Harder (24 page)

“Can I see?”

She flips the paper over and shows it to me. It’s a portrait of a woman—glamorous, all hair and lips like a fashion model. It’s shaded and intricate, with decent perspective. Fucking impressive. Way better than her other drawings.

“You made that?”

“Rikki showed me how. You just make a grid on the magazine and then you make a bigger grid on the picture, and you draw it one square at a time. It’s easy. It’s not really like drawing at all.”

She hands it to me, and I can see the faint gridlines now and some details that aren’t quite right—a squinty eye, the jewelry cartoonish where Frankie drew what she thought it was supposed to look like instead of what it actually looks like. Still. “This is amazing.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Franks—”

“Can I take it over to Rikki’s?”

“Yeah, if you get dressed first.” I give her the picture back. “Would you make me one next?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just to have it.”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“Great.”

She leaves the room, and I hear a dresser drawer open. When she comes out, she’s wearing jeans—normal jeans, not huge ones—and a giant sweatshirt. She opens the front door. “You should draw your own,” she says. “It’s really easy. I could show you how.”

I follow her to the door. “After dinner. I’d like that.”

She smiles up at me.

“Careful on the steps,” I say. “It’s snowing.”

“Okay, Grandpa.”

I watch her make her way down, one hand gliding over the powder on the railing. Then she’s off, running across the yard without a coat, snow falling in her hair.

Laurie’s moving around in the space outside his workshop. I wanted to talk to him, so I throw on a coat and head down the stairs myself.

I find him buried to the elbows in a big gray metal box on stilts, peering through a small glass window while a compressor hums loud over a low hissing sound that stops and starts, stops and starts.

I don’t come out here much, and when I do it’s usually because I’m grabbing Frankie for hanging around too long. I don’t blame her for wanting to hang around, though. Laurie’s workshop is sweet. It’s like a barn crossed with a carport. Inside, there’s a space like a hayloft full of rusted-out pieces of scrap metal and a row of stalls that makes me think the place was a stable once. Each stall holds a different kind of supplies—wood and metal, ceramics, rubber, glass.

The open-air part under the carport roof is where he does welding. There’s a big compressor just inside the door, propane tanks, face shield, huge gloves, I don’t know what-all else.

I’m still trying to figure out what the fuck the story is with the gray metal box when the compressor kicks off and he steps back.

“Hey, West,” he says.

“Hey, Professor Collins.”

“Laurie.”

I can’t call him Laurie to his face. It’s not only because he’s a professor—it’s also because he’s my landlord
and
he’s got a Wikipedia page that calls him an
internationally acclaimed multimedia three-dimensional artist
.

“What is that thing?” I ask.

“Sandblaster.”

“What are you blasting?”

“Glass.”

He withdraws his arms, unscrews the wing nuts on either side of the window he was looking through, and extracts a beige shape.

“That’s … what is that?”

“It’s a hammer.”

“A glass hammer.” It’s almost entirely wrapped in masking tape, like a hammer mummy with just the round surface you hit with and the bottom of the handle showing. “What for?”

“It’s a series. Tools. This one’s just a study—I have a commission to do a big one. But the logistics are a pain in the ass.”

He takes his mummy-hammer inside the barn. I hear water running. I edge closer to the sandblaster, curious what it looks like inside.

There’s a brass-colored nozzle attached to a hose laying on top of an open plastic grid. The nozzle must shoot sand at the glass, and then the sand falls off and through the grid to come out the hole in the bottom.

Neat.

Laurie comes back out drying his glass hammer with a paper towel, a roll of masking tape dangling from his fingers. Unwrapped, the hammer is aqua blue, shining, and I want to touch it. I want to wrap my fingers around the handle and pound something with it—which is all wrong, because it would shatter if I did that, and I’d be fucking disappointed.

It reminds me of Studio Art last week, how Rikki was debating with Raffe about what art is. Raffe said art has no purpose—that if something
has
a purpose, it’s not art. And Rikki said the opposite. That the purpose of art is to make you feel or think, and a lot of the time both.

Art provokes a response
, she told us.
Be provocative
.

“You want to try the sandblaster?” Laurie asks.

“Sure.”

“Give me a minute to mask it again.” He wraps tape over the polished surface of the hammer, leaving one strip around the handle bare. “So what we’re doing is blasting off the polish to give it a frosty surface.” The hammer is heavy when he hands it over. I touch the strip, cool glass beneath my fingertip.

“Put it inside there,” he says. “Careful with it, though—I had that thing in the kiln more than a week.”

“Just to cast it?”

“Yep. You have to bring the temperature up slowly, hold it there, bring it back down just as slow. Otherwise it’ll crack, explode, God only knows. Glass is fussy. Took me eleven tries to get that hammer.”

Eleven tries. A week in the kiln for each one. This thing is worth a fucking fortune in fuel and labor.

I place it on the grating carefully, close the observation window, and push my hands into the gloves. They’re bulky. The nozzle is hard to hold on to. When I first pull the trigger, the hammer jumps from the compressed hit of air, and I almost drop it.

“Good,” Laurie says. “Just do that back and forth evenly.”

“For how long?”

“Until it’s done.”

It’s meticulous work, satisfying. After I get the hang of it, I relax enough to say, “I wanted to thank you for watching Frankie last night.”

“No thanks necessary. It was fun.”

“She behaved herself, I hope?”

“Always,” he says. “And I was happy to see your truck wasn’t out here when I went to bed.”

A minute passes. Laurie comments, “Rikki says you’re doing well in Studio Art.”

“I’m spending three times as long on that class as everything else, just praying to get out of there with a B.”

“She says you have an interesting mind.”

“I have the least interesting mind in there.”

“What makes you say that?”

I tilt my head toward the sandblaster. “This kind of stuff is easy for me. Machines, problems, figuring out one step after the next. But Rikki wants me to be creative, and I’m not.”

Laurie seems to accept this. He’s quiet for a while. Then he asks, “You ever use a wheel to grind glass?”

“No.”

“Want to try?”

I do.

I want to see the kiln, too, and find out what it costs to run it for a week. Ask what happens when you scale it up—what kind of logistics problems does he mean? How’s he going to cast a giant hammer? Can he make it in pieces?

“I’d better get back to my reading,” I say.

I draw my hands out of the box and turn the art back over to the artist.

He takes the hammer and holds it lightly with his fingertips, flipping it one way and the other.

“How’s the factory?” he asks.

“I’m giving notice. I need to find something where I’ll be home more with Frankie.”

“You want to work for me?” he asks. “I need an assistant. Flexible hours. Decent money.”

“What kind of work?”

“Stuff like this. Finishing. Polishing. Answering email or phone calls. Whatever I don’t feel like doing, to be honest. I’m behind on this commission. I could use the help.”

“Shouldn’t you hire an art major?”

He waves the hammer in dismissal, making me worry he’s going to drop it. “I’ve been trying, but I can’t find any who know fuck-all about tools. You seem like you know tools. And like I said, Rikki thinks your mind is interesting.”

“I guess—yeah. I would. As long as you know what you’re getting. You need references or something?”

He laughs. “You’re twenty-one years old, you’re raising your kid sister, studying your ass off, doing night shifts at a window factory. You could be an ex-con and I’d still probably hire you. Under the table, though, okay? I don’t want to deal with taxes.”

He holds out his hand.

I shake it.

I mean, fuck, of course I shake it. Even if the money’s only so-so, the job’s perfect.

But when his fingers grip mine, I’m not thinking about Frankie or the paycheck. I’m thinking about what’s inside that workshop.

Compressors and welders and kilns, polishing equipment, all kinds of shit I don’t know the names of. Tools to learn how to use. Systems to work out.

It takes me a minute to figure out why my heart’s beating so fast. It’s been such a long time.

I’m excited.

That night, Caroline’s in my bed.

She sits with her back cushioned by my pillow, her hair down over her shoulders and her arms, tongue toying with her tooth gap, typing on her laptop.

I’m at the desk, supposedly studying for a Spanish quiz, but Spanish is easy. Caroline is right there.
On my bed
.

“Quit looking at me,” she says. “I’m trying to think.”

“It’s late.”

“It’s only eleven.”

“Frankie’s sleeping. It’s late.”

Fingers hovering over the trackpad, she smirks. “I’m almost done.”

“You said that an hour ago.”

“Maybe I want you to spend some time wanting what you can’t have.”

“I been wanting what I couldn’t have since I went back to Oregon last March.”

She takes her hand off the trackpad. “You could’ve had me, though,” she says. “All you had to do was ask.”

I drop my feet from the desk and clasp my hands together.
I promised her no bullshit, but it’s hard to know how to find explanations without it.

I owe her an explanation.

“I never wanted to leave Silt,” I say.

But that’s not what I mean.

I take a breath, try again. “I never
wanted
to, because it never seemed possible. When I was a kid, I was too young to aim that high. I wanted to get through the day, the week, whatever. I wanted to get enough to eat, or if my dad was around, to not get beat. Or I wanted my mom and dad to get married, because I had this idea that things would get better if they were married. But then Frankie was born, and by the time I was old enough to think about leaving, I knew I couldn’t leave without her. So when I dreamed about what I wanted to happen, it was always about
her
leaving.”

Caroline puts her laptop down on the floor by the bed. Pats the spot next to her on the mattress.

“In a minute,” I say. “I want to get this out first.”

Rubbing my hands together, I reach for the words. “When I came here my first year—I wasn’t really here, I think. My body was here, but my head was in Silt, with Frankie, and everything I did my first two years—everything with you—it’s like I let myself get close to what I wanted, but I wouldn’t really
take
it. I was following this plan for what I was supposed to do that was all about what Frankie was going to need me to be. And you—God, I was so fucking hard on you, pushing and pushing you away when you were
all I wanted
. I felt like I had to do that, because I wasn’t
here
, right? I had to convince myself I wasn’t here so I could be
there
, with her.”

“West, come sit by me.”

“I’m almost done.”

She walks over and knocks at my hands until I move them apart. Then she straddles my lap. She puts her palms on my
shoulders, resting comfortably on my thighs. “You were too far away,” she says. “Now you can tell me the rest.”

I wrap my arms around her and hold her first. Feel how soft she is. Move her hair behind her shoulders and inhale against her neck.

“So you went back to Silt,” she says.

“Yeah, but before that, when we got together, those weeks last spring—you have to understand, Caro, then I
was
here. I was with you, and being with you was the only thing I’d done that was just for me in …”

“Forever,” she says.

“Ever,”
I reply. “It was the only thing I’d done for me
ever
.”

“And then you went back to Silt.”

“You saw what it’s like there. There’s no place for me to want anything. It’s just what I can want for Frankie. At least, that’s how it feels. Maybe that’s not how it is. Maybe I could’ve called you up, said, ‘Come help me do this,’ and we would’ve been okay there, but it didn’t feel like anything I could let myself do.”

“Tell me how it felt.”

She’s stroking my head, my neck. I’m so tense, my back teeth ache.

“It felt like if I tried to do that, I would ruin you. Not even that
I
would be doing it. That Silt would, my family, just the way it is there—where I come from ruins people. Good people. And I’d have to watch it happen. I’d be responsible for it, because I wanted you and drew you to me across all those miles. I
couldn’t
.”

I get my hands in her hair and kiss her. “I couldn’t.”

She smiles, but it’s the sad kind, the kind that hurts. “You were ten when Frankie was born.”

“Yeah.”

“The same age she is now.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Do you ever think about that—your sister with a baby?”

“Christ. No.”

“But it’s the same, right? If Frankie were in your shoes, if she had a baby brother born and nobody to take care of him but her—”

It gives me chills. “Don’t.”

She runs her hands up and down my arms, warming away the goose bumps. “It’s cruel even to think about, isn’t it? She’s a kid. She’s too young. But so were you.”

“I was old enough.”

“You were always as old as you had to be. That’s the part that breaks my heart.” She resettles herself on my lap, pressing closer. “How old were you when you met the Tomlinsons?”

“Sixteen.”

“How old the first time? With Mrs. Tomlinson?”