Page 7 of Silver-Tongued Devil
“Oh.” She swallowed. “Still?”
“Every damn day. I feel the urge, and I don’t do it. Here’s another way to look at it. Find somebody who likes your wild side. Somebody who wants a wild child. Why should you give up the best part of you, the free part? For who? For a bully like Jerry Richards, who pushes his wife around and probably took the belt to his kids? For that lawyer you were going out with? Screw him. Screw ’em all if they don’t like it. Go find yourself somebody who wants to see that part of you. Go be Dakota someplace besides your glass.”
“I can’t afford even to be Dakota in my glass. You know that. That isn’t what the people want.”
“Then find different people.”
They finished dinner, and Dakota bit her tongue not to say anything at the way Russ hauled himself out of his chair and hobbled into the living room to watch TV, Bella shadowing him every step of the way. She tossed the Kong for the dog until Bella was—well, not satisfied, but panting—then washed the dishes, watched half an hour of a Mariners game with Russ to be companionable, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and headed to bed.
All right, to her workroom, but only because she had to look. She shoved her feet into flip-flops, stepped over the baby gate that kept Bella’s paws safe from glass slivers, and entered her domain.
Twelve feet by fourteen, order in every inch of it, and passion in every breath she took here. This was where she came to life. With her glass.
Her new storage unit, a labyrinth of zigzagging supply cubbies as complex and pleasing to the eye as an Escher print, was in the garage waiting to make it even neater. Russell’s hand was everywhere, from the frames setting off her most inspired pieces to the prosaic dividers along the wall that separated the precious panels of stained glass. Panels she bought on the occasional trek to Seattle, spending far too much money every time for a woman who was slowly, painstakingly paying down her stepfather’s precariously balanced mortgage debt. But she had to have the glass or she couldn’t breathe. And she always made back the cost of her materials, and more, too. Eventually.
She walked down the row of racks, arranged along the spectrum, ending up as always at the golds and, farther along, the roses and reds. The most expensive colors—and the most beautiful, especially when they swirled and bubbled with hue and texture. She crouched before her pink rack and carefully shifted pieces.
There. That was it. The palest pink, brushed with darker color. The outer shell of the conch that would reveal its heart of deep rose starting on Saturday. She had the vision in her mind, and she had to do it. Shehadto.
Customers sometimes asked to see her sketches, occasionally even for an autographed version, and looked skeptical when she tried to explain that she didn’t sketch. Shesaw.The design happened only when she was ready to create, when she laid out the squares of glass on her work table and drew the pattern. Customers couldn’t understand, because she couldn’t explain. How could you describe the anxious minutes and hours beforehand, when you found yourself delaying the start because you feared not being able to transform the perfect vision in your head into the fragile medium of glass, always only one clumsy misstep away from not reaching your ideal? And how could you possibly explain the relief, the freedom of actually starting, of taking that leap no matter what?
They were her dream babies, so nebulous before she made them real with her tools, her patience, and the magic of the soldering iron so they could glow against the light. So they could come to life. Before she let them go to somebody who, she hoped, would love them half as much as she did.
Her fingers itched to create her piece now.Rightnow. But if she started, she’d be here all night. She knew herself. Her body ached with the fatigue of a day of physical labor, capped off by her swim and her ride home, and she had another day just like it tomorrow. She had responsibilities to more than herself, and always—always—to more than her vision.
There was more than one kind of love. Creation was one thing. People were another.
Saturday,she promised the glass before stepping over the gate again, kicking off her flip-flops, and heading to bed. This one project for love, and then the next in the line of simple, nonthreatening flowers and birds, of fan lights and cattail-bedecked sidelights that the public expected. The ones rich owners would snap up to adorn the front entries of their lakeside “cabins.” The ones that paid for the most expansive panels of glass and let her excuse all the time and money she spent here.
But when she put her head on the pillow and closed her eyes, she saw a sliver of unstained background crackling with texture, and then a shell, so close-up you were almost dreaming it, its swirls and bands and spikes made up of pale and darker pinks… and that deep, secret swell of rose leading to the mysterious, pulsing life within. She saw a conch.
Blake climbed down from the Explorer on Friday morning, ignoring the protest from his knee, and headed into Wild Horse Bait & Tackle. He’d spent most of the past couple days flying to various meetings for Sundays, his sports bar/restaurant chain—also known as “what he was supposed to be doing”—and he’d be in more meetings today for the stretch-goal project that had had him waking up at night wondering what the hell he’d been thinking. Today was lunch with the mayor and city council to talk about the plans for the resort’s grand opening on the Fourth of July. If he was going to have to be charming again, he needed something to look forward to afterwards. A willing woman in his hot tub would do it, but he was working toward a goal here that took his wild side off the table. That pretty much left fishing.
An old-fashioned bell on the door chimed out a welcome when he walked into a space that was a bona fide throwback. Linoleum on the floor, a long wooden counter at the front, a whole wonderful section devoted to fly-tying, and what looked like a surprisingly good equipment selection.
A couple guys conferred over tackle, both outfitted by L.L. Bean and showing “tourist” like it was written on their backs. The older man behind the counter, though, had been cut from different cloth. He’d been talking to a man of about his age in a plaid shirt and paint-splattered white cap, accompanied by a medium-sized brown dog that sat at his feet, ears pricked like it was taking in every word.
Both men shut up at Blake’s entrance and looked him over. Probably the clothes, since he’d flown straight in from a franchisee get-together in Seattle. He’d left the suit coat in the truck after getting off the jet, but he was still a little bit designer for Wild Horse. He’d even shaved this morning.
“Hey,” he said, and both men nodded. The dog just looked interested.
“Help you?” the man behind the counter asked.
“Sure hope so. I’m looking for whatever I’ll need to go after salmon this weekend.”
The two men looked at each other, and then the owner—he had to be the owner—scratched the back of his head and said, “Well, now, you can goafter’em all right. Whether youget’em, though…”
“Yeah,” Blake said. “That would be the idea.”
“What kind of a boat you running?”
“Hatteras GT54.”
He’d swear that the old-fashioned ceiling fan overhead stopped moving, such was the stillness in the air. “You’d be Blake Orbison, then,” the owner said. Everybody looked tense. Including, Blake could swear, the dog.
“I would be,” Blake said.
“I’ve seen that rig,” the owner said. “Now, Hatteras makes a mighty fine boat, don’t get me wrong, and I can’t say I wouldn’t pay cash money just to take one out and put her through her paces. But, all due respect—it takes more than a boat, and that thing’s so new, she practically still has the stickers on. City guys—I usually suggest they go out with a guide, learn the lake before they go wild.”
