pulled out of the alley, kicking up gravel and dust? Look at Eliza’s mother. Look at what happened when you tried too hard to dictate your children’s choices—they ended up running even farther from you.
With the kids gone, Harriet spent the afternoon busying herself in her studio. She still had work to do to replenish her inventory. She didn’t know how much the marijuana Jude had stolen was worth, but surely her glass had been worth more. And surely the boys who had destroyed it were the ones Jude was running from again. Maybe, as she believed before, he’d be safer out of town. Only now, she had three children to worry about. She tried not to think about which cities they’d be driving through, whose floor they’d be sleeping on, but she was clumsy, distracted. Her hands shook; she cracked two tubes. She chatted too long with a ponytailed man who had come by yesterday. He hadn’t bought anything then, but again she walked him through her gallery, all the pieces she displayed in fish tanks turned on their sides (the fish tanks, too, she’d had to replace). She shared a pack of American Spirits with the man, sitting in the plastic patio chairs that overlooked her garden. Normally, this was her least favorite part of her occupation—the exchange, the chummy small talk. That was Les’s talent. He used to spend hours with his customers, shooting the shit while they smoked up the greenhouse; only when she called him in for dinner did he remember to collect any money. Her customers often seemed as puzzled as she was about what exactly the interaction required of them, whether the rituals that were in the job description of the drug peddler, the prostitute, the illegal arms dealer, even, in this state, the tattoo artist—those professions more clearly on the other side of the law—applied to the traffic of glassware. It had been many years—and a few drop-ins by the local police—since Harriet had inaugurated a bong with its new owner. Now she kept things simple. Rarely did she talk like this. She told the man with the gray ponytail about her work, her ex, the carload of kids who had just disappeared. It was almost dark when he kindly extinguished his third or fourth cigarette and left with his newspaper-wrapped bundle. Alone in the moon-shadowed alley, the folded bills in the breast pocket of her overalls, Harriet felt unclean, as though she had engaged in something illicit. Did he think she was hitting on him? (Was she?) Did he think she was some doped-out old tramp?
She returned to the studio, turned on the lights and the hood. Pru was staying at Dena’s, and unless they’d broken down or been hit by a truck or killed by a hitchhiker, Jude and Eliza were safe in their van. They would be fine. They could take care of themselves. Leaning a knee on the rickety desk chair, she selected two glass tubes from the plastic pitcher at her workstation. She turned on the clock radio, tuned since the 1970s to Lintonburg’s classic rock station. What had classic rock been called then? Just rock, she supposed. After hunting for a moment for her safety glasses, she found them hanging, along with her other glasses, on their separate chain, around her neck. She got her torch going, and she got her tubes spinning, and then, a miracle of molecules, it was one tube. Her hands were steady now. She fumed some silver onto the pipe and raked it. Nothing fancy, but it was a clean design. This is what she loved: the work. The evening hour, the smell of the propane, the industrious whirr of the hood. She lit a candle, then used the flame to light a cigarette. Paul Simon was on the radio. Just drop off the key, Lee. She turned it up. Maybe the pipe did look a little like a dildo. Maybe there was something unsavory about her line of work. The man with whom she’d apprenticed in Brattleboro at the age of seventeen (glassblowing had been only one of the skills he’d taught her) had later gone on to specialize in glass sex toys. Harriet had stuck nobly to her roots, though over the years, often while sitting in the principal’s office at one of Jude’s schools, she had questioned the nobility of pipes and bongs. Somewhere along the way, she had lost her fondness for pot; since Jude’s hypothermia scare,