professor Vitebskin's reaction to Shelby's portfolio. He thought it bourgeois, derivative, trite, middle-brow, lifeless, and twee, statements he slashed in bold red ink across her application to ensure everyone who reviewed it knew his opinion. Veronica's source told her that Professor Vitebskin could be counted on saying this kind of thing if there was even a single image of a cat in a portfolio no matter what the portfolio actually looked like or how accomplished it was.
However, Shelby liked kittens and cats. She desperately missed their cat, Madame Fluff, who had been sold when they lost everything. She had included several loving portraits of Madame Fluff in her portfolio, more than enough to send Professor Vitebskin over the edge and down the shaft into the deepdown. If only, Veronica thought again, they had known in advance what set Vitebskin off. She would have ensured Shelby only included acceptable drawings that would garner the precious scholarship.
Shelby's yelling snapped her focus back to the present.
"Well then why did you spend all of Neza's trust fund to send me to PanU?" Shelby shouted. "I could have gone to PCC and spent way less money and we'd not be in this fix right now!"
"Because I was hoping you'd meet someone decent at PanU and get your Mrs. degree!" Neza said loudly. She thumped her cane on the floor, hard. "You're still a Bradwell and you deserve a better husband than anyone you'd meet at PCC."
Shelby gaped at her aunt, for once at a loss of words. Then she turned onto her sister. Veronica had her mouth snapped tightly closed and her eyes were blazing.
"You let auntie Neza do this? Veronica, how could you? You're always supposed to be so sensible. Get my Mrs. degree? Who even does that these days? You don't go to school to catch a husband. You go to school to get an education that will get you a decent job!"
Neza thumped her cane onto the floor again, harder. She kept on thumping her cane until she got their silent attention. "I wanted this, Shelby," she said firmly. "You're a Bradwell and a Molony. Maybe that doesn't mean much anymore, not our branch of the family, but it used to mean a lot. It was my money and I wanted the best possible chance for you."
Shelby turned back onto her sister. "And what about you? Going along with such a …" Seeing Neza's hurt expression, Shelby stopped herself in time from adding 'stupid idea.'
Veronica let go of her string of beads and traced out the grain of the bamboo tabletop with a fingertip so she did not have to look at her sister.
"It was auntie Neza's money so it was her choice, but I had to agree. You've got real talent and I hoped that you'd learn to paint really well at PanU. PCC has a good commercial art department, I checked, but I didn't think you'd be happy drawing ladies' dresses for department store ads. You're very creative and PanU seemed the best chance to nurture your talents. And yes, maybe you would meet someone nice there. Someone with prospects."
Shelby breathed out deeply and sat back down in her chair.