Fire Pit Glass

The generator hummed behind me. I had my khim out on the sidecar bench, all forty-two strings laid bare under the clip light. Tuning hammer in my hand. Beer on the stump beside me, warm already. Kampur nights do that.

It was a Thursday. I remember because the wedding gig was Saturday and I was behind.

I'm Christa. Fifty-two years old, and I've been doing flowers and music for weddings here for eleven years. The sidecar lot is my second home. Twelve old tuk-tuk sidecars, all repurposed, arranged in a circle around the fire pit. Mine has a workbench and a cushion. A few of us string low lights across ours when we work at night. It's not fancy. It's mine.

I was halfway through the second course of strings when a headlamp beam swept across the lot. Straight into my eyes.

"Hey!" I put my hand up. "Watch the light."

"Oh. Sorry. Sorry!" The beam swung down to the gravel. A man stood there in a hiking shirt, sweat through the shoulders, looking around like he'd wandered into someone's living room. "I think I took a wrong turn back at the river path."

"You took about four wrong turns." I set the hammer down. "This is private. Mostly. Sit down, you look like you're about to fall over."

He hesitated. Then he came over to the fire pit and dropped onto the stump across from me. Early forties, maybe. Fit in that way men get when they walk everywhere and eat whatever's in front of them.

"Jay," he said. "Jay Meeker."

"Christa. You want a warm beer? That's all I have."

"I want a warm beer."

I handed him mine and cracked another from the cooler. He drank half of it in one go.

"So what's your wrong turn about?" I asked. "You're not a tourist. Tourists carry maps and look thrilled to be lost."

"I'm working." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I record monitor bezel gap measurements."

I waited. He didn't elaborate.

"That's a job?"

"Yes!"

"Bezels. On monitors."

"The gap between the glass and the frame. Somebody has to travel to assembly plants and record the gaps. For compliance. I'm here for the plant outside town."

I laughed before I could stop myself. He grinned.

"Everybody laughs."

"No, it's charming. It's the most charming job I've ever heard. You flew across an ocean to measure a gap." I shook my head. "How specific is that even. What's the tolerance, like a hair?"

"Point-one-five millimeters. Some clients want tighter."

"Oh my god," I laughed again, harder. He laughed with me. Warm beer, warm fire, this poor man with his millimeters.

Then he nodded at the khim. "What's the instrument?"

"A khim. It's a hammered dulcimer, Cambodian. I play weddings."

"For flowers and music?"

"Flowers and music, yes. Both. People around here get married and they call me and I show up with a van full of orchids and this thing."

"That's a good life."

"It is a good life." I looked at him a second longer than I meant to. He had kind eyes. Tired, but kind. "So how long are you stuck here measuring gaps?"

"Six days. Then Phnom Penh, then home."

"Home is?"

"Portland."

"Huh. I lived in Portland for three years. Long time ago now."

"Small world."

"Big world, small overlaps." I stood and stretched my back. It cracked in two places. He pretended not to notice, which I appreciated.

Then I got my idea.

"Wait here."

I went to my sidecar and dug out the wooden case from under the bench. Inside, packed in straw, were my glass pieces. I make them at a friend's studio on slow weeks. Hand-blown spheres, seven of them, translucent, each one a step in a sunset. Deep violet at one end, pale gold at the other. I use them for nothing practical. I just like them.

I set the case on the bench by the fire and turned it toward him.

"Game," I said.

"Okay."

"These are in a jumble. They go in sunset order. Violet through pale gold, end to end on this rail." I laid the brass rail across two firepit stones. "The rule is you can't touch them. Not one. Arrange them by looking, by judging, however you do it. If you get the order perfect, you win."

"Win what?"

"Dinner. I'll cook you dinner tomorrow. Real dinner, not warm beer."

"And if I lose?"

"You carry my instrument van up the hill Saturday. The wedding hill. It's a bad hill."

He leaned over the case. Seven spheres, me sized, jumbled on purpose. He studied them for a while. Long while. Then he picked one up and I smacked his knuckle with the tuning hammer. Lightly. Mostly lightly.

"Ow. No touching?"

"No touching. Read the rule."

He sat back and stared at the set. This was honest. The middle colors are almost identical, that rose and that salmon. Even I squint at those two.

"You know," he said slowly, "this is actually a measurement problem."

"Is it."

"Everything's a measurement problem. But I don't have a gauge here. What I'd need is..."

He trailed off. He looked at the spheres. Then at the khim. Then at me.

"What if you hummed?"

"What?"

"A note. A single sustained note. If the glass walls are different thicknesses, they'll resonate differently. The right spheres will sing back loudest at the frequencies near their own pitch. Thinner glass, higher wall frequency. If your gradient goes thick to thin, I can sort them by which ones answer."

I blinked at him.

"That's the craziest thing I've ever heard," I said. "Do it."

I stood beside the khim. Struck a low note and hummed up from it, slow, steady, up through the scale. The fire cracked. The spheres sat in their case doing nothing.

Then one of them, the deep violet one, shivered against the straw with a faint ring.

"There," Jay said softly. "Again. Higher."

I hummed higher. The violet went quiet. Two others answered this time, faint, wavering. He marked their positions with a stick in the dirt. I hummed up the whole range, note by note, and he listened as a man listens to a sick engine, head tilted, eyes shut half the time. Each sphere got its rank. Then he called them out one at a time, without touching a single one, and I laid them on the rail where he pointed.

Violet. Indigo. Rose. Salmon. Amber. Apricot. Pale gold.

Perfect sunset. I checked it twice. It was right.

"You win," I said. "Dinner tomorrow."

He grinned like he'd just closed a big account. "Best use of my job ever. First time bezel physics got me anything but a corporate email."

"You hum like you've done this before."

"Church choir, age..." He stopped himself. "Long time ago. I'm forty-three, by the way. I figure if we're betting dinners, you should know I'm forty-three."

"Christa. Fifty-two." I raised my beer to him. "And I was going to ask anyway, because I also tune instruments for strangers, and I don't do that blind."

"Fair." He clinked his warm bottle against mine. "So. That khim. Those strings looked tense when I came in. The metaphor writes itself, but I'll behave."

I laughed. God help me, I laughed.

"You play?" I asked.

"Guitar. Badly. Ten years out of practice. There's a rental shop in town that had one in the window, I almost went in today."

"Almost?" I set down my beer. "Go in tomorrow. Buy it. Then come back here tomorrow night, after my dinner, and I'll tune it for you myself. I'm good. I'll make that cheap guitar sound like it costs something."

"You'd do that?"

"I'd do that."

He looked at the fire. Then at me, straight on, no shyness in it.

"Then I'll be here," he said. "Tomorrow. And probably the night after too, if the dinner's good."

"Dinner will be good."

The fire popped. Somewhere across the river, a dog started up and quit again. I picked my tuning hammer back up and looked at the khim, and looked at him sitting there on my stump in my lot, four wrong turns deep, and thought about the second course of strings still waiting.

"Make yourself useful," I said. "Hold this string while I tension it. If you're going to hang around a musician, you work."

He moved around the fire without a word and sat on the bench beside me. His shoulder near mine. The generator hummed. He held the string exactly how I told him to.

He held that string like it owed him money. Steady hands. Good hands.

"Nobody's ever watched me do that before," he said, quiet. "The humming thing. I never told anyone about it. Not even..." He trailed off.

"Not even who?"

"Not even anyone. Ever."

I set the hammer down. Looked at him.

"I haven't shown those pieces to anyone in years," I said. "Nobody comes to the lot at night. Nobody sees the spheres come out of the case."

The air did something then. Shifted. I don't know how else to say it. The fire was the same fire. The generator was the same generator. But the space between his shoulder and mine got smaller and warmer without either of us moving.

I touched his wrist. Just that. Two fingers on the inside of it, where the skin is thin.

"Your pulse is fast," I said.

"Is it."

"Very."

"I wonder why."

I left my hand where it was. He didn't pull away. He didn't move at all, which told me more than moving would have.

"Can I ask you a blunt question?" I said.

"You've been blunt all night."

"Are you single?"

"Yes." No pause on that one. "Four years single. Last relationship ended when I was thirty-nine. It just... ran out of gas. Nobody's fault. Are you?"

"Five years. My last one ended nice, if you can believe it. We just wanted different things. We still send each other recipes."

"That's the healthiest thing I've ever heard."