“Hi, you sweet boy,” Tessa said, giving Stanley a vigorous scratch on the head. He flopped onto the floor, looking like a misshapen bearskin—basset skin—rug. I was certain there would be a puddle of drool left on my oak flooring when he got up.
“Where’s Gumdrop?” Val asked. We were always careful about keeping Gumdrop and Stanley separate, since there were still moments when the cat insisted this house was not just his home but his country, and the dog was an invader who must be stopped at all costs.
“He’s down at the end of my worktable, sunning himself by the window,” I said.
“Oh good, because I really, really, really don’t want to deal with all the howling and fighting,” Val said.
“Sounds like my house,” Tessa said. “But not this week. Everyone is off having fun away from everyone else. We’ve got some contractors coming in to do some remodeling work. They’re opening the attic to make a new room for Izzy. She and Ashley have been fighting so much lately that I’ve decided that we’ll all have more peace and quiet if those two aren’t sharing the same bedroom.”
“Have you ever thought about turning your attic into an extra room?” Val asked me, looking toward the door at the top of the stairs, against the wall that separates my studio from the rest of the house.
“It’s only Gumdrop and me. I don’t need the space.”
“But think about it, if you had a room up in the attic, visitors could stay in it, and you wouldn’t have to give up the Bead Lair,” Tessa said.
I had thought about it from time to time, but had always dismissed the concept. The idea of spending any amount of time in the spider-infested attic gave me the heebie-jeebies. I’d only entered it once to grab some tiles that must’ve been stored there for decades. Other than the overall spookiness of the attic, the other thing holding me back was a lack of funds for the renovation.
The advantage of finishing off the space would be that I’d have an additional storage area, since I didn’t have a garage. That wasn’t a big deal when I first moved here because I only brought what I could fit in my car, including Gumdrop. Now that I’d been living here for a few years, things were starting to accumulate, and my living space was getting tighter and tighter.
“I think some night this week we’re going to have to take a look in your attic,” Tessa said, picking up some of the beads that Gumdrop had knocked onto the floor.
“It’s scary up there! It’s full of boxes covered in dust and cobwebs and pieces of furniture covered in sheets. They look like ghosts,” I said.
“You have ghosts?” Val asked.
“No, I don’t have ghosts, they only look like ghosts.”
“Oh, good, because I was about to go and get my perfume,” Val said.
We learned about Val’s cure for the common ghost last fall when we were staying at the supposedly-haunted Red Rose Hotel. She liberally spritzed the hotel room with her somewhat questionable Chanel No. 6, which, according to Val and the guy on the street corner who sold it to her, was better than No. 5.
Tessa blew her bangs out of her eyes, a sure sign of exasperation. With Val around, you had to get used to her funny notions about how the world worked. If Val believed in something, no matter how unlikely, there was no way you could get her to change her mind. It was one of the most adorable things about Val, and one of the most aggravating.
“So, ladies, are you hungry for some dinner?” Val asked. “I made some super-yummy chili, and it’s ready to eat right next door.”
“Sorry, I think we better head over to the glassblowing studio,” Tessa said.
“Oh, too bad. You’d love it. You want to know my secret ingredient?” Val asked, turning to leave. “Chocolate!” Stanley jumped up and followed her, stumbling over his ears as he went. Sure enough, he left a puddle of drool behind.
“I’d love to get the recipe from you. My kids will eat anything with chocolate and so will I,” Tessa called after her.
“I’ll email the recipe to you. Bye, darlings. Have fun at your class,” Val said, shutting the door behind her.
“Here, let me show you something that will get you excited about the class,” Tessa said. She pulled out an elegant marbled-paper box from her purse. Gently untying its satin ribbon, she opened the package, and I looked inside, feeling like I was peeking into a special box of chocolates. Inside was a stunning strand of Venetian beads.
“Oh, Tessa, these beads are gorgeous!” I plucked the exquisite necklace from the box. Each bead was covered in a mosaic pattern of multicolored flower designs. The satin surface of the beads hinted at their age. They were certainly not new.
“It was my nonna’s. The design is called millefiori. It means ‘a thousand flowers’ in Italian,” Tessa said, taking the necklace from me and holding it near the studio window. We admired the beads in the sunlight, even though there wasn’t much of it. The skies had been threatening rain all day.
“I love the tiny details in the flowers. I can’t believe we’re actually going to learn to make this kind of bead in the workshop,” I said.
“It should be a lot of fun. I’m excited about it.”
“I’m a little nervous. I’ve never been in a glassblowing studio before. At least you spent time hanging around glassblowers when you moved to Venice after high school, plus all those summers you visited your grandparents in Murano.”
“You’ll be fine. There’s nothing to worry about. I promise,” Tessa said.
As it turned out, Tessa was wrong. There would be plenty to worry about.
THREE
The glassblowing studio was in the town of Carthage, a forty-five-minute drive from Seattle. Tessa and I decided to drive the Ladybug each day rather than stay locally, since the distance didn’t seem too daunting and the drive would give us time to gossip before and after class. We’d heard some of the students decided to camp near the glassblowing shop to save money. That wasn’t an option for Tessa and me. We were too old for that. In fact, I think I’ve always been too old for camping.
The owners, Dez and Abby McCabe, named their workshop Old Firehouse Studio, which made sense because it was, in fact, the old firehouse in Carthage. They had spent the last two years building out the space and installing glassblowing equipment and were now making their own glass art vases and paperweights. Recently they had begun offering glassblowing classes. Since Seattle real estate was expensive, having a business in the boondocks made sense. Properties in this area were less expensive, but it also seemed like it would be difficult to attract visitors, especially since there wasn’t much out here except for Old Firehouse Studio. Correction: There was nothing else out here.
“What? No Starbucks?” Tessa asked as I turned off the highway into Carthage. How would she survive a week without a constant supply of coffee?
“Not every town in America has a Starbucks,” I said. Of course, all I could think was that Seattle could do with fewer coffee shops and that it would be convenient if one simply relocated here, immediately. “Don’t panic. We’ll make coffee at my house in the morning. We can leave a little early each day and get a cup on the road, too.”
“But what about our ten o’clock cup?” asked Tessa. “Our two o’clock cup? What about that cup at four o’clock when it’s been a really long day?”
“Maybe the studio will have a coffee maker. We aren’t the only ones around here who love a good cup of java,” I said.
Old Firehouse Studio wasn’t hard to find. It was at the end of the main street, called, appropriately enough, Main Street. I pulled into a parking spot by a garage-sized door at the front of the building. The door was rolled open and through it was the glassblowing studio, known by those in the glass world as the hot shop. Tessa and I got out of the car and stood at the entrance, taking it all in. We stepped tentatively inside. The workshop was set up differently from what we used when we made glass beads—bigger, hotter, and, I must admit, s
carier. Instead of a pistol-sized torch attached to a table and a kiln not much bigger than a toolbox, the hot shop was filled with huge furnaces of molten glass and kilns the size of refrigerators. At one end of the room was a glassblower’s bench, a seat with two parallel metal rails on each side. The devices on the shelf attached to the bench looked more like torture implements than tools for forming glass.
Blown glass hummingbird feeders strung from fishing line hung in the floor-to-ceiling windows next to the rolling door. Had there been sun on this April day, I’m sure the colorful globes would have glistened. Instead, they glowed dimly, illuminated by the gray sky of a Washington spring.
A woman exited the office at the back of the studio and extended her hand.
“Abby McCabe,” she said with a firm shake, “Here for the class?” The woman was about my age, but thin and wiry, and strong—stronger than I’d ever be. She was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt that revealed her ropey biceps.
“Yes, I’m Jax O’Connell, and this is Tessa Ricci,” I said.
“Welcome to Old Firehouse Studio. I’m so glad you’re able to join us for this class. You two haven’t worked in the hot shop before, have you? Don’t worry, we’ll give you a little orientation. Let me get Sam, he’s our gaffer,” Abby said. Noticing my confusion, she added, “A gaffer is the head glassblower in a studio. In our studio, he’s the only glassblower, other than Dez. Sam will show you around.”
“Sam!” Abby screeched. “I gotta yell at him,” she explained, “otherwise he doesn’t hear me when he’s working out back.”
Sam entered the studio through the back door next to the office, coming in from what looked like a utility yard. Sam was stocky with a scruffy beard and looked to be in his early thirties.
“Sam, this is Jax and Tessa. They’re new to the hot shop. Why don’t you get them oriented?”
“Hey, nice to meet you. I’m Sam Tilden. I’m the lead glassblower here, and I’m happy to help you any way I can. First off, we’ve got some rules here in the hot shop. You’re going to have to wear cotton clothing.”
“We’re glass beadmakers, so we know fire and synthetic fabrics don’t mix,” Tessa said. I was glad Tessa was doing what she could to assure Sam we weren’t complete newbies when it came to hot glass.
“Okay. Good to know. Still, you’ll probably want to wear long sleeves to protect your arms from the heat.” I noticed he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, which was covered in dark burn marks. Some were big enough to have become holes, others were still small black dots. “You won’t see any of us wearing long sleeves, but we’ve been at this a long time and can handle the heat. These furnaces are hot. You don’t have to touch anything to get burned. Standing near the furnace for too long can do it. While you’re learning, we don’t want you rushing, and we don’t want you to get injured.”
I’d been burned plenty of times, but only on my fingers, and most of those burns were no worse than I’d get by touching the edge of a hot pan in the oven. I’d been hit by a few rice-sized pieces of glass that had popped off glass rods I was melting with my torch. But compared to what could happen in a hot shop, the dangers in a glass beadmaking studio were minimal. When making glass beads, it didn’t matter whether you wore long sleeves or not; you could wear anything you wanted, as long as you chose natural fibers that wouldn’t melt if you got too close to a heat source.
“You’ll want to wear closed-toed shoes. Trust me when I say that you don’t want molten glass falling on your feet,” Sam said, pointing at his own scuffed-up work boots.
Tessa and I nodded in agreement. Molten glass on any part of the body was a very bad thing.
“This is the furnace.” We walked over to an upright concrete cylinder, which was a little smaller than the Ladybug. “Inside it’s 2,100 degrees, and we keep it like that twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” An eighteen-inch square door was located at chest height on the front of the furnace. The gaps between the door and its frame glowed bright orange. Behind the small door was a crucible of molten glass. Its extreme heat, combined with the vibrant yellow heating elements, lit up the inside of the furnace.
A vintage white Chevy pickup pulled into the parking lot out front. A small, fit man slid out of the cab and headed into the hot shop. I recognized him from the studio’s website. This was Dez McCabe, and he owned the studio with his wife, Abby.
“Dez,” he said, extending his hand to Tessa and then to me.
“Hi, I’m Jax, and this is Tessa,” I said.
“Nice to meet you both. Hope this class isn’t going to be too hard for you, since you’re middle…”
“Uh, Dez? Can I speak with you privately,” Abby broke in, and then to Sam, “Can you keep showing these gals the studio?”
Dez ambled toward the office with Abby.
“Was Dez about to call us middle-aged?” I asked Tessa, offended. Even though I was approaching middle-age, I didn’t think it needed to be pointed out publicly.
“Look, Jax, you’ve got to understand, glassblowing is hard, physically. Most people who are first-timers are a lot younger than we are,” said Tessa. She and I both had reached our mid-forties in decent shape, other than my serious case of studio-butt from sitting in front of my torch, instead of power-walking with Val when she took her dog for a spin around the neighborhood.
“It’s not like we’ve got one foot in the grave or anything!”
“I know, and we do have experience working in glass, only on a much smaller scale.”
“On a way, way smaller scale.” I was already nervous about taking this class, and now I felt like I had been told I was too old to do it. It didn’t make me happy.
“I’m not ready to give up before we’ve even started. Are you?”
I knew Tessa was right. I needed to step outside my comfort zone. The best things in my life have happened because I’ve stepped away from a place where I felt safe and in control. It was that way when I moved here. I knew I needed to make a change from my less-than-amazing life in Miami if I didn’t want to be stuck in an apartment with a leaky sink and harvest gold appliances forever. My boyfriend at the time, Jerry, had started spending more time in front of the TV and less time with me. I didn’t want to be with a man who had been ignoring me for years, only saying, “Hi, babe,” and, “Bye, babe,” each day. If I waited too long to order take-out, he would add exponentially to the word count of the day by asking, “What’s for dinner?”
But even more than leaving Jerry, I’d wanted to start a new life away from the cold, white walls of my job at Clorox. I wanted to create beautiful glass objects and become my authentic, creative self. Leaving Jerry and driving to Seattle was the biggest challenge I’d ever faced, and now here I was, looking at a smaller challenge, learning to blow glass, which was relatively easy compared to moving cross-country. I took courage in reminding myself how much I had accomplished. I had even started up my own company, Ladybug Beads, and was managing to keep myself afloat financially.
“You’re right. I want to do this. I can do this,” I told Tessa.
“Of course you can,” she said, beaming at me.
“Are these blowpipes?” I asked Sam, pointing to a few four-foot-long, inch-thick metal pipes that were resting against the wall. Each pipe was tapered on one end and flared out on the opposite end.
“Yes, they are. The blowpipes are tubes; they’re what we use to blow glass into hollow shapes like vases. We blow into the tapered end.” He pointed to another set of metal rods nearby, which were more slender than the blowpipes. “These are punties. They don’t have a hole that runs through them. They’re used as handles when you’re creating solid glass items like paperweights, or canes like we’ll be making this week.”
Sam passed a punty to each of us to examine. I was fascinated to see this equipment because it was quite different from what I’d seen in the glassblowing workshop at Clorox, where I’d first le
arned about working with hot glass. Scientific glassblowers usually work with rods or tubes of borosilicate glass that they heat in a torch and then form into apparatus for experiments and research. That setup differed from art glass studios like this one, where glassblowers pulled clear molten glass out of a furnace and shaped it into vases, paperweights, and many other decorative and functional objects.
“This is the marver,” Sam continued, running one of his hands across the top of a metal platform the size and height of a picnic table. “We roll the hot glass on it to shape it.” I used a hand-held graphite marver when I made glass beads. It seemed to me that glass beadmakers used a lot of the same tools as glassblowers, except that everything we used was on a much smaller scale.
“That certainly puts my little hand-held marver to shame. I guess when you’re making big pieces, you need a big marver to shape them,” I told Tessa.
The office door slammed open with a crash. Abby ran from the office, jumped in Dez’s truck, and was gone.
Dez stomped out of the office.
“That damn woman! She makes me crazy!” Dez yelled, pounding a fist on the office’s doorjamb.
“Excuse me, ladies. I think I need to see what I can do to help Dez,” Sam said. “We’ll finish the tour a bit later.” Sam joined Dez as he stormed around in the office screaming idle threats—at least I hoped they were idle—at Abby, who wasn’t around to hear his tirade.
“What do you think that’s about?” I asked as we headed outside to get away from Dez’s ranting. Tessa and I took a seat on a low bench in front of the studio’s roll-up door.
“I don’t know, but I hope it doesn’t mean we’re in for a week of drama,” Tessa said, zipping up her hooded sweater. As the day wore on it was getting colder, and the clouds were threatening rain. “I could use a lot less drama in my life. I was hoping this week away from Izzy and Ashley would be stress-free.”
Off the Beadin' Path, Glass Bead Mystery Series, Book 3 Page 2