Page 10 of Dropping the Ball

This had been plenty of room when I started upcycling furniture during college, and by the time I graduated four years ago, I was selling things as fast as I could make them. But I could only make things when I had salvage to work with, so I’d put out the word to my boys, and they started bringing me so much scrap that I had to put up sheds in the backyard to hold it.

The garage itself is the workshop. It always smells like woodworking chemicals and sawdust in here, and if I had to describe the scent of happiness, that’s it. The faint acrid odor of the paint stripper might make other people’s noses wrinkle, but for me, it triggers something in my body that tells it to relax.

I set the folder on the table where I do most of my mosaic work and pull out the pictures. They’re from an elderly client, Mrs. Davenport, who prefers giving me reference photos theold-fashioned way—neatly clipped from magazines at the library when the librarians aren’t watching. I’d suggested she could tell me the magazine issue and I could look it up online, no clipping required. She’d reassured me that she only chose issues that were about to expire anyway.

Never mind that she lives in a mansion her departed husband bought forty years ago. Never mind that she has a full-time gardener who also serves as her handyman and the driver of her beautiful old Mercedes. Never mind that she’s commissioned me to make a mosaic water feature for her backyard that will cost her five thousand dollars. Mrs. Davenport still only buys groceries on double-coupon day, stores all her leftovers in old Country Crock tubs, and steals her expensive design ideas from magazines at the public library.

The door leading from the house opens.

“Hey, Ma,” I say as she stands on the threshold. She’s wearing the same sweatpants and Pepsi T-shirt she had on yesterday. “You good?”

Her gaze skitters around the garage before landing on me, and I stifle a sigh. She’ll say she’s fine, but it’s not one of her good days.

“Fine, I’m fine.” Her tone is irritated, like I’m prying. “It’s a mess in here.”

It’s not. Full of stuff, yes. But everything has its place. Even things that might look like junk won’t be for long. But this is a losing argument, and it’s not why she wandered out here.

“Do you need help with something?” I ask.

“No.” It’s sharp. “Can’t I come out here to see you?”

“Of course.” I proceed carefully here, because she will look for every reason to turn this into a fight. “How are your orders going?”

“Why? You want to tell me how much more stuff you’re selling?”

“Nah, I’ll never get as many orders as you do.” She sells wooden peg dolls online, customized for different families or teams. In early fall, she switches to doing nativity characters only, and she’s four times busier than the rest of the year.

“Don’t have a boss, don’t need a boss.” She jabs her thumb at her chest. “I’m an untrained genius. I built a business without all the extra college and training. If I’d gone to college like you,Iwould be the one making all the money. Don’t forget that. One day, the right set of eyes will see my work, and then you’ll see that I’m the real deal.”

“I know you’re the real deal—” I say but she steps back into the house, shutting the door harder than she needs to.

I rub my head, feeling a tension headache starting. I’ve noticed a couple of other signs that her meds might need adjusting, but a call to Dr. Karumbaya can probably wait until Monday morning.

I pull my phone from my pocket and turn the ringer on before I set it on the workbench. I’ll be tiling the basin of Mrs. Davenport’s water feature, and it’s the kind of work that will absorb me as I ponder the placement of each mosaic piece, making minute tweaks. I doubt Mom will leave the house today, but if she does, I don’t want to miss a call from a neighbor letting me know.

The broken pieces of glass from a corporate office call to me, begging to be rearranged from senseless shards into an Impressionist-style basin for the water to splash into before it’s reclaimed and sent back through the pump to spill over again. And again.

A thump reverberates from inside the house, probably a chair getting knocked over. Again.

And again.

Freshman Year

In which Micah does not make it better . . .

On Monday, no onetalks to me.Yes.

Drake seems to have lost interest in his game over the weekend. With no one to impress, Micah leaves me alone too.

It already means the second week of school is starting better, and it only improves when the morning announcements advise that the school media center is now open. They say “media center,” other students say “library,” and I say “place to eat lunch without being bothered.”

Megan and Lulu make me eat lunch with them at least once a week, but we compromise by eating out on the grounds beneath a cedar tree. The other days, I have my own lunch retreat in the library to study and reset. Every now and then, other students will come in, but always solo, always finding their way to their own table/life preserver/Formica oasis.

It’s a perfect plan for two whole weeks—until a new scandal breaks about my dad, accusing him and the company of stealing wages. Big news outlets follow the story, but it’s a scroll-way-down type thing. Not in Austin. Here it’s a front-page headline and top of the evening news. There is no scandal tastier than ahomegrown scandal, so they make sure to air it on Monday and flog it for the rest of the week. Austin is a very anti-capitalist city for a town that runs on capital. Hypocrites.

The coverage is more slanted than the angles we’ve been solving for in geometry all week. Dad came home the day the story broke and told us that it was a major distortion of the facts and explained what really happened.

Madison turned it into an argument, of course, using sound bites from the news to convict him. I tuned her out because she’s jumping to the conclusions the media wants her to draw, but she should know better.

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