Chapter 8
Eight
Gavin
My dad had cancer twice and beat it once. Half a year later, the sting of that math doesn’t hurt any less.
As hard as it was when I got the news that second time—I took the call in the middle of weed whacking by the old oak in front of the elementary school—an unexpected gift came from the diagnosis: time.
It was running out; I was determined to stretch every second to a minute.
Just a year prior, we’d suffered a loss that changed us all. It came at the end of a nothing day and without warning.
We were in the shop—we were always in the shop. My brother Greg was always in the shop. I think he spent more time there than he did at his actual job.
He was prodding pipes, toying with frit, and getting too close to the furnace the way he always was while Dad poured us each a glass of wine.
The Torch Red was their favorite. The two of them were buzzing about the equipment they were ordering.
Soon the vineyard would become a full-production winery.
Mom and Dad had had the vineyard for three years, casually learning the ropes while my brother and I became more and more involved and could finally see how it could be the future for all of us.
It was a weird concept at first, but I loved what we were building. The difference between the industries couldn’t have been greater, but they worked. And if anyone could do it, it was the three of us. And Mom. Mom kept us all in check.
Judging by the way things were received in the limited hours of the tasting room, we already were—the guests loved it. Glass and wine.
“Whatcha say, Gav?” Greg asked around his glass. “You ready to finally start pulling your weight around here?”
I grinned. “No can do, asshole.”
I took the letter out of my back pocket that I’d been carrying around until the time was right. I handed it to him then took a sip of my wine. He and Dad huddled together to read.
Dad looked up from the letter like he was about to cry—he was a damn softie to the day he died—but it was Greg who yelled like he just won the lotto before clapping me on the back and pulling me into a hug. The letter was nearly two decades in the making, and it took all of us to get it here.
Greg pulled his phone out of his pocket, poked around the screen, then put it up to his ear. To us he said, “We’re having dinner to celebrate.” Before I could argue, he pointed a finger and added, “Tonight.”
I was on cloud nine and loved Amanda’s cooking. How could I say no?
He ended the call without getting an answer, but the smile on his face was permanent.
“You’re a damn sonofabitch.” He said it like it was a term of endearment.
From him, it was. “Amanda’s probably napping.
Baby’s taking it out of her.” He downed his wine and set the empty glass on the corner of a shelf.
“You mind getting the little glass bubble so I can make sure my wife doesn’t kill me for planning a party without her permission? ”
“Of course.” I raised my glass toward him. “Tell Amanda I’ll help bury the body if she needs me to.”
He chuckled, then he was gone.
Turns out, Amanda had already started cooking dinner before she laid down for that nap. She also forgot to turn the burner off. Forty-seven minutes after leaving the shop, Greg tried to save his pregnant wife from their house as it burned to the ground. Neither of them made it out alive.
All our plans went up in the black smoke of that fire.
The shop sat empty for months. A looming aluminum building at the edge of a picturesque vineyard that reminded us of everything we used to want.
My parents never started making their own wine, and the words of that letter never turned into anything more than the ink on the page.
With my niece to look after and my parents’ property to help my dad maintain, there were more important things to do. Dreams are easy to set free when the people you love need you more.
The blow of Dad’s cancer returning came only months later. Unlike my brother’s death, which blindsided me, I got a warning this time, and the grotesque gift of time to say goodbye.
I refused to waste it.
Dad declined quick. It wasn’t long after the call that he became too weak to do much else other than sit in bed and watch TV. So that’s where I met him: watching TV. And, sometimes when Mom wasn’t looking, I’d sneak him a glass or two of wine.
While I tried to convince him that it would be more fun if we watched the best movies of all time, he insisted on documentaries.
“Gonna rot our brains, might as well learn something while we do,” he said.
Dad was a retired teacher and loved a good documentary.
He waved the remote at me before pounding the buttons. “Everyone works remote these days.”
He also loved bad jokes.
Unfortunately for him, my bones were made of different stuff. I never was a great student, but despite poor grades and skipping classes, I managed to graduate high school.
The bad jokes, however, were a genetic anomaly: I inherited his affliction.
Either way, we watched the damn documentaries—hours and hours of them—with our punny commentary the only real conversation.
Documentaries about the Roman Empire: I heard Caesar had back-to-back meetings on March 15.
Geography of Africa: They peaked with Kilimanjaro, didn’t they?
Ancient Egypt: What a pyramid scheme.
They were stupid, every single one of them, but the laughter they brought was a balm for the pain of the pending goodbye. I was twenty-nine and losing my dad, if it meant telling Laffy Taffy-level jokes to make it more bearable, I’d do it.
On what I’d later realize would be our last day of watching documentaries together, he turned on one about making glass.
It covered the whole history and highlighted every process.
Reenactments in old Italy to modern windows being made in factories.
We watched Waterford Crystal being hand-cut and polished in Ireland and blowers in hot shops making larger-than-life sculptures.
We both already knew all this, of course, but neither of us said that. We talked around the elephant in the room.
“It’s a pane-ful trade to watch, isn’t it?” my dad asked.
I scratched my chin. “A pane in the ass, really.”
“You know what kind of glass gets the most famous?”
I shook my head.
“Kind with crystal-clear talent.”
I made a badum ching! motion with my fingers. “You’re cracking me up.”
He shrugged, proud, sinking deeper into his pillow, the case covered in a pattern of baby-poop-green flowers. They were the same sheets my parents used since I was a kid. “What can I say?” He coughed a little. “I’m a glass act.”
On TV, a gaffer blew into a pipe, making a bubble form in the ball of molten glass on the opposite end. I thought of Greg—he loved that part.
“Remember when you learned about it?” he asked.
“How can I forget?” I was nine, the minimum age required by a local studio for the fusing class. I made a shitty mosaic coaster my mom still has. “Mom refuses to destroy the evidence.”
“I heard that!” Mom hollered from the kitchen.
“Mom didn’t want to shatter your dreams.” Dad grinned. “And I meant before.”
That story is worse than the fused coaster and has been told to death. Every time my mom runs into Iris Conway in the grocery store or sees a little boy that reminds her of me.
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Bullshit,” Dad said, his words turning to a deep cough that sounded like cancer. I stuck a straw in his water and gave it to him. He took a sip. “You learned to read because you fell in love.”
“I was seven!”
“Ah.” He set the water on the nightstand. “Still a damn good story.”
I snorted a laugh. It wasn’t that good of a story. Little Gavin had stars in his eyes for a teenage girl who ultimately taught him to read through the wonders of glass. My parents still have the book somewhere on a shelf with all the words we underlined and favorite pictures we circled.
I was seven—then eight—and she was seventeen. To any normal person, it would be an innocent crush long forgotten.
But not for my parents.
And especially not for Greg. He ran with it like a dog with a bone that led to the dream he had until the day he died.
“It’s not that good.” I looked at him sideways. Dad was tired and thin. Older than I’d ever seen him. Time shrank like hot glass in an annealer. I cleared my throat. “John emailed me about a teaching position.”
Dad nodded a single, strong nod that said Take it.
I’d already told John yes.
I snatched the remote from the bed. “Now can you stop talking so we can hear what they’re saying?”
Dad grunted. “You already know it all.” Before I could turn the volume up loud enough to drown him out, he said, “I’m proud of you, son.”
I looked at him then, both of us serious. There was a lump in my throat, there was a relieved resignation in his eyes. He was tired of fighting.
“Dying’s made you too reflective, old man,” I said, then turned the volume up as loud as it could go.
He laughed and I laughed—what else was there to do?—then we watched people make glass.
Much like the last day with my brother, I think of that last good day with my dad often. Every remembered word spoken accompanied by a bittersweet pain.
It was a good day; I just wish there would have been more. More of his documentaries, more jokes, more of him.
Six months later, he’s gone, but in front of me is that teenage girl he loved to talk about. Now a grown woman with a scowl on her face, glaring at me from the middle of her mom’s front yard.
She’s older—we both are—with a few lines around her dark eyes that pull me right to them.
If I hadn’t already heard through the Fontain grapevine that she was in town, I might not have recognized her.
But there’s no denying it’s Reese Conway.
Just as pretty as that little boy thought she was all those years ago.
She doesn’t know it’s me; of course she doesn’t. Just because she set the trajectory of my life by simply doing a school assignment doesn’t mean it stayed with her for a minute after it was done.
My dad would have loved seeing her standing here, covered in fancy clothes and a face full of pissed off. He would have shaken her hand, thanked her, and told her the whole story she started over a glass of his wine.
Hell, maybe one day I’ll work up the nerve to tell her the same thing, but today’s not that day.
“Gavin,” I say, wiping a hand on my shirt before extending it out to her. “Nickels.”