48. Forty-eight
Forty-eight
The broken pieces of the bowls I smashed are rehydrated enough to be pliable again, and I carefully spread them across the worktable the next day.
I don’t have gold like they used in traditional kintsugi , and the epoxy my dad uses with his slabs of wood won’t work, but I do have slip, clay glue as Veda always called it.
Scooping some of it into a bowl, I mix in some underglaze—a special slip-based glaze that can be used before the piece has been fired. I pick a shade of pink, mixing enough into the slip that it turns from muddy grey to a lush rose that reminds me of the flower bushes that bloomed in Veda’s yard in the summer.
With a radio playing all my favorite country songs in the background, I start to piece the bowls back together like a puzzle, pink slip bulging out of the cracks. I fall into a rhythm, singing along with the lyrics I know by heart, trying to make the broken beautiful. It doesn’t make sense, but hands in the clay, I’m compelled to create the sadness right out of me.
Luke Combs starts singing “Fast Car,” and I turn the music up—loud enough to drown out my thoughts—and sing along loudly, losing myself in the lyrics and how I piece the pot together.
One piece turns to two, turns to—
“Birdie?”
My own name makes me jump, jerking to face the doorway.
Wearing blue jeans, a canvas Carhartt jacket, and a green beanie pulled over his ears with his hair curling out from the bottom, Bo walks into the sunroom.
“Jesus!” I gasp, bringing a clay-covered hand to my pounding heart, breathless. Because he’s just scared the hell out of me, because he’s here, and because he looks like that.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know…” I turn down the music, suddenly self-conscious in clay-covered black leggings, oversized blue sweater that’s sliding off one shoulder, and hair in a messy bun on the top of my head.
He walks across the room, stopping before he’s all the way to me.
He looks at the broken pieces on the table. “You’ve been busy,” he says, with the slightest hint of amusement as a toothpick bobbles on his lips.
I tug my sweater onto my shoulder. “Yeah, just playing.” My sweater slips again as I talk. “What are you doing here?”
He shrugs. “I’ve been checking on the place after work, today we stopped early. ”
“Ah,” I say. “Well, I can leave. I was just going to finish but…”
No.
I’m not leaving.
My chin lifts.
“I mean, Veda told me in her note to keep coming here. I guess she wants me to have it.” I pause, wait for him to argue. When he doesn’t, I add, “I’m going to finish what I’m working on.”
His lips twitch, and I can’t tell if he’s hiding a smile or something else, but he doesn’t leave either. Instead, he sits in the wicker chair, elbows on his knees, watching me as I work.
Finally, after the silence that’s as suffocating as the first day I walked in this house, I speak.
“I watched my mom die—wither away—Gran didn’t want that for you.” I don’t look at him as I stick a jagged piece of the bowl into a line of slip. “And she also knew if she told you what was happening, you’d beg her to get treatment she didn’t want. So—and I know you don’t understand my rule following personality—but the fact she asked me, specifically saying, ‘don’t tell Bo,’ and because I understood deeply how she felt, I did as she asked. Even if I wasn’t legally obligated to keep her secret, I would have.”
I’ve put one bowl completely back together. It’s mangled, yet somehow whole, with lines of slip covering it, cracks visible. On display, even.
I move on to the pieces of the next one, this time mixing black underglaze into the slip. All the while, Bo stays quiet, which is exactly what I need him to do, so I keep going.
“When I remember my mom, I remember her dancing in the kitchen and slipping away to nothingness. I’d give anything to only have one of those. I don’t know if I did the right thing, but that’s why I did it. Veda asked me, and I said yes. Because she loved you.”
When I’ve said it, I’m relieved. I stick another piece to the bowl without turning to look at him.
“You don’t have to forgive me, I’ve come to terms with that, but I want you to know that I loved her, I cared what happened. I did it for her and you. But mostly her.”
Without looking, I hear him stand, his footsteps moving across the room, and it’s his familiar Bo Mountain Breeze when he’s standing next to me.
“What are you working on?” he asks, close enough to touch me but not.
I blow out an amused exhale as I look at the pieces. “I broke something, and I’m trying to fix it.”
I lift my eyes to his and his lips pull to a small smirk, toothpick dancing. “Here,” I tell him. “Hold these two pieces together so I can add another one on.”
He pinches the pieces firmly in place as I add slip to another one and slide them together.
“I don’t remember Gran doing this.” His skeptical tone makes me chuckle.
“She didn’t.” I grin. “I got the idea from my dad with his cookie slab table. He drew inspiration from a Japanese technique called kintsugi . Figured I’d try it here.” I shrug, our fingers still holding the pieces together .
“I'm sorry for what I said to you. The day she died,” he says, looking at the broken pieces in our hands. “I didn’t mean it, Birdie, any of it. I want you to know that.”
Every word he threw at me that day hurt. I never expected him to apologize, but now that he has, I know I needed it.
“You know, it was the part about the color-coded lists that really got me,” I say, lightening the mood just enough to make him laugh under his breath.
Then, we work in silence, finding a kind of cadence with one another like we do when we hike—putting the pieces together, holding them in place long enough for them to set, before moving on to the next one. And the next. Until all the pieces are back together, lined with wet black slip.
“So you and Mandy, huh?” I ask, wrapping the broken-but-not-broken pieces in plastic bags. “I’ll admit I was surprised…” that you invited me over to see her and kept texting me after.
He jerks around from where he’s standing at the sink. “What?” He grabs a towel to dry his hands, dropping it on the table before walking across the room to me, plucking the toothpick from his mouth. “Is that what you think, Birdie? I’m with Mandy ?”
He reaches a hand toward me but pauses midair, like he isn’t sure if he should go any farther, before dropping it back by his side.
My cheeks fill with air before deflating with a whoosh. “I mean, she was in your house, next to you at the funeral, and accusing me of sleeping with her husband. So…yes? ”
“Birdie, no. No! ” He shakes his head, rubbing a hand across his forehead. “Is that why you’ve been avoiding me? Because of Mandy?”
I wring a sponge over a bucket of clean water. “Bo, you told me to come over, and she walked onto your front porch.” I glance at him. “How would you interpret that?”
“She just showed up!” he cries. “I didn’t know she was coming, definitely didn’t invite her bu—”
“You don’t owe me an explanation, Bo,” I say, trying to maintain an air of confidence over what I’m saying. Trying to ignore the fact that him not being with Mandy is making the strangest feelings plant in me like a seed and shoot roots and blooms in a million directions within me. Trying to ignore how everything I’m saying is the exact opposite of what I actually want. “And, you know, you married her, so I wouldn’t blame you if you were with her. It would probably be good for Lucy.”
He nods silently, jaw clenching in the way it does when he’s grinding out words he’s trying not to say.
“And”—I clear my throat, dropping my eyes to the table I’m wiping—“I think it’s best if we’re just friends anyway.” I ignore the way the words burn the entire inside of my mouth like I’ve just filled it with acid. “I have my routines, and Huck will be in the mix next week. And I’m six months into thirty-seven, which means I have six more months to go. I’m not sure what the statistics look like for me if I make it to thirty-eight, but either way, it’s for the best if I figure it out alone, you know. Not drag a bunch of people down with me. Or distract me. Or whatever. ”
I reach across the table to give it a final wipe. He leans against the edge, jaw tight, hand scrubbing across his beard.
“And,” I say, the ache in my throat making it hard to say the next words. “My dad said he’d take Huck if I…if you changed your mind.”
His eyes widen. “No, Birdie. I didn’t change my mind. Not about Huck…about any of it.”
I nod; we’re silent. All the words and events of the last weeks and months hanging in the familiar earthy-scented air. He moves first, grabbing the tools we were using and rinsing them in the sink. Music is the only sound other than our movements.
At the rack, I lift the bag slightly off the vase I made with flowers earlier in the week, spinning it carefully to see how it’s drying.
I stop. On the smooth side, Bo loves Birdie is scribbled into the clay.
How?
I look over my shoulder, gaze catching with Bo’s across the room. When his eyebrows lift slightly, mine do the same. It’s all the confirmation I need: he did this.
I look back at the piece, his name and mine, ignoring the confusing knots that my insides are tying with each other, then cover it with the bag.
I glance back at him, not moving from my spot at the rack.
“I like that one,” he says, leaning against the doorway, arms folded over his chest.
I’m quiet, looking back to the bag that now covers his words .
“I need you to know how sorry I am, Birdie,” he says to my back. Neither of us moving. “If you don’t want to be with me, I’ll learn to deal with that, but I need you to know I don’t blame you. If anything, I should be thanking you…for being with her when she couldn’t trust me to be. To see what she needed when I couldn’t.” His voice cracks, just barely but I hear it, and I swipe my tears before they reach my cheek.
I clear my throat and nod, unable to look at him.
Then, a deep breath.
Finally, I face him. “Okay.”
He smirks, familiar. “Okay.”
Turning off the radio and the lights, we walk to the front door together. Close enough to touch but not.
“Did Mandy sign the papers?” I ask, lifting my chin to face him when I step onto the front porch.
“I thought it didn’t matter,” he says, teasing. “But yes. After she spoke to you.” He raises his eyebrows but doesn’t say anything else.
I laugh under my breath, backing up toward the railing, looking over my shoulder before walking down the porch steps. “You’re kind of an asshole, I don’t blame her for divorcing you.”
He grins but doesn’t make a move toward me. “If you say so, Birdie.”
His voice—words—sound easy. So easy.
“Hey,” I call from the middle of the yard.
He lifts his chin.
“Lock up, will ya? Apparently, this is my house now.”
He nods, lips pulling to a small smile .
We look at each other longer than makes sense before I get in my minivan, and he turns to lock the door then jogs to his Jeep.
I let out a breath—one that I’ve possibly been holding for weeks—and try to make sense of what he’s said.
Mandy is gone. Bo is divorced. He doesn’t blame me.
Three simple truths that flip my reality.
I take out my phone, pull up Libby’s name, and write, Hey, sorry for the vanishing act. Yoga soon?
Her response is instant. Thank God you wrote, I was going to send John over to your house to do a wellness check soon. Tell me when and I’ll be there. Xo
For the first time since Veda died, I realize I’m smiling.