Chapter 10: Brown

By Wednesday there were forty videos.

By Friday there were four hundred.

Women held their LUMEN bottles up to bathroom lights all over the country.

It was brown in Ohio, brown in Texas, brown in a dorm room in Oregon.

One girl poured hers into a shot glass next to a cup of tea, and you couldn't tell which was which.

"Is it dangerous?" Carrie asked.

"No. It just doesn't work anymore. It turns into nothing and smells like a penny."

"Eighty-four dollars for a penny."

"Plus tax."

The shop's phone started ringing on Thursday.

Most of the calls were reporters.

A beauty blogger called from New York.

A man from a business channel said he'd only need five minutes of my time.

Carrie took every call in the office with her feet on the desk.

"Ashbaugh Glass, we make glass," she said. "No, she doesn't. No, she won't. Thank you, have a blessed day."

Then she'd hang up and swear at the phone, inventively, for one full minute.

"You could say something," Matt said on Friday.

We were in the back room.

I was writing up batch forty in the third black notebook.

"I could," I said.

"One sentence. You were right. You said it was the wrong bottle in front of all those cameras."

"And then everybody hears the bitter ex-wife."

"You're not bitter."

"They'll say it anyway."

He leaned on the doorframe.

"So you just let them hang."

"I let the bottles talk," I said. "They're doing fine."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he went back to the furnace.

He blew three Glasshouse bottles in a row without a single flaw, faster than I'd ever seen him work.

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