A Little Too Late (Madigan Mountain)

REED

I sit there for another hour, chiseling a number of small concessions out of the Sharpes. By the time I’m done, I imagine they’ll use my photo for target practice next time they get out their guns.

But it’s worth it. At the end, I’m finally satisfied with the leaseback clause on the house and a few other items on my wish list. If my father wants to sell to these yokels, he’s going to get good terms. At least I can go back to California with a clear conscience, if not a clear head.

Unfortunately, I can’t stop worrying about Ava. Even with a two-year contract, I still feel like I’m feeding her to the sharks.

She isn’t worried, though. This is what she wants. So I ask the Sharpes to put three weeks’ vacation—annually—into the deal memo. “And three personal days,” I add.

Sharpe gives me a dark look, but he adds it to his notes.

When the meeting is adjourned, I go looking for Ava, because I need to give her the good news. At least that’s what I tell myself.

I’m not just seeking her out because she looks hot in her red dress, or because I can’t stop remembering the look in her eye last night when she was telling me how much she missed me.

Nope. This is strictly a business visit.

I find Ava sitting at her desk. She’s holding something under a carefully aimed task lamp. As she patiently manipulates the object, her frown reminds me of the girl I met when she was only twenty-one, squinting while she drew an exquisite owl or a fox onto her latest art project.

“Hey there,” I say with as much nonchalance as a guy can muster for the only girl he ever loved. “I have some good…” The sentence dies on my tongue when I realize what she’s holding. I sputter, “W-where did you get that?”

She lifts her pretty eyes, and they’re confused. “The mug?”

I nod, my eyes still glued to it.

“Found it in a box of old crockery that someone stashed in a storage locker. And I loved it so much that I took it home with me. There’s a saying painted on the bottom—on the inside. It says—”

“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides,” I say, my voice hoarse.

Ava makes a noise of pure surprise. “How did you…” She looks down at the mug, and swallows hard. “Wait. Was this yours? It looks handmade.”

I nod. And then I tell her something that I never managed to tell her before. “My mother made it. She loved pottery.”

Ava gapes at me. Then she looks down at the broken thing in her hand. “Your dead mother made this for you. And I broke it.”

I take another deep breath and try to shovel a heap of emotions back down my gullet. “Ava, this isn’t on you. But can you show me where you found it? There were two more of them—in different colors—one for each of my brothers. With…”

“…different sayings inside,” she finishes my sentence. “Yeah. Come on.” She shuts off the light and grabs her coat off a hook. “Follow me.”

Fifteen minutes later, I’m toting a cardboard box out of a storage shed behind an employee apartment building. “Up here,” Ava says, leading me up the exterior staircase to the second floor. “I have the other two mugs in my kitchen.”

I follow her upstairs, shamelessly admiring the view of her backside. “I used to come up here in high school,” I tell her. “There was a ski tech living on the second floor who was willing to buy beer for me and Weston. He probably overcharged us.”

Ava looks over her shoulder to give me a tiny smile as she reaches the second-floor walkway. She passes two doors and stops in front of the third one. “I still can’t get over the fact that your mother was a potter.” She unlocks the door to her unit, but before she steps inside, she gives me an appraising look. “Seems like something you might have mentioned that day we met in pottery class.”

“Oh, I know it.” I follow her inside the apartment. “But there I was, sitting next to a very pretty girl who was better at pottery than I was. Didn’t seem like something to brag about.”

She frowns. “That class lasted a month, Reed. And it never came up.”

She’s right, of course. “I just didn’t want to be a sad sack. I didn’t want to lay my tale of woe at your feet. What was I supposed to say? ‘My mother was a potter. She made our home amazing. Then she died, and my father won’t even say her name.’”

“That would have been a good start.” Ava throws her coat on a chair. “Sit down.” She goes into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and pulls out a gallon of apple cider. Then she retrieves the other two mugs—a yellow one and an orange one—from a cupboard. “Hot cider?”

“Yes, please.” As much as I do not want to talk about my dead mother—and my own questionable behavior—I’m enjoying this invitation to see where Ava lives.

I set the box down on the coffee table and sit on the sofa.

The apartment is startlingly nice. It almost makes me feel better about leaving her here under questionable new management. The living room is small but comfortable, with a charcoal-colored couch and a leather chair. It’s very civilized—much nicer than that dude’s bachelor pad that I used to visit in high school.

She’s decorated the small space carefully. There are bookshelves and throw pillows with… Hold up. The pillows have mountain goats drawn on them.

“Ava, are these your drawings?” I ask, lifting a pillow to show her. “I saw this in my hotel room.” There are drawings on the parking-lot signs, too. Hell, her mark is all over this property. “This is you, right? I’m not crazy? Your art is all over Madigan Mountain.”

“Yep.” She’s stirring cider in a pot on the stove. “And I’m starting to think Sharpe is going to wipe it all away and put golden snakes on everything instead.” She makes a face.

For once in my life, I hold my tongue. But she’s probably right. Even so, she and my father seem hellbent on going through with the sale. And it really is none of my business.

I’m going to keep repeating that until I stop worrying.

While Ava stirs the cider, I allow myself a weak moment to look around and wonder if this might have been our apartment. If things had gone differently…

“How did the rest of the meeting turn out?” she asks.

I swear it takes me a long beat to even remember. I’d been so eager to brag about the concessions I’d won from Sharpe, so desperate to give her this trivial news. Negotiating her employee contract is such a cheap apology, really, for all the things I did wrong when we were young. “It went fine. The Sharpes will draw up an agreement giving you a two-year guarantee, three paid weeks of vacation, three personal days each year, and a twenty percent raise.”

She turns sharply. “Twenty?”

“Yeah. You deserve it.”

“I thought I’d have to prove myself first. Damn, Reed. Thank you. That’s incredible.” A smile lights up her face.

My heart pangs with fresh guilt. “You deserve it. You’re going to run the place.”

“Sure, but…” She begins ladling cider into the mugs. “Your father wants to sell so badly. I think he was afraid to push the Sharpes on the details. I was afraid to push, too. I have no stake in the game. I’m nobody in this negotiation. I just work here.”

“Really? Is there another employee anywhere on the property who puts as much into this place as you?”

She shrugs, like it doesn’t matter. Then she carries the cider over to the living space, and I rise from the sofa to take the mug. “To your mom,” she says, raising hers for a toast.

“To Mom,” I say, except my voice catches on the word. And my damn eyes get hot. But God, I never talk about her. Never.

Ava sits down quietly in the chair across from me, while I take a sip of the spicy brew in my cup and try to keep my composure.

“It never occurred to me that she made those mugs.” Ava runs a finger around the mug’s rim. “They’re unsigned, for starters. And while I knew she was an artist, I’d heard she was a sculptor. Employees used to talk about how much they loved her and how talented she was.”

I swallow the lump in my throat. “Sculpture was her main thing. But she loved ceramics. She’d model a new piece in clay, and when she felt she’d captured the shape, then she’d cast it for metalwork.”

“Wow, interesting,” Ava says. “I would have loved to meet her.”

Just the idea of my mother meeting Ava makes my heart ache. “She would have loved you. And that pottery class? I took it to try to feel closer to her.”

“Oh, Reed,” Ava says quietly. “I wish I’d known.”

“It was a mistake,” I say carefully. “I made a lot of those.” I hope she can’t tell how close I am to losing my shit. My mother’s been gone thirteen or fourteen years. And I’ve spent all that time trying not to grieve.

Obviously, it worked great for me. My lungs feel tight and weird. I guess this is what happens if you pack something away so tightly that it can’t breathe. When the cork finally pops, you just burst.

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. “Destroyed it? 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.