A New Casting

Leigh backed the hatchback up to the bay door of the gallery workshop and killed the engine. The salt air came in right away, mixed with sawdust from somebody's earlier job. She sat for a second with her hands on the wheel.

"Okay," she told the steering wheel. "New town. New job. No more checking my phone every twenty minutes."

She was thirty-three, and she had taken this framing job in a coastal town two hundred miles from everything she knew, which was exactly the point. Her last relationship had ended two years ago, ugly and slow, and she had spent most of that time framing other people's art and not thinking about it. Mostly it worked.

The workshop was hers to use, the email had said. She popped the trunk and started hauling boxes. Miter saw. C-clamps. The good bone folder her ex had given her before things went bad, which she kept because it was a good bone folder and she wasn't going to let a person ruin a tool for her. Rolls of linen tape. A coffee can full of pencils.

The gallery itself sat out front, one big bright room with white walls and a concrete floor, and behind it this workshop with a workbench the length of a car. Somebody had left a radio on the shelf above the bench. It got one station, mostly static, occasionally something with a fiddle in it. Leigh plugged in the miter saw, tested the blade, and smiled at the sound.

"God, that's better than therapy," she said to nobody.

She spent the morning building stretching bars for a shipment of canvases that had not arrived yet, so really she spent the morning measuring boards and cutting them anyway, because it felt good to cut things on purpose. At some point she ate half a sandwich over the trash can so she wouldn't get crumbs on the bench. Small unglamorous details of a life starting over. She was fine with that.

The footsteps came around two. She heard them on the gravel outside and then in the doorway, and she turned around and there was a man standing there with a crate in his arms.

"You must be Leigh," he said. "I'm Vincent. I own the place. I would have been here this morning but the ferry was late."

"No problem. I got settled!" She wiped her hands on her apron and took the crate from him before he could insist, because that was the kind of thing she did. "What have we got?"

"Open it and see."

Vincent looked to be in his thirties, dark hair going gray at the temples, calm in a way that Leigh noticed right away because she was not calm. He had the kind of stillness she associated with people who had lived alone a long time. He watched her pry the crate lid with a flat bar, and out came a sculpture wrapped in moving blankets.

"Careful of the edges," he said. "It's cast from materials off the beach. Barnacle clusters, driftwood, a piece of old net. All of it cast in resin and then assembled."

Leigh got the blankets off and stopped talking. The piece was maybe four feet tall, a form like a standing figure but wrong in a way her eye kept trying to correct. The surfaces were covered in shell and worn wood grain, and the whole thing looked like the sea had spent fifty years making a person out of what it found.

"This is gorgeous," she said. "Who made it?"

"I did." He said it plainly, no false modesty, and she liked that too. "It's for next month's show. The theme is washing up. Things the tide leaves."

"It must weigh a ton."

"About that, yes. Which is why I need you. Installing it is a two-person job, and honestly, the framing work is only half of why I hired you."

Leigh looked up from the sculpture. "Oh yeah? What's the other half?"

Vincent put his hands in his pockets, and here was the thing she would remember later, that he hesitated. He was not a man who seemed to hesitate much.

"There's a companion piece I want to make," he said. "A cast of a person, standing, in the same materials. The figure and this one side by side. I need a model for the casting."

"And you're asking me."

"I'm asking if you've ever modeled. Have you?"

"Never. I'm the one with the saw, not the one in front of it." She laughed. "Why me? You could put an ad out. Art students do that stuff for pizza money."

"Art students would want money and a credit. I want somebody patient, somebody who can hold still, and somebody I don't have to explain my process to twice." He paused. "Also you have good shoulders. Sculptors notice shoulders. It's not flattery, it's anatomy."

Leigh felt her face do something and made it stop. It had been two years and a new town and she was not going to read anything into a compliment about shoulders. "What does the process involve?" she asked. "Because before I say anything, I have questions."

"Good. Ask all of them."

So she did, and she counted them off on her fingers like she was itemizing a framing job, because that was how she kept herself from getting flustered.

"One. Am I clothed for this? Two. When and where does it happen? Three. What do I get out of it besides watching you make a weird statue? Four. And this is the big one. Does saying yes to a casting mean saying yes to anything else? Because I just got here and I like this job and I am not interested in mixed signals."

Vincent listened to the whole list without interrupting, which already put him ahead of most people she had worked for.

"Clothed, yes. Form-fitting clothes, because the cast picks up everything, but clothed. It happens here in the workshop, in the daytime, with the bay door open if you want it open. You get paid for your hours, separately from your framing wage, and I'll put it in writing before we start, because money should be settled before anything begins, that's how my mother raised me. And no." He said the last one looking right at her. "Saying yes to the casting means yes to the casting. Nothing else is part of it. If either of us wants anything else ever, that's a separate conversation on a separate day, and no is a complete answer."

"Well," Leigh said. "That's the most reasonable offer I've heard all year, and this year I moved towns, so the bar was low."

"I also need to tell you the casting material is unusual. It's not plaster and it's not the fast stuff. It takes a while to set. You would stand still for maybe two hours, with breaks. Some people find it strange."

"How strange are we talking?"

"It feels like the tide coming in around you," Vincent said. "Slow and cool and then it holds you. Some people love it. One man hated it and we stopped after twenty minutes and that was fine too."

"Stopping is always fine," Leigh said. "That goes on the list too. If I say stop, we stop, no sulking."

"No sulking," he agreed. "I've been told I don't sulk at all."

She looked at the sculpture again. Up close she could see individual barnacle casts, each one different, and she thought about how much time it must have taken to gather all of it, walk after walk on cold sand. There was a story there. She was curious about stories. That had gotten her in trouble before and would probably get her in trouble again.

"One more question," she said. "Why a person at all? The theme is washing up. You could cast a boat."

"Because the thing I keep thinking about," Vincent said, "is what the tide would make if it decided to make a person. What it would keep. What it would wear down. I've been thinking about it for a long time." He said the last part quietly, like it had slipped out, and then he straightened up. "Anyway. That's the pitch. Think about it."

Leigh pulled her pencil out from behind her ear and tapped it against the workbench. Two hours of standing still in a bright workshop, listening to the fiddle station and getting paid, versus going back to her rental to eat dinner alone and rearrange her books again. It was not a hard math problem.

"Okay," she said. "I'll do it. Clothes on, daytime, bay door open, money in writing first, and stop means stop. And Vincent? If this turns out to be some weird art-world scheme, I still have a miter saw and I know how to use it."

"Noted," he said, and there was the smallest smile, the first one she had seen on him. "You and the saw are safe. When can you start?"

"Thursday morning works. I've got a delivery to frame for the front room Wednesday."

"Thursday morning, then. I'll have the materials mixed and ready." He picked up the empty crate lid and paused at the door. "Leigh. Thank you. Most people ask fewer questions and then regret it."

"I'm not most people," she said. "I make lists."

After he left she stood in the workshop a while, looking at the sea-worn figure. It really did look like it was waiting for company. She went back to her stretching bars, whistling along with the static.

The casting went well, mostly. Leigh stood on a chalk mark in the middle of the workshop floor while Vincent layered the material over her arms and shoulders in slow passes, and it did feel like the tide coming in, cool and heavy and then oddly comforting. The fiddle station played for a whole hour without turning to static, which she took as a good sign.

"Relax your shoulder," Vincent said, and put his hand on it to turn her a degree toward the light.

That was when it happened. His palm sat there for maybe four seconds and warmth went through her like a current, not painful, not even strange at first, just warm, and it kept going after he took his hand away. She felt it in her collarbone. She felt it in her teeth.

"Hold still a moment longer," he said. "The layer is setting."

She held still. She held very still, because the warmth was still spreading down her arm and she did not trust her voice yet. When he stepped back to mix more material she flexed her fingers at her side and the warmth flexed with them.

"Does the material do that?" she asked. "The warm thing."

Vincent looked at her a little too long before answering. "Some people report it. It conducts body heat oddly. That's all."

"That's all," Leigh repeated, and decided to let it go for the moment. She had a list. The list did not have a category for this yet.

They took a break at the halfway point and ate the sandwiches he had made, egg salad on good bread, wrapped in wax paper like it was 1950. She sat on a crate and he sat on the workbench and the bay door let in a clean cold wind.

"Fair warning," he said. "There's a