Cory responded with a row of clapping emojis, and Goldie with a heart eyes emoji. She felt a little bit accomplished as she cleaned up the corner of the basement. 

Nina was back to work soon enough, again on shift with Kate and Paul and Graham. She was very apologetic about calling out sick on Saturday, and Kate whispered, "did you end up spending the night in the city?" when Nina had the register later.

"Maybe," Nina whispered back, feeling her face heat.

"I mean, I get it," Kate said. "Who wants to take a late night train back to Jersey? And we had Lucy coming in at noon anyway, so it wasn't that bad."

The art store didn't experience rushes, exactly. They didn't have the space to accommodate that many people.  But on weekends, every business on the main street was busier than the rest of the week. Even Desiree graced them with their presence to "help out" and order restocks of postcards while chatting with her favorite regulars. They had to make sure to keep the music on the smoothest jazz the radio had to offer while she was there, so as not to "disturb the customers." On an average Tuesday, though, Desiree would cheerfully do her ordering from the office in the back and let them blast whatever they wanted in the mostly empty store.

Nina spent most of her time off register restocking the shelves. Today, she was doing so while thinking about her studio space, and what she had in it. She got a pretty good employee discount. She could buy another canvas, or even just the fabric and stretchers and build her own if she remembered how... More paint, definitely, in fun colors like the bright neon acryl gouache they sold in sets of three small tubes, maybe some new brushes optimized for heavy synthetic paint like that... She could get some nice patterned paper and modpodge and try a collage for once, she never did those... 

And then she realized that even with an employee discount, all of those supplies would still cost some amount of money. 

Best not to rush into it, Nina decided. She put a large mixed media drawing pad behind the counter for her to pick up before she went home for the day, but everything else could probably wait.

When she checked her phone on her lunch break, she realized Goldie had texted her a few more times after the heart emoji. 

Goldie: do you have any more paintings like this? I really like it!

Nina felt her entire body turn to scalding steam. 

Goldie: I've been working on uhhh. Nothing I can really share sorry but I can send you a picture of my tits if you'd like

Nina: well I wouldn't say no to that haha

Nina: but no I actually haven't painted anything like this before

Nina: was inspired by the exhibition

Goldie: ?!?!! For real??? It looks so fresh and new! Now that you say that though I can see the influence but I think it stands on its own!

Nina: thank you!

Maybe she was just being nice. But maybe she did actually like it, and that would be nice too. Nina's professors had been generally lukewarm-to-positive about her future prospects in the art world. Her technical abilities were strong enough, but she drew too slowly for it to be worth her time. No attempt to get faster seemed to actually speed up her detailed, meticulous process. Until yesterday, when she finally tried painting loosely with a big, wet brush.

Nina pulled out her pocket sketchbook and tried scribbling with the side of her soft pencil, seeing if she could channel that energy into a smaller size and dryer medium. It looked like a silvery-gray stormcloud smudge. She slashed an X over the attempt and shoved her sketchbook back into her pocket, then went back to work.

She looked at the painting again when she got home. Maybe she could sharpen the details more, finish it more somehow... Or maybe she should just start the next thing and focus on quantity over quality. That was how people improved, right? Quantity?

Thinking about moving forward with the painting, with painting in general, suddenly seemed like an insurmountably overwhelming concept. She turned off the floor lamps and looked at her painting again in the near twilight of the single overhead basement light. With the lights off, it had less of the tenderness she saw in Rose O'Neill's work, and instead resembled Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son. The color drained from the shadows, the highlights turned yellow under the orangey lightbulb. The glossy plastic shine of acrylic paint reflected flecks of the lamp light into Nina's eyes. What seemed sensuous and welcoming in daylight looked more like the cover of an ancient pulp paperback novel in the semi-dark. 

Nina went back up the stairs, turning the light off behind her.

It was getting warmer, gradually, with every passing day. Nina dressed in layers when she went out in the morning and brought a bag to put discarded sweaters into when the afternoon sun hit later. On her walk to work she noticed the grass had started changing color, from dark green to the lighter, new tints of springtime. Soon, the geese would be back. Soon, she could start wearing sundresses to work without shivering with bare legs on the way there. Maybe she could draw something about this feeling. Should she be wasting time playing at fine arts, instead of working on her illustration portfolio? She should be drawing book covers, magazine article illustrations. Things people could pay her for. She should be drawing more in general. Real artists probably scribbled in their sketchbooks while they walked to work.

Maybe Nina shouldn't be an artist at all. 

She shook her head to get her mind off the subject and decided to make a detour to a coffee shop before work to help with that. The coffeeshop distinguished itself from the other shops in town by being slightly closer to Nina's workplace and having slightly worse coffee (Cather's was noticeably superior), but better Italian pastries. She came often enough that the morning shift barista, Lily, would smile and say "hi, Nina" before asking what she wanted: a seasonal drink, a lavender fog, or sometimes a caramel macchiato if she really needed caffeine.

"We just got a shamrock matcha latte in today," Lily said. "It's like a regular matcha latte with some vanilla and mint added. Wanna try it?"

"Sure, thanks."

There wasn't much time to talk to Lily during the morning rush of students and local workers desperate for caffeination, but Nina liked to think they were at least somewhat friendly. She picked up her paper travel cup with a smile and said "Thank you so much!" unintentionally summoning up her customer service voice as she did so.

"See you tomorrow?" Lily asked.

"Maybe." She tried not to go to the coffeeshop every single day of her work week, that seemed excessive.

Nina might've entertained the idea of Lily having a crush on her if she didn't have 2-inch long acrylic nails and a wedding band. Otherwise, odds were slim. She waved on her way out the door anyway.

Today, Kate was off, and a newer hire named Roni was in her place. Desiree was in too, to remind everyone they were providing materials to an event at the town arts council and someone needed to help her set the stuff aside and then bring it over there. 

Roni was friendly, chatty and the only Black employee Nina had ever seen working at For Art's Sake in the half-year she'd been there. She wasn't sure how long they would last before Desiree decided they "weren't a good fit for the store" and either gently bullied them into leaving or outright fired them. Roni was a Middlewater University senior, though, and would graduate and move back to Georgia soon enough, so maybe Desiree wouldn't want to.

Roni's art Thing was animation and cartoons, although mostly from an academic perspective, and they had a complicated thesis about the history of children's animated educational programming in America they would pick away at while on register. They mostly spent their employee discount on markers and school supplies. "I heard you went to New York for an art show last weekend?" they asked. "How was that?"

"Good," Nina said, smiling. "I had a good time. You know the Kewpies? It was a show for the artist who came up with them. A whole career retrospective." They didn't really know each other well enough for her to go into more detail than that.

Roni surprised her by replying with "Wait, a Rose O'Neill show? Really? How long is it on for, I kinda want to check that out!"

"It's gonna be at the Illustration Society for two more months," Nina said. "I didn't know you liked her stuff."

"I love old illustration and old animation," Roni explained. "Her monster series is just fantastic stuff."

"It really is," Nina agreed, then decided to take a chance. "You know, I don't actually know that many early 20th century illustrators besides the ones I learned about at art school. Who's your favorite?"