I Married a Stranger to Ruin Them novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Charter

The glassworks can only be owned by family, and Alice asks the stranger to marry her.

"I didn't come to say sorry," I said.

"Then what's the dress for?"

"A party. I got fired at it."

He turned the pipe once more in the furnace mouth.

The glow on the end of it went from orange to almost white.

"Huh," he said. "Tough crowd."

He carried the pipe to a steel bench and sat, rolling it along the rails with one hand.

With the other he pressed a wet wooden block against the hot glass.

It hissed and smoked, and the ball came out round as an egg.

I had never watched anyone do it before.

Six years of buying bottles from this building, and I had only ever shaken hands in the office.

"Your father made my bottle," I said.

"My father made a lot of bottles."

"Amber. Four ounces. A little lip at the neck so the dropper sits right."

He stopped rolling.

"That was his favorite job," he said. "He said it was the only bottle he made that had a reason."

"It does have a reason."

"Yeah. Your company decided it was four bucks too much of a reason."

I didn't argue.

He was right.

He finished the piece in silence, knocked it off the pipe and set it in a little oven by the wall.

Then he pulled off one glove with his teeth and looked at me properly.

"Matt," he said. "Ashbaugh. The one who's left."

"Alice Merrin."

"I know. Your name's on the invoices."

He wiped his face with a rag that had seen better years.

"We owe the bank two hundred and ninety thousand dollars," he said. "Dad borrowed it for the new furnace lining, because your order was steady. Then he died. Then your order stopped."

"The notice says June first."

"It does."

"How many people work here?"

"Eleven. Twelve with me. One of them is seventy-two and taught me to hold a pipe when I was six."

A door banged at the far end of the shop.

A short woman in a Steelers hoodie and steel-toed boots came in carrying a foil pan.

"Mom says if you're going to work all night you're eating a real..."

She saw me and stopped.

She looked at my dress, at my heels, at my mascara, which had probably given up somewhere on the highway.

"Holy mother of a busted kiln," she said. "Is that her?"

"That's her," Matt said.

"The bottle lady?"

"The bottle lady."

"Carrie," she told me. "His sister. I do the books, so I'm the one who cried when your email came in."

"It wasn't my email."

"It had your logo on it."

"They fired me tonight. The logo isn't mine either anymore."

Carrie set the pan on the bench next to the oven.

She studied me.

"Okay," she said. "That's actually kind of worse."

She peeled back the foil.

Pierogies, fried in onions, still warm.

Matt held the pan out to me.

I hadn't eaten all night.

I took one with my fingers and burned my tongue, and I didn't care.

"I can find you a new customer," I said, with my mouth full. "I know every buyer in the business."

"Customers take months," Carrie said. "The bank takes June first."

"Then an investor. I know people with money."

Carrie laughed, not nicely.

"Come here," she said. "You need to see the wall."

The office was a closet with a desk, a space heater and a fax machine.

On the wall, in a cheap black frame, hung a sheet of yellowed paper covered in brown ink.

ASHBAUGH GLASS WORKS. ARTICLES OF ASSOCIATION. 1898.

Carrie tapped one line with a chipped fingernail.

"No share of these works shall be held, nor any contract signed on their behalf, save by a member of the Ashbaugh family, by blood or by marriage."

"A lawyer from Erie offered to buy forty percent last month," Carrie said. "He read that and drove home."

"Can't you change it?"

"Dad could have," Matt said from the doorway. "He wrote a letter in the hospital saying he wanted it to stay family. Mom framed that one too."

It hung under the charter.

The handwriting shook.

I read it twice.

Then I stood in the hot little office in my party dress and started counting out loud.

"The bank won't refinance a dead man's loan without a new contract."

"Nope," said Carrie.

"Nobody outside the family can buy in."

"Nope."

"Matt can make glass, but he can't make glass and sell it and run the books and fight the bank."

"I can do the books," Carrie said.

"You can't sign anything."

She opened her mouth and shut it again.

"Only family can sign," I said.

"Lady, it's one in the morning," Matt said. "Just say the thing."

I said it to the charter first, because that was easier.

"I have six years of formulas in my head. I have every buyer in the country in my phone. I have a lab's worth of chemistry and nowhere to use it."

"Great," Matt said. "Bring a lawyer from Erie."

"I don't need a lawyer."

I turned around.

He was leaning on the door frame with his arms crossed over those scarred forearms, and he looked tired enough to fall over.

"Ashbaugh by blood or by marriage," I said.

Carrie dropped the pen she was holding.

Matt didn't move at all.

I pushed my glasses up with one knuckle.

My hand was shaking, so I put it in my pocket, on top of my silver pen.

"Marry me," I said.

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