Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Gavin
Idon’t often think of my childhood, but when I do, the memories spring up like a flash-bang.
My brother on the football field as I watched from the stands.
My mom’s face, lit up by candles as she sang happy birthday.
My first kiss with Claire Wiggens. My dad’s frown when I got suspended for skipping school.
Our old dog, Red, with a dead squirrel in his mouth.
The ugly brown carpeting in the living room and the baby-poop-green sheets my parents used.
The smell of Sunday pancakes in the kitchen and the taste of my first beer from a cooler at a bonfire.
But the one thing that’s always there, the event that happened and stayed, is the day I met glass.
Sure, it all started because I was a kid infatuated with the teenage girl reading about it, but more than that, the idea that hot sand—the most primitive thing there is—could turn into something so striking blew my mind.
It was a seed that planted, took root, and grew.
I started with mosaics—I didn’t love those—to get into the studio. I couldn’t blow until I turned nine, and it was that birthday that my parents—and brother—paid for me to start learning under the only glassblower in the area, an old friend of my dad’s, John Struckers.
The way some kids go to soccer practice and kick goals or baseball practice to hit balls, I went into his small hot shop and learned about frit, annealers, and the temperature variations of glass.
By the time I graduated high school, I was as good as anyone. John Struckers would say I was better than him.
I was.
I was braver with the pieces I made and had no qualms with breaking the traditional rules of the craft. But out of respect for all he’d taught me, I never agreed with him.
The natural next step meant leaving Fontain, something I never wanted to do. I liked it here. I liked how small it was and seeing my family every day. But, unfortunately for me, the artists who get to make a life out of their craft and are taken the most seriously have a degree, so I’d get one too.
I enrolled in the best program I could get into in the state at East Carolina but knew within minutes in that first day it would be a waste of time.
It wasn’t their fault, of course, nobody expects an eighteen-year-old freshman to have so much experience or natural talent with any medium, but I did.
I could have pulled a million miles of cane around the instructor and his curriculum.
I dropped out after two classes.
Eventually, John retired, and for the next nine years, I rented his shop.
With his connections and my borderline obsession, I made a name for myself beyond Fontain.
My pieces went on display in hotels in Atlanta, a conference center in Huntsville, and a handful of small venues across the southeast. I did a gallery show in Charleston and have two pieces in a museum in Norfolk.
Finally, my reach grew right to where I’d always hoped it would.
Even without a degree, I got accepted to an eight-week residency with the prestigious Corning Museum of Glass in New York.
I was already paying the bills—made enough money to buy a patch of land from my parents and build a hot shop of my own—but this would be the thing to push me into the big leagues. A career made of glass.
Then Greg died and I didn’t go in the shop for months.
Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was anger. Maybe it was guilt from knowing the fire I’d come to love was the very same thing that took my brother. Or maybe it was simply because Greg had been my biggest fan and every piece of the shop looked like him.
He was the one who wanted to combine my glass with their vineyard.
He was the one who went through the shop and took names of tools and made them wines.
He was the one who saw me looking at the Corning program and said, “If them, why not you?”
Whatever it was, I was done.
I turned down the residency, took a job with the city, and closed down the shop. I focused on Addie and helping at the vineyard until that last good day with my dad when I told him about the offer from John. The local art guild was looking for someone to teach community glassblowing classes.
My dad was dying and wanted me to do it, but more than that, I wanted to. I’d missed it.
Slowly it came back to me. I stuck to the basics until the anger and sadness melted into acceptance in those two-thousand-degree furnaces. It took six months and Reese stomping into town in her fancy clothes and ridiculous shoes for me to start showing up the way I had before life took a turn.
Wild how it only takes one person to put a bend in the road.
Reese wasn’t wrong when she said I was a dreamer with nothing to show for it, but she wasn’t entirely right either.
It’s why I haven’t told her about this part of me.
I want her to want who I am today, not who I was before or who I once thought I’d be.
I cut grass, I love Addie, and a few days a week, I teach people about the very same glass Reese introduced me to all those years ago.
Based on the way she’s chasing things I’m not sure I fully understand, maybe she doesn’t see that who we are and the ideas we have can start as one shape before softening into something else if we allow it.
The difference between people and glass aren’t so great if the conditions are right: We bend or we break.
I was pissed she lied—pissed about a lot of things really—but the second I saw how lonely she was, I got it then. Everything about her fell into place.
But as long as she’s in Fontain, I’m not giving up, even if she did punch me and might benefit from a psychiatric evaluation. She feels what I do—I see it every time she looks at me—but she’s also stubborn as shit and frustrating as hell.
But Reese isn’t my concern right now, it’s the people who are here to watch me do what I love.
“Alright, everyone,” Sabrina’s voice calls through the speaker. “Grab a glass of wine and get settled in. Gavin will be up in just a minute to introduce the team and tell y’all a little about the shop and what he’ll be making tonight.”
Three students will be assisting me with tonight’s demo: Jimmy, a pizza delivery driver in his early twenties, Stu, a retired cop, and Janet, an art teacher from the local high school. Sabrina, a college kid with purple hair, is on the mic.
They’re in class every Saturday, but since I’ve been coming in more often, I’ve opened the shop for them to do personal projects when they want, and they never miss a Thirsty Thursday. Half the crowd is their friends and family.
I push my safety glasses to the top of my head then wipe my brow with my forearm, already sweating from the heat. I gesture to Stu, and he opens one of the large garage doors, pulling in a breeze that cools me instantly.
“Wine or rocks glass tonight?” Jimmy asks, organizing the tools.
They’re our go-to projects for these events because they’re fairly quick and showcase the basic techniques.
I swipe a blowpipe from the rack. “Wine don’t we make both?”
“Dude,” Jimmy says in a tone that makes me feel far older than thirty. “You’re worse than my dad.”
I grin then step next to Sabrina, taking the mic she offers to introduce myself and the rest of the artists, each of whom lift a hand at the mention of their name.
“Welcome to Hot Sand,” I say with a smile.
There’s a good crowd tonight, maybe twenty-five, and the ones with wine lift their glasses in greeting. As much as I loved doing this full time, I love the sense of community that teaching brings more. Maybe it is mediocrity, as Reese put it, but it doesn’t change how happy it makes me.
“Sabrina here’s gonna be talking you through the process while we work, but I want to thank y’all for coming out and tell you a little bit about what you’re looking at before we get started.
” I give them my very brief history, starting with having a crush and learning to read.
“I still have the first piece she gave me.” I pull the leather band out from the neckline of my shirt and show them the small chunk of sea glass I’ve barely taken off since my eighth birthday.
I’ve seen Reese eyeing it, but she’s never once asked.
She probably doesn’t remember giving it to me.
“Things progressed from there.” I tell them the story of me throwing sand in the fireplace to see if glass would be the result. “My mom still reminds me it wasn’t.”
They laugh.
I explain the major pieces of equipment: the furnace where we keep the molten glass at two thousand degrees, the glory hole used for keeping in-progress pieces at proper temperature, and the annealer where finished pieces cool slowly.
“Once I gather glass on one end of this pipe from the furnace”—I twirl the blowpipe—“I’ll blow into the other.” I demonstrate with a quick puff. “And that’s when the fun starts.”
“You ever get burned?” a man asks.
I chuckle. “More than once.”
A lady: “What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever made?”
“Have a solar system installation down in Huntsville, that one was a doozy.” Moving it from here to there nearly gave me an ulcer. In a stage whisper I add, “We included Pluto.”
Again, they laugh.
“You break a lot?”
“All the damn time,” I admit. “Glass, like most things in life, is more about the process than the piece.” I pause to let that sink in.
Some people struggle with it, but to me, it’s part of the fun.
Nothing is guaranteed; life is no different.
Despite what Reese thinks, there’s no controlling it either.
“There’s a good chance of not liking how something turns out and an even better chance it’ll never make it to the end. ”
I glance around the group. “Any other questions before we get started?”
“I have one,” a woman’s voice says, stilling my spin of the pipe. It takes less than a second for me to find her.
Reese’s brows lift, the angle of her lips putting her somewhere between impressed as hell and fully pissed off. After the fight we had and her avoiding me for days, I’ll take either version.
Especially in that dress.
“The girl who taught you to read,” she says, holding my gaze. “You ever tell her about all this?”
“No,” I admit, fighting a smile. “But . . .” I teeter my head. “She’s smart enough she probably figured it out though. A real pane in the glass too.”
Her lips and nostrils jump just enough for me to read her better than any book: She wants to laugh but won’t out of principle. Instead, she mouths the word bad.
I dip my chin, say, “Y’all enjoy,” then pass the mic to Sabrina.
Into it, she says, “Gavin’s going to be making a—”
I grab her arm to stop her then whisper in her ear.
“Okay then,” she says to the crowd. “Change of plans, folks. Looks like Gavin’s got a little surprise for us this evening.”
I slide my safety glasses into place and swipe a Kevlar glove from a shelf.
All these people are here to be entertained and have a glass of wine, but not Reese. She’s here to see if she’s wrong about me; I fully intend on proving she is.
To the team I say, “Y’all ready to have some fun?”