Page 41 of A Little Too Late
Clearing my throat, I take another gulp of cider. “Thank you for finding that box. I’ll go through it tonight.” I’d peeked inside when we were in the storage shed and saw a few larger bowls and a bud vase. “She never signed pieces with glaze, but there’s an imprint on the bottom of each piece. A symbol.”
Ava carefully lifts her mug—she has the orange one, which was Weston’s—and examines the bottom. “The mountain? I’ve seen it, but I didn’t know who it belonged to.”
On the bottom of the red mug—Crew’s—I trace the indent with my finger. My mother made this with her own hands. She’s long gone, but it’s still here. Still solid against my palm. Another wave of sadness crashes over me. I breathe through it.
“Reed,” Ava says softly. “I’ll have your mug repaired by a professional.”
“Is that a thing?” I ask to lighten the mood. “Professional pottery repairer?”
“Art conservator,” she says. “Have you ever heard of Kintsugi?”
I think it over. “Sounds Japanese.”
“It is. It’s a way of fixing broken pottery with gold. Instead of trying to hide the crack…”
“They make it ornamental,” I finish. “Yeah, my mother explained that to me once. How a broken thing can become more perfect than it ever was.”
She gives me a tiny smile. “Some things are never repaired at all, though. Will you explain to me how these family heirlooms ended up in an unlabeled box in the shed? That’s where we dump the things seasonal employees leave behind.”
I flinch, although I’m not surprised by where we found the stuff. “At least they’re not broken. My father destroyed one piece of her art.”
Ava gasps. “Destroyedit? Your father broke your mother’s art?”
I nod and look away, because this memory is hard. My mother had died right before Christmas, while I was at Middlebury finishing up finals for my first semester. I flew home and then skipped out on J-term that year to be with my family.
But my father was too busy losing his shit to even look at us. “Right after she died, he was a mess. One night he got it in his head that he had to remove all her pieces from the house. There weren’t many. She liked to sell her work, and send it out into the world. But we had some of her clay models at home. Dad was a little drunk, and he took all the smaller pieces out…”
I take a deep breath, surprised at how hard it still is to talk about this.
“The largest piece went last. I saw he was in a state, and I tried to help. But he jerked away from me. And it fell and cracked.” I get the rest of it out in a rush. “For a second, we both just stared at that crack. And then it’s like he just snapped. Like one more loss was too many. He picked it up and hurled it outside. It broke into pieces on the front walkway to our house.”
Afterward, I’d cleaned up the whole mess as best I could before every single employee could see what a disaster he’d become. I don’t even know why, but I’d felt so much shame about it.
Still, those were the early days, when I’d thought my dad might pull out of his rage spiral. When I’d thought he’d stop drinking and start acting like our dad again.
I was wrong.
CHAPTER 16
WHAT MUST YOU HAVE BEEN THINKING?
AVA
Across from me, Reed is struggling. He hides it, but I know him pretty well, even after all this time. “That is awful, Reed. I had no idea things were that bad after she died. I remember you told me your father hadn’t coped well, but…”
His laugh is bitter. “None of us did. I was nineteen. I had no idea what to say to him, or what to do with this—” he waves a hand “—black hole in the middle of our family. I had so much guilt for being off at Middlebury when she passed. But it was torture being home for a month. When I went back to school in February, it was such a relief to get away from my father.”
I make a sound of dismay. Now I know why he never went home. It wasn’t until two years later that I’d met Reed, another year until I showed up here in Colorado, and then another two years until I started working closely with his father.
Clearly his dad had done some work on himself in the intervening years. By the time I went to work in the administrative office, he’d quit drinking. “I just had no idea. It must have been traumatic.”
Reed shrugs, like he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. “It’s no excuse, Ava, but that wreck of a kid was the guy you met two years later. I had no business getting serious with anybody.” He lifts his brown eyes, and they’re full of apology. “I’m sorry I blew up your life. I never meant to. It’s just that when we lost the—” He swallows.
“Baby,” I say softly. It’s not easy for me, either.
He takes a breath. “Baby,” he repeats carefully. “I just couldn’t cope. It was like…here we go again. I shut down. I couldn’t get myself through that, and I didn’t have the first clue how to get you through it, too. So I…” Another deep breath. “I took myself out of the equation. I know that sounds childish.”
“Itwaschildish. That’s because we were basically children.”
