“Thanks.”
Ellie sat down and signaled to the waiter. When she caught his eye, she pointed to Donal’s coffee mug.
“I’ve had a lousy morning,” she said, turning back to Donal.
“Welcome to my life. I’m still trying to air out from the deadly combination of Miki’s cigarettes and accordion, both of which she has to experience in excess before going in to work. But today’s worse, since she’s got the day off to get together a last-minute gig for tonight. So it’s going to be smoke and noise in the apartment, all bloody day.”
“Why do you guys even live together?” Ellie asked.
“We’re family.”
Ellie shook her head. “Most siblings I know don’t live together into their twenties. Not unless they’re both living at home with their parents.”
“And that’d be a whole other bottle of fish.”
“Kettle,” Ellie said.
“What?”
“It’s ‘kettle of fish.’ ”
The waiter came by with her coffee then and asked if she wanted to order. She was about to say no when she realized that all the walking she’d been doing earlier had left her with a real appetite.
“I guess I’ll have the brunch special,” she said.
After she went through the multitude of choices that ordering the special entailed—how did she want her eggs, toast or pancakes, bacon, sausage or ham, what sort of juice—she turned back to Donal.
“It’s because of us, isn’t it? I mean, your living with Miki now.”
He shrugged. “I know. We should have taken it slower. I never should have given up my apartment. You don’t have to say ‘I told you so.’ ”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“It just seemed the right thing to do at the time,” Donal said. “She needed someone to help with the rent when Judy moved out.”
“Right.”
“And now I’ve got my studio all set up.”
“Of course.”
Donal sighed. “I just forgot how annoying Miki can be.” He gave Ellie a mournful look. “She’s so relentlessly cheerful—especially in the morning. She makes Jilly seem positively dour.”
Jilly was easily the most outgoing, cheerful person Ellie had ever met—until she’d been introduced to Miki—so it was difficult, if not impossible, for her to imagine anyone thinking of Jilly as dour.
“I like happy people,” she said.
“Everybody does,” Donal told her with his Eeyore voice. “And more power to them, I suppose.”
Ellie knew that the real reason Donal had moved in with his sister was that he couldn’t face living on his own again after they’d broken up. She still felt guilty about it sometimes. They’d only lived together for a few months when she realized that it wasn’t going to work out. She knew that they could be great friends, but a more intimate relationship simply wasn’t going to happen. She’d probably known it from the beginning. Donal had been the one who’d been in love, but it was she who’d let herself be persuaded that the friendship she felt for him was something more when she really should have known better.
Trying to explain it to him had made her feel terrible, but at least their break-up hadn’t been acrimonious. They’d actually had been able to stay friends—were better friends for what they’d gone through, perhaps, though she also knew that he was still more than a little enamored with her. She kept hoping he’d fall in love again, with someone who could love him back as much as he deserved. It hadn’t happened yet.
“But enough about you,” Donal said. “Let’s talk about me for a change.”
Ellie smiled at him over the rim of her coffee mug.
“No, seriously,” he said. “What made your morning lousy?”
She told him about Henry Patterson and had to force herself to calm down all over again, just repeating the story.
“So now it’s your turn to say ‘I told you so,’ ” she said when she finished up.
“Not a chance,” Donal said. “Unlike you, I’m far too polite to rub it in. Except… well, I did tell you so.”
Ellie nodded. “Don’t I remember. ‘Been there, done that, it doesn’t work out in the long run,’ ” she quoted back at him.
“And it’s hard work,” Donal said. “It’s one thing pleasing yourself, and then maybe selling what you’ve done. Quite another being so bloody subject to the vagaries of your clients’ whims.”
“I know,” Ellie said. “And when you deal with someone like Patterson, you feel like all you’ve been doing is wasting your time.”
“I used to feel like that,” Donal told her. “But then I realized that I was getting paid to practice my craft. Not necessarily my own art, but at least I was learning what I could do with the tools at my disposal.”
Ellie moved her coffee mug out of the way as the waiter approached with her breakfast.
“The thing is,” Donal went on while she began to eat, “you’ll meet some grand folks doing portrait and commissioned work, but some of the punters are so bad you just want to chuck it all and get an office job. Sounds like your man Patterson’s one of those.”
Ellie gave him a glum nod of agreement. She dipped a piece of toast in the yolk of her egg, but didn’t lift it to her mouth.
“Do you think he’ll really sic a lawyer on me?” she asked.
Donal shook his head. “It wouldn’t be worth his while. The bloody lawyer’d cost him way more than your deposit. There’d be no profit in it and from what you say, Patterson would be one to want a profit.”
“Except he could do it for meanness,” Ellie said. She put the bite of toast in her mouth.
“There’s that,” Donal told her. “I don’t know your man at all, but if he’s got the connections he says he does, you could find your commissions in the business sector drying up.”
“What can I do?”
“I’ve told you before. You need to do a show. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but you have to get your own work out there for the public to see. Build up a reputation in the real world, not with corporate punters like Patterson. You know, the kind of man who likes to think that even his shite smells lovely and will turn him a profit.”
“But I’ve got nothing to show. And what would I live on while I was getting enough together to do a show?”
“Well… “Donal said.
He let the word hang there. Ellie waited a moment, then she realized what he was getting at.
“You think I should go up to Kellygnow,” she said.
Donal nodded. “And find out what the mysterious Musgrave Wood has to offer.”
“It might be nothing like you’re thinking,” Ellie told him. “With the caliber of artists that’s usually in residence there, I doubt there’d be either a commission or a residency in the offing.”
“I think you’re selling yourself short.”
“Butstill…”
Donal wouldn’t let it go. “Until you follow up on it…”
“I won’t know.” Ellie sighed. “I hate this kind of thing. I’d have no idea what to say.”
“If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll come up with you.”
“Really?”
He gave her one of his rare smiles. “Sure. And who knows? Maybe your man Wood—”
“Who’s actually a woman.”
“Maybe she’ll offer me a gig, too.”
Ellie laughed. “Maybe she will.”
“So that’s settled then. We’ll run by Kellygnow first thing tomorrow.”
Ellie immediately had a flutter of anxiety.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe we should wait for a weekday.”
“And maybe we should wait until Riverdance becomes a weekly sitcom—which for all I know, might actually happen, and I wonder, would your man Whelan be pleased with that? But we won’t. You have to seize the cow by the horns.”