Page 131 of The Difference Between

“He makes it look easy, doesn’t he?” Nancy asks me.

My brows lift.

“Dropping one dream for another.”

Addie has her first rehearsal this afternoon and Nancy is picking her up. Now that I know Gavin is a hop, skip, and property line away having whatever Thirsty Thursday is, I want to get out of here and collect my thoughts. “Sure.”

Plus, I’m still stuck on the fact Greg had a secret hobby for all the years I knew him and why Nancy thinks his ghost is making glass and it’s because of me unless it’s not Greg. It was Greg. Nancy’s emotions over moving are making her delusional, and she needs a gentle nudge back to reality. She’s misspoken or I’ve misheard.

“Nancy,” I call from the car, making her look. “It’s kind of ironic that I taught Gavin to read with a book about glass and Greg ended up being a glassblower, isn’t it?”

“What?” Nancy laughs. Really laughs. She raises a finger then disappears inside, her giggles floating through the screen door and open windows. She reappears, carrying a blob of glass—the ugliest piece I’ve seen—still working through how funny this is.

“Greg made this,” she says, look on her face saying she thinks it’s as ugly as I do. “A few years ago.”

“Okay . . .”

“Reese,” she says, almost dumbfounded. She hands me a photo, this time of Gavin, wearing his suit and a wide smile as he stands next to one of the glass installments. “Greg wasn’t a glassblower, honey. Gavin is.”

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.