“Great,” I said with a shaky smile, “she couldn’t just hold an intervention or something while she was alive?”
“I may be wrong,” she said.
“Hey, girls,” Dad said, coming down to the car, “ready for some lunch?”
“So, how’s the store going?” Mum asked, pretty much the minute our butts hit the outdoor chairs. We were sitting on the deck at the back of the house, looking over a park that ran along the back of our street.
“Uh . . .,” Tess said.
“It’s fine,” I said. Mum’s keen hazel eyes flicked from me to Tess and back again. The woman never missed a thing.
“I’m sure everything is fine,” Dad said, patting the back of my hand.
“Your grandmother was starting to struggle towards the end, sales were starting to slow. Who knew the ‘magical supplies’ market could go into recession, just like any other market?” Mum said. Mum was a financial advisor and had nearly had kittens when we were willed the shop. “Perhaps you’d be better off selling the stock and renting out the shopfront. No point in losing the property, it’s in a very much an up and coming neighbourhood.”
“Well, now that you mention it, we have rented out half of the shop,” I said. Mum looked elated, but Dad jerked up straight in his seat.
“Well done, girls!” Mum said with a wide smile. “I hope you’re charging a good rate. Have you got contracts signed? Did you want me to look them over first? I don’t want the two of you getting robbed blind by someone unscrupulous.”
“Rented? How did you manage to rent part of the shop?” Dad asked, his eyes going wide, his mouth a thin line.
“We rented the library section . . .,” Tess said.
“See, Bill, I’ve always told you that was just dead space. It’s a commercial property, not a library!” Mum said to Dad.
“To a tattooist,” Tess finished.
Ah fuck, if I thought we were in trouble before, now we had the twin gazes of the dreaded parent coalition. Dad was a carpenter by trade, but an artist at heart and he didn’t quite hold with the economic rationalist perspective of Mum, so we had enjoyed a certain amount of divide and conquer growing up. But when they joined forces, it kinda went all Voltron, Defender of the Universe. They were greater than the sum of their parts.
“You’ve rented your shop to tattooists? What, are you hoping to get cross flow traffic from meth heads and bikies?” Mum snapped.
“You’re getting rid of the library? Mum spent hours building that collection up. Those bookcases were carved by your great-grandfather!” Dad said.
Tess looked at me and I shook my head. “Mum, about three-quarters of the population has tattoos now, so don’t go all Reefer Madness on me. The guy has a huge profile that’s just building. He’s in all of the mags, there’s talks of them running a reality TV show out of the shop for National Geographic. Tattooing is a glamorous business nowadays and I thought they were a great fit for the shop. Dad, the bookcases are gone. I sold them when we rented out the place because the guy moving in was keen to get in there and I couldn’t afford to get someone to move them. And where would you have put them, anyway?” Mum had the house decorated in what she called a Hampton’s style; lots of pastels and weird curios like clamshell vases and glass floats bound with rope. Big, heavy, dark-wood furniture would have looked terrible, something confirmed by Mum’s nervous expression. “Look, we were given the shop by Nan and we’re doing the best we can with it. You guys haven’t stepped foot in it–”
“You know your father is finding it hard. It reminds him too much of your Nan.”
“I get that, but unless you guys are going to get involved in the day to day running. . . .” Oh no, Mum perked up at that, eyes beginning to shine. “Making decisions about which smudge sticks to buy, how many, from which supplier, read through all the industry mags to find out what the new trends are, label the stock when it comes in, do new product displays. . .” I kept going until her shoulders began to sink and the gleam left her gaze. “You know this, guys, a business is a lot of work and we can’t run it by committee.”
Silence reigned. I looked at Tess who was staring back at me, eyes wide with fear. We loved our parents, but they were strong personalities that liked to take over. If they took up the facetious offer to interfere. . . .
“You’re right,” Dad said, there was hurt in his smile, but at least he was smiling. “I couldn’t have run my business with my dad hanging over my shoulder and neither can you. We have to trust them, Cecile. We’ve done our damnedest to raise them right, we have to trust that they’ve got this.”
She nodded a bit hesitantly, but then smiled, “I’m proud of you girls.”
I felt the tension leach out of my body as they changed the topic, going back to the usual update on what various family members were up to. Weirdly, as my heart rate dropped back down to normal, I also felt . . . trepidation? I was used to lying to my Mum to get her off my back, to redirect that laser-sharp focus of hers away from my vulnerabilities, but right then, my vulnerabilities were bigger than I could cope with. If Dad was freaking out about a couple of bookcases, what would he think if the whole business was going under? I looked over at Tess. This was her dream, to run Nan’s shop, to do magic, to be Nan, basically. How would she feel if it all went to shit? I rubbed at my head, feeling the familiar pulse of a headache beginning.
During high school and adulthood, I’d been able to apply myself to whatever goal I set myself reasonably easily. I finished high school with way better grades than I deserved, especially considering I was doing my assignments in the lunchtime they were due. Having a good memory meant I was able to pull my results up due to good exam grades. I’d gone to uni and did an Arts degree because I couldn’t think of anything else to do and Mum had insisted on a degree. I had a pretty good working knowledge of Modernist literature and film criticism, but strangely, this didn’t apply itself well to job opportunities. I’d been coasting, through all the nondescript, white-collar jobs a girl could have without specific qualifications. I wasn’t having too much fun with it, but I had my own place, my own car. Now I–we–had our own business.
“Mum, we are struggling a bit with the sales side of the business,” I said, the words out before I could really think about it. Everybody went quiet again. Great, I was a regular conversation killer. They all just stared, at me, at each other until finally, Mum pulled out her phone and a stylus.
“Love to help, darling,” she said. “Monday and Tuesday are out for me, but I have an hour or two around ten on Wednesday?”
“Ah, yeah, that should be fine.”
“Excellent, we’ll go to lunch afterwards. My treat.”
“Awesome.”