Chapter 7 - The Unvarnished Truth
By eight o’clock, the cold autumn wind had picked up, rattling the dry oak leaves against the dining room windows. Arthur pushed his plate aside, his slice of birthday cake untouched, the white frosting beginning to harden in the cool draft.
"Victoria," Arthur said, his voice regaining some of the steady authority he had possessed when he ran the shift floor at the ironworks. "Tell Clara what happens to her studio."
Victoria turned her attention to her sister. Clara had pulled herself up from the floor and was huddled in a wooden dining chair, clutching her elbows as if freezing.
"The commercial landlord on 4th Street agreed to terminate the lease early without initiating bankruptcy proceedings against you," Victoria said. "I negotiated the exit yesterday afternoon before driving down here."
Clara’s jaw tightened. "You broke my lease? Without even asking me?"
"I paid eighteen thousand dollars out of my personal retirement savings to settle the remaining six months of the agreement and forgive the property damage your framing contractor caused to the load-bearing wall," Victoria answered coldly. "The alternative was an open civil lawsuit against you and Mom that would have resulted in an asset freeze within forty-eight hours. The locks are being changed tomorrow at noon."
"Everything I worked for..." Clara whispered, shaking her head. "My paintings. My studio space. My identity."
"Your identity was funded by our grandfather’s medical safety net, Clara!" Victoria’s voice finally rose, not in hysteria, but in an explosion of concentrated, righteous truth that echoed off the high plaster ceilings. "You didn't build that studio! You played shopkeeper while Grandpa skipped his cardiology appointments because he thought the co-pays were getting a little tight! You took selfies in your designer overalls while Mom hid eviction notices behind the furnace filters!"
Clara shrank back into the chair, tears spilling freely over her cheeks.
"I didn't know," Clara whimpered again, though the words sounded small, pathetic, and hollow even to her own ears.
"You didn't ask," Victoria shot back. "Ignorance isn't innocence when the bills arrive in someone else’s name every thirty days. You chose not to ask because knowing the truth would have required you to wake up at six in the morning, get a job that paid an hourly wage, and stop pretending you were an undiscovered genius waiting for a patron."
Arthur placed his palm flat on the table, silencing the room with a single dull thud.
"That's enough, Victoria," Arthur said quietly.
Victoria stopped. She breathed out, stepping back from the table and smoothing down the lapels of her blazer.
"She needed to hear it, Grandpa," Victoria said, her chest rising and falling.
"She did," Arthur agreed. He turned his gaze to Clara. His faded eyes held no malice, but the unconditional indulgence that Clara had relied on her entire life was entirely gone. "Your sister is right, Clara. Tomorrow morning, you will pack your art supplies out of that store on 4th Street. You will load them into the bed of my pickup truck. And by Monday morning, you will have an application submitted at the regional distribution center by the highway."
May you like
Clara looked at him as if he had spoken in an ancient dialect. "The distribution center? Grandpa, that’s warehouse labor! I have a fine arts degree from an accredited conservatory!"
"And I have fifty years of calluses on these palms that paid for that conservatory," Arthur said, holding out his hands so she could see the thick, scarred knuckles. "You will work, Clara. You will pay Victoria back five hundred dollars every month until your debt to her is cleared. And if you refuse, you will not sleep under this roof, nor will you eat from this table."
