I Married a Stranger to Ruin Them novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Glass Season

The woman from Corning drove down the next week to explain it in person.

She sat at the kitchen table in a good wool coat, with a plate of pierogies she hadn't asked for and ate anyway.

"We'd build a studio onto your works," she said. "A second furnace, a teaching floor. Our name on a plaque by the door. Two residents a year, sent here instead of to us, to learn from you."

"From me," Matt said.

"From you, and from him." She nodded at the old man in his lawn chair by the stove. "We've never had a master who learned at a furnace from 1961. Our people learned in classrooms."

The old man grunted.

"Classrooms," he said, like it was a swear word.

"And your apprentices train beside them," she said. "It's a year. Then we do it again."

Matt looked at me across the table.

He didn't ask.

He'd stopped asking me things he already knew.

"Yes," he said to her. "If the old man gets a real chair. Not that lawn chair."

"I like the lawn chair," the old man said.

They broke ground in November, before the frost.

The crew built most of it themselves, after shifts, in their work boots, with the museum's money and Carrie's spreadsheets.

The new studio went up on the river side of the works, brick to match the old brick.

The roof was the part Matt cared about.

He'd drawn it on the back of a pierogi receipt, the way I'd drawn the bottle.

One long skylight, right over the new furnace, so you could blow glass by daylight and see the sky while you did it.

The first two residents came the second week of January.

A tall young woman from Ohio who'd blown glass for ten years and had never once used a wooden block.

A quiet man from Maine who called Matt "sir" until Matt begged him to stop.

The old man had a real chair now, a green leather recliner the crew had found at an estate sale.

He sat in it twelve feet from the new furnace and yelled at all six of them, residents and apprentices together.

"Turn! What are you doing, knitting?"

The woman from Ohio wrote it on a strip of tape and stuck it to her pipe.

Carrie left for Philadelphia on a gray Sunday in January.

She'd packed her whole life into her little car, plus a cooler of frozen pierogies.

The old coffee can rode on the passenger seat, and her mother told her to spend it on books.

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