On My Way - Eve Langlais Page 0,21
he’d brought and the credenza right into the showroom area. The rest we piled on shelves in the storage room. I’d go through and inventory them before I put them out for sale.
Only one item in the truck remained, and by its shape, I had a funny idea I knew what it was.
His boots thumped as he walked to the back of his truck and put a hand on the last sheet. “Here’s the present I brought you.” He whipped off the covering and showed me the pottery wheel from his basement.
“I’m sure it will bring a good chunk,” I said, wondering if it would be unethical to buy it off him myself. I could go online and make sure I gave him a fair market price.
“I’m sure it will make you lots of money, especially since you’re not going to sell it. You’re going to use it.”
“You lost me. Use it to do what?”
“Make stuff, of course. You know like bowls and, uh, vases and shit.”
“I’ve no idea how.”
“Then you’ll learn. I know that second storage room in the back still has an old brick oven from when this used to be a pizza place. I’ll check and make sure the chimney is still good.”
“But I don’t know the first thing about pottery making. No one will want to buy amateur stuff.”
“They will if it’s made of a certain mud.” He hinted, reminding me that I was the only person who still owned property bordering our very special lake. The only person other than Airgeadsféar who could actually get her hands on some of Maddiogo Lake’s sediment.
“No one is going to buy crappily made stoneware just because I claim it’s made from Maddiogo mud.”
“Are you sure about that?” He heaved the pottery wheel onto a dolly he’d brought. He wheeled it down the ramp, and I followed him as he brought it straight through into the smaller storage room, empty now except for that defunct oven and the wheel.
“It’s a crazy idea,” I said, still arguing. “No one even knows about the mining effort yet except our town and the workers.”
“Key word being ‘yet.’ It’s coming. Something this big won’t stay quiet forever. And when it does, it will blow up. People will flock to Cambden, looking to get a gob of mud, but we both know Airgeadsféar will have that lake locked tight.”
“Except for my property.” So long as I didn’t sell, I would have access to the lake. “You really think people will want to buy it?”
“Tell you what. If I’m wrong, I’ll owe you dinner in a fancy restaurant.”
“And if you’re right and people do want it?” I asked.
“Then you make me dinner. At my place. I’ll provide the wine.”
I frowned. “You seem pretty confident about this.”
“And so should you. Do you really think Airgeadsféar would be going through so much trouble and secrecy if they weren’t sitting on a gold mine?”
Good point.
I ran my hand over the spinning stone. “I guess it won’t hurt to try.”
Even if the pottery idea failed, he did give me an idea. Worst-case scenario, I could bottle the stuff. How much would it sell for? What would I call it? For some reason I could hear Winnie’s voice from the other night saying, “Come one, come all, and partake of Maddy’s magical shit.” Never mind the monster didn’t exist; Winnie thought it made a good spin.
She might be right. Although I thought making bowls would be a tad classier.
I spent the rest of that day after Darryl left making an inventory list. Clearly marking his items and giving them sticker SKUS for tracking. I’d enrolled in an online billing system that allowed me to enter all my products, give them descriptions and prices, and in return, it spit out SKUS I could scan. It was almost dummy proof.
Despite the anxiety knotting my stomach and the conviction I had too much to do, in reality, I was just about ready to open. The only thing left was choose a name and run my suggested prices by Darryl. Hopefully he would agree with them. People could be funny about what they thought their things were worth.
I remembered browsing garage sales in my old neighborhood where people were convinced things bought a decade ago and barely used, so they claimed, were worth almost the full purchase price. Sentimentality had to be taken out of the equation.
Since I passed the gas station on the way home, I stopped in to see if Darryl was