Sea Glass Winter

by JoAnn Ross

“They’re wonderful at giving you instructions.” Dottie jumped onto the fish bandwagon. “Steamed clams are one of the easiest things in the world to cook, since they sell them already cleaned. And you could buy a nice boiled crab—”

  “Or crab cakes,” Doris said. “Maeve Farraday makes them all up by hand with cooked crab. All you have to do is brown them in a pan—”

  “Or oven,” Dottie broke in. “Easy peasy. Maeve also makes the best chowder on the coast. They also carry wonderful artisan bread from the Grateful Bread and coleslaw that would finish off a meal nicely.”

  Claire was doubtful. Then again, she thought about this morning’s mess of a breakfast and admitted to herself that she couldn’t keep feeding Matt takeout forever. He’d always seemed to enjoy his grandmother’s cooking, and she was already asking enough of him with this move and adjusting to a new school.

  It wasn’t as if she wasn’t an intelligent woman. She had, after all, made a nice career for herself with her jewelry making, and although she’d never equal the genius of Chihuly, she was beginning to build a reputation, at least on the West Coast, for her blown glass.

  How hard could it be to toss some damn crab cakes in an oven?

  “Okay.” She polished off the tea and made her decision. “But if I end up giving my son food poisoning, I’m going to tell him the seafood was all your idea.”

  They shared a laugh; then she left the store and headed to Farraday’s at the docks, not far from the bait shop she spotted down the way.

  “The trick,” she said as the wipers swished the rain from the windshield in wide arcs, “is not to get the two places mixed up.”

  9

  Thanks to the unrelentingly perky Aimee, lunch in a new cafeteria didn’t turn out to be the horror show Matt had dreaded. Although it wasn’t any fun feeling like an outsider, sitting at the nerd table, forced to watch the jocks laughing across the large room. It especially sucked when one of the guys strolled in with a hot blonde wearing a fuzzy white sweater that fit as if it were spray-painted on, a pink miniskirt, and pink UGGs. Matt recognized them as the couple who’d been tangling tongues up against the locker. They were—no big surprise—greeted like royalty.

  Meanwhile, as far as they were concerned, everyone at his table could have been on another planet. Or invisible.

  One of the jocks threw a French fry at another, which started a short-lived food fight, which everyone, including the teacher monitoring the cafeteria, seemed not to witness. Apparently even here in Nowheresville High School, athletes possessed star power.

  Which was what had Matt making up his mind. He might have landed in a really small pond, but maybe his mom was right about that making him an even bigger fish.

  “How’s it going?” Aimee leaned over and asked him quietly.

  “Great.” He told her what he knew she wanted to hear.

  Which was mostly true. At least he hadn’t been forced to wolf down chips and a candy bar from the vending machine in a stall of the boys’ restroom.

  The hot lunch was billed as seafood mac and cheese, but it smelled like an aquarium filled with dead fish. Fortunately, they also had fish sandwiches and Tater Tots. Even Aimee wasn’t enough of an optimist to try the mystery mac, instead going for a turkey Cobb salad and a Fuji apple.

  “I had an idea,” she said.

  He took a gulp of milk from the carton. “What?”

  “You could always take the late bus, but I’m working on an Oregon history project about Sacagawea with Jenny Longworth. Did you know that she—Sacagawea, not Jenny—was a teenager when she went with Lewis and Clark on their expedition?”

  “No, I never heard that.”

  “She was. They took her along as a translator, but since she was the only person who’d ever seen the landmarks, they might never have gotten to the coast without her to keep them on the right trail.

  “She also helped keep them alive by teaching them about edible plants, nuts, and berries, which Americans and Europeans had never heard of. And she did all that with her newborn baby on her back.”

  “That’s pretty impressive,” he allowed.

  “She was also the first woman in what would become the United States to vote.”

  “I may not know everything about history, but even I know the first vote was in Seneca Falls in the twentieth century.”

  “That’s because history tends to overlook people who aren’t white,” she argued. “When the expedition reached the Pacific Ocean in 1805, Lewis and Clark let her vote with the men on where they’d set up camp for the winter. That was more than a hundred years before the Seneca Falls vote.

  “Anyway, I was thinking, since I already live across the bridge, and Jenny’s house is just a couple streets away from yours, why don’t I drive you home from practice?”

  He’d been about to squeeze more ketchup on his Tater Tots, but that got his attention. “You have a car?”

  “Yeah. It’s not new or sexy—well, actually it’s my mother’s old Volvo, which pretty much looks like a blue refrigerator on wheels—but it gets me where I want to go.”

  “I thought you were a sophomore.”

  “I am. But my birthday falls at the end of this month, so back when I was in preschool, my parents had to make the decision to have me be way younger than everyone in the class, or older. Since my dad was deployed at the time and my mom said she wasn’t emotionally ready to be left all alone again all day, they opted for older. Which, like most things, ended up with mixed results, but the best part is that I can drive.”

  “That’d be cool.”

  He pulled out his phone and, ignoring the TURN OFF CELL PHONES and NO TEXTING signs posted all over the school, texted his mom his plans.

  As nice as Aimee was, it was bad enough sitting here at Nerd Central. One thing he so didn’t need was his mom showing up and blowing any juice he was bound to get from showing off his wicked ball skills during tryouts.

  10

  Another of the things that had attracted Claire to Shelter Bay was its abundance of Pacific Coast sea glass, which she’d first learned about from a jewelry-maker friend who lived a few miles north in Cannon Beach. According to the archives in the historical society’s museum, early residents of the town took care of their garbage by simply dumping it over the cliff. It might not be ecologically popular today, but after years of being washed out to sea, then back onto the shore, all those old bottles, dishes, and even chandeliers offered an amazing array of sand-polished sea glass. Also appealing were the agates and small shells that were scattered on the beach at low tide.

  The tide was out when she arrived back at the cabin shortly before noon with several items from Farraday’s, along with detailed instructions on how to prepare the dishes. Although Maeve Farraday, who ran the shop while her husband and older son fished, had been friendly and helpful, not quite trusting her skills, Claire had also stocked up on frozen bag dinners from the grocery store. Just in case.

  She knew she should attack the rest of the moving boxes that were taking up so much of the floor space. But the beach was like a siren’s call. After a cup of creamy clam chowder, which was even better than advertised, she went down the cliff steps in the drizzling rain. She found a small glass float wrapped in a bit of netting that had gotten caught up on a driftwood log. Probably more of the flotsam she’d read was drifting into the Pacific Northwest coast from the tragic Japanese tsunami.

  Carefully placing the float into the canvas bag she carried, along with two small pieces of green glass and a handful of agates, Claire climbed back up the steps.

  She’d originally started blowing glass eight years ago; when she’d tired of trying to find glass beads to add to the sea glass jewelry she’d begun making at home shortly after Matt’s birth, she’d decided to make her own.

  As she’d branched out with her art, she began having small showings up and down the West Coast. When the owners of Art on the River, a chichi Portland gallery, heard Claire was relocating to the Pacific Northwest, they
invited her to have an exhibition the week after Thanksgiving, just in time for the Christmas shopping season.

  When Claire had agreed four months ago, November had seemed a very long time away. Then she’d gotten sidetracked with all the details involved in handling her mother’s estate and selling and buying a house, which left her in a bit of a time crunch.

  Fortunately, at least one idea had been simmering in her mind during the drive up from Los Angeles. One she thought she’d finally figured out how to execute.

  Knowing that her mother’s property would be easier to sell if the old carriage house was converted to a guesthouse rather than a glass studio, she’d shipped her equipment ahead of the move to Oregon, and a glassblower she’d met at a conference had volunteered to drive down from Lincoln City and set it up in the garage for her.

  Unlike jewelry making, which allowed her mind to wander to problems with insurance companies, hospitals, finding a hospice nurse, and medications, not to mention Matt’s growing rebellion, she’d quickly discovered that working with molten glass required absolute concentration.

  During this past very sad and challenging year, it had become an escape from all the problems raining down on her.

  As she entered the studio, which, in contrast to the chilly outdoors, was an arid one hundred degrees, Claire took a deep breath and cleared her mind.

  This was her domain, where fire and glass came together in a seductive dance and, she hoped, would give birth to the shimmering vision glowing in her mind.

  After readying her supplies and tacking the drawing she’d done of the piece she planned as the centerpiece (and so far only piece) of her show to the wall, Claire put on her safety glasses and was on the verge of taking her first gathering of glass from the crucible when her cell phone dinged with a message.

  Got ride home. C U L8R.

  As brief and uninformative as the text was, it lifted her spirits. If Matt had a ride, he must have already made a new friend.

  Although his text didn’t say, the most likely thing would be that it was a player on the team. And the fact that he said he’d see her later suggested he’d be staying for tryouts. Claire truly hoped that was the case, because playing ball would give him a purpose and focus he’d been missing over the past several months.

  Feeling more optimistic than she had in a very long while, she put Enigma on the CD player, heated the tip of her blowpipe, then dipped it into the molten glass inside the furnace, gathering the glass as she might swirl honey from a jar, spooling it onto the end of the blowpipe.

  She took her time, going back and forth between the furnace, where the glass lay molten and without form, and the glory hole—a smaller furnace used to reheat the glass so she could roll and shape it on the marver.

  From the first, admittedly flawed, bead she’d blown, Claire had been delighted to discover that unlike the lovely solid pieces she’d been working with for years, glass was organic. It was a living, breathing thing, hungrily taking in oxygen, which was why ventilation was imperative. Along with the exhaust fans she’d had installed in the walls, she’d opened the windows a bit to let in the fresh sea air.

  Glass also had moods. It could be as calm as a soft and sunny summer day or as mercurial as a teenage girl with PMS, depending on the weather and the oxides she’d added to the sand to control the hardness and create the colors. And, all too often, for some mysterious reason she’d never understand, it would refuse to cooperate.

  As it was doing today.

  Glassblowing not only took enormous patience and attention to detail; it could on occasion, be ego deflating.

  While she was happy with the shape, she was dissatisfied with the way the thin layers of glass had flash-fused. The colors lacked the drama she’d intended.

  Discarding this first attempt into the hot pot, which was basically a fireproof wastebasket next to her bench, she began heating up her blowpipe again.

  “If at first you don’t succeed…”

  11

  After his last class, Matt made his way through the crush of students leaving the building, and although he still wasn’t happy about the move, at least, now that he’d figured out how to get his mojo back, he was feeling like it might not be the end of the world.

  He had to admit that the gym was as good as some of the best he’d played in back in California. It also, for some weird reason, had a bunch of folding chairs set up all over the court.

  “It was remodeled last year,” Aimee, who’d come along to watch the tryouts, said when he mentioned it. “Is it true about the gym at your old school? That it’s the one where the floor opens up and Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed fall into the swimming pool beneath it?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “That is way cool.”

  He shrugged, even though he secretly agreed. “I guess.”

  Coach Slater was already there with two other guys. One was holding a clipboard.

  “You don’t have to wait around,” he told Aimee. “You can go to the library or somewhere.”

  “That’s okay.” She glanced over at the near-empty bleachers. “I don’t have anything else to do right now, and hey, maybe you can convince me to like basketball. And I can convince you to go skiing.”

  “Maybe.” Not.

  The other players were strolling into the gym as if they belonged. Which they did. Watching them laughing and punching each other, the way they had in the cafeteria, Matt wondered again if this outsider feeling was the way other kids in BHHS had felt when he and his team had walked down the hall.

  Of course, it had been harder to impress kids at his old school. Especially when you were a freshman. And when kids’ parents collected Oscars, Emmys, and Golden Globes the way his mom collected shells, beads, and sea glass, being a high school basketball player didn’t put you on as high a pedestal as it did at most other schools. Especially when you played for a 3AAA division team that had a 20-11-1 record last year and had been ranked ninety-eighth in the state.

  But that hadn’t mattered, because he’d been the best frigging freshman in the state, with everyone saying he could only get better. Which was going to be hard to pull off now that his mother had forced him to play on a team that hadn’t even managed to have a winning season in a crappy Podunk 4A division.

  In California, papers from Redding to San Diego and even over to Blythe on the California/Arizona border had sent reporters to watch him. One sports blogger had even named him “Mad Matt,” because whatever gym he was playing in turned into a Thunderdome.

  The name had stuck, and although his mother and grandmother hadn’t liked it all that much, he’d be lying if he said he didn’t fantasize about some TV play-by-play announcer calling him Mad Matt in the NBA finals.

  The locker room benches and lockers had been painted the same blue that was on the bleachers. Unlike the student lockers lining the hallways, these had diamond-shaped perforations in the doors to allow fresh air in.

  A poster featuring Coach John Wooden’s famed Pyramid of Success had been tacked to the wall. Although it hadn’t been required at BHHS, Matt had memorized the fifteen points on the pyramid back when he was a little kid playing YMCA Junior Lakers ball. A piece of blank white poster board was tacked above the door.

  “Okay,” the coach said after they’d changed out of the clothes they’d worn to class. Although Matt still thought a dolphin was a lame mascot compared to a Norman, it felt good to be back in uniform. Even if it was a practice uniform with his name written on masking tape on the back and he was having to win the right to wear it.

  “It’s good to see a lot of familiar faces from summer camp,” Slater continued.

  His mother had sprung their move on him too late for Matt to attend summer camp, but he figured he was so far ahead of the other guys in skill and talent, it wouldn’t matter.

  There was the problem that they’d already formed a cohesive unit, which he’d be bound to screw up. Which wouldn’t make him the most popular guy on the team, as he’d b
een last year, when the other players rode his coattails to a winning season. But there had been a few varsity guys who hadn’t been happy having a freshman on their team.

  What if this team decided to haze the new kid by making sure he never got his hands on the ball? That would keep the coach from seeing that he was the player Shelter Bay had been waiting for.

  “We have a new player, transferring in from Southern California. Matthew Templeton. But he likes to be called Matt, right?” he asked.

  “Yes, Coach.” It had come up during physics lab, which, thanks to Aimee’s wicked organizational skills, his red team had won, blowing out those loser blues.

  “Coach Daniels”—Coach Dillon nodded at the guy with the clipboard—“and I have been watching the films both from the past two seasons, along with those we took during summer camp, and we’ve already got a pretty good idea who’s going to make the roster, and, probably what you’re all waiting to hear, who’s going to be a starter and who’s coming off the bench.”

  Looks were exchanged; there was a low murmur of agreement.

  “Here’s the thing everyone needs to know. Whatever you did last year is history. I worked with a lot of SEALs while I was doing bomb-disposal work in the military, and those guys have a saying: ‘The only easy day was yesterday.’

  “Along with making sure every one of you can repeat Coach Wooden’s fifteen building blocks to success before tip-off of our first game, we’ll be adopting that as our team motto this year.”

  “I thought we were Dolphins, not seals,” said a kid Matt recognized as being the one who’d thrown the French fry that started the food fight.

  A couple of the guys laughed.

  The coach did not. He merely nodded toward the coach with the clipboard, who pulled down the poster board, where that SEAL saying had been painted in Dolphin blue paint on the wall over the door leading out to the court.

  More looks were exchanged. Matt realized that some of the guys were worried. As if just maybe this new coach was going to turn out to be tougher than he looked.