Malcolm Ordered Me Out While My Sister Passed The Carrots

Malcolm waited until my sister passed the carrots before he told me to leave my studio.

"Thirty days, Eleni. I need the whole third floor clear."

Mara kept her hand on the serving dish. Outside her dining room, rain tapped the window facing a narrow Lowell street. Inside, the roast cooled between us.

I was forty-nine, a Greek American woman with olive skin, a broad nose, and dark curls threaded with silver that I pinned above my round face.

My knees hurt from a week spent beside a theater drop cloth. I had missed a stripe of blue paint on my wrist.

"The whole floor?" I asked.

"Including your little paint room."

I restored theatrical backdrops for a living. Old forests, palace halls, painted seas. I worked on cotton and linen that could tear under their own weight. My pigments sat in chipped porcelain cups because the white glaze showed me the true color.

Malcolm called it a hobby whenever a stranger asked.

Malcolm was fifty-four, a white American man with a square pink face, neat sandy hair going thin at the crown, and broad shoulders packed into a tight navy blazer.

He had worn the blazer to supper. A tiny brass mill wheel shone on its pocket.

"I closed on the property Thursday," he said. "Canal Mill Holdings owns it now. I'm the managing member."

"I saw the deed."

His fork stopped.

"You saw it?"

"It's a public record."

Mara set down the carrots.

"I thought you were keeping the artists," she said.

"Real tenants, yes. People who pay."

He looked at my paint stripe.

"Mother let certain things slide. That doesn't mean the rest of us must support a dependent forever."

I heard the word more clearly than anything else that night.

Dependent.

I had paid my own mortgage for eleven years. I had paid Mara's furnace bill the winter Malcolm's last project failed. I had never mentioned the $3,800 again.

Mara looked down at her plate.

"Beatrice and I had an agreement," I said.

"Mother's been dead fourteen months."

"I know when she died."

I had held her hand that morning. Malcolm had been parking his car where the hospital sign said not to park.

He leaned back.

"Whatever she promised you ended when the building sold. This is a business now."

I folded my napkin. I did not tell him that businesses also kept files.

The old textile mill stood beside a canal, with red brick walls and windows tall enough to catch a whole gray sky. My studio, 3B, held two long worktables, a rolling frame, and a painted river that had nearly turned to dust before I met it.

Beatrice had found the backdrop rolled above a false ceiling. It once hung in the mill workers' small theater. Boats crossed a blue river beneath a peach sky. A painted footbridge joined two banks.

She had asked what saving it would cost.

"More than washing it," I had told her.

"Then write down what saving it means."

We had written down everything. The loose color. The torn lower edge. The hours of dry cleaning and small tests. Who would own the work. What I would receive.

Beatrice liked plain records. She had kept paid bills in biscuit tins, then paid a lawyer to make sure our larger bargain belonged somewhere safer.

At supper, I touched the small chip in Mara's gravy cup. It was one I had given her when we divided our grandmother's dishes.

"Don't fuss with that," Malcolm said. "Listen. This place could finally bring in important people. Donors. Opening nights. You can't expect me to explain you forever."

"Explain me?"

"A woman alone in a room full of old sheets."

Mara pushed back her chair.

"Malcolm."

He raised one hand, as if she had interrupted a speech.

"I'm helping her face facts."

I put the gravy cup down with its chipped side facing me.

"Send the notice to my business," I said. "River Seam Scenery Conservation. Use the address on your closing papers."

"You need a lawyer to move boxes now?"

"I need you to use the right name."

I left before dessert. Mara followed me into the hall carrying my coat.

"Let me talk to him."

"You heard him."

She studied the buttons instead of my face.

"I didn't know what to say."

"Neither did I, for a minute."

At home, I opened the bottom drawer of my desk. Behind insurance papers stood a blue binder with a narrow white label.

3B. ORIGINALS.

I checked three things: the signatures, the receipt, and the registry stamp. Then I put the binder in my work bag beside a chipped cup wrapped in a clean dish towel.

My phone lit up before I closed the drawer.

Malcolm had sent a photograph of a letter on expensive cream paper.

VACATE AND SURRENDER PREMISES, it began.

Below that, he had added a message of his own.

"I've already arranged your replacement. Don't embarrass yourself by making this official."