Chapter 7 - The Gallery of Ghosts
For the next seventy-two hours, my studio became a forge.
I didn't sleep more than three hours a night. The adrenaline that had carried me out of the ballroom had metabolized into a cold, terrifying focus that every serious artist recognizes—that rare, dangerous state of flow where the hand moves faster than doubt, where the line between memory and pigment dissolves entirely.
I didn't touch The Millers at Home. That canvas was finished; its fate was in the hands of the museum selection committee.
Instead, I worked on the Inventory of Debt.
Using my father’s four-page spreadsheet as a literal underdrawing, I created a series of nine twelve-by-sixteen-inch mixed-media panels.
On the first panel, I mounted the high-resolution photocopy of the line item: Aug 14, 2012: Four Michelin tires — $642.18. Over the top of the typed legal text, I painted a detailed, hyper-realistic study of my mother’s polished dining table, focusing on the empty chair where I was supposed to sit during Jason’s twenty-first birthday dinner—the dinner I had missed because my old tires had blown out on the highway near Bernalillo, and my father had told me over the phone that “A real adult learns to change a spare without crying to her parents.”
On the second panel, beneath the heading Emergency appendectomy co-pay — $1,250.00, I rendered the fluorescent lighting of the recovery room at St. Vincent Hospital. In the corner of the frame, my mother sat in a vinyl chair, checking her watch, her face illuminated by the blue light of her phone, while in the doorway, my father was talking to a doctor, holding his credit card out between two fingers like an executive paying for an inconvenient valet service.
On the final panel, dominating the center of the series, I mounted the photograph of the mountain family portrait from October 14th.
I didn't paint over the photograph. I simply used gold leaf—the traditional material used by Renaissance masters to denote the sacred and the untouchable—to gild the ornate frame, the golden aspen leaves, and the matching green sweaters of my parents, Jason, Megan, and Buster.
And then, across the bottom of the gold leaf, using the same India ink and the same administrative font my father used in his lumber yard invoices, I lettered the final total:
BALANCE DUE: ONE DAUGHTER.
At eight-thirty on Friday morning, the white transport van from the New Mexico Museum of Art pulled up to the curb outside the old flour mill.
Two art handlers in gray cotton gloves climbed the stairs carrying a custom wooden crate. With the quiet, reverent efficiency of people who handle sacred artifacts, they lifted The Millers at Home from its easel, slid it between layers of acid-free foam, and secured the lid with brass screws.
As they were carrying the crate down the stairs, a black Lincoln town car pulled up behind the museum van.
The driver’s door opened, and Uncle Robert stepped out.
At sixty-four, Robert Miller was the legal architect of the Miller family fortune. He was shorter than my father, with sharp, bird-like features, rimless glasses, and the cautious, measured walk of a man who had spent four decades avoiding courtroom surprises. He was wearing his heavy camel-hair overcoat and carrying a slim leather portfolio under his arm.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looking at the two museum handlers loading the wooden crate into the climate-controlled van. He read the logo on the side of the vehicle: New Mexico Museum of Art — Department of Exhibitions.
His eyes narrowed behind his spectacles.
“Rebecca,” he said as I descended the final flight of stairs, Ethan walking two paces behind me.
“Uncle Robert,” I said, stopping on the gravel landing.
“What is that van doing here?” he asked, his voice low, lacking the performative bravado of my father’s threats.
“It’s transporting my submission for the contemporary portraiture biennial,” I replied.
Robert looked at the crate, then back at me. For a moment, the lawyer disappeared, and I saw only my father’s younger brother—the man who had watched me grow up, who had handed me silver dollars at Thanksgiving when I was eight, and who had never once intervened when David turned me into the evening’s joke.
“Your father is not going to let this go, Rebecca,” Robert said softly. “You know how he is. When David feels cornered, he doesn't negotiate. He escalates. He’s already talking to the bank about calling the personal guarantee on the equipment loan for your studio’s landlord.”
A cold flare of anger ignited in my chest, but I kept my voice as level as a carpenter’s rule.
“Mr. Corrales owns this building outright, Uncle Robert,” I said. “He bought it in 1982. There is no bank loan. And even if there were, Mr. Corrales happens to be the godfather of my studio assistant. Tell Dad that his corporate rolodex doesn't run this side of town.”
Robert sighed, a long, weary exhalation that turned to white mist in the morning air. He tapped the leather portfolio against his thigh.
“Did you read the letter?”
“I did.”
“And?”
I reached into my canvas tote bag, pulled out a manila folder containing the nine panels of the Inventory of Debt, and handed it to him.
“What is this?” he asked, taking the folder.
“That is my counter-offer,” I said. “Tell Dad he doesn't have to wait for the civil trial. Tell him that if he wants to settle the account, he can come to the museum opening on the fifteenth. The admission is twelve dollars. If he’s short on cash, he can put it on my tab.”
Robert opened the folder. He looked at the first panel—the Michelin tires and the empty chair at Jason’s dinner. His hand paused. He flipped to the second panel—the hospital room and the credit card held out like a business card.
His face did not turn red like my father’s. It turned the gray, ashen color of old lime plaster.
He closed the folder slowly, carefully aligning the edges of the paper.
May you like
“You’re going to destroy him, Rebecca,” Robert whispered.
“No, Uncle Robert,” I said, looking him dead in the eye as the museum handlers closed the rear doors of the van with a heavy, magnetic latch. “Dad destroyed himself thirty years ago. I’m just charging him for the cleanup.”
