The Glass Armonica Blank

Liv Bowman pulled her pickup into the gravel lot behind the annex at 6:40, twenty minutes early like always. Sixty-three years old and she still showed up early to everything, a habit from thirty-one years on the department that nobody had managed to beat out of her. She sat in the truck a minute with the engine ticking, looking at the long low building with its windows lit up yellow against the dark of the terraced tea fields behind it.

"Well, here we go," she told the rearview mirror, because talking to yourself was another thing nobody had beaten out of her either.

The reunion was Hillary's idea, of course. Hillary Xavier had been hosting something every few months for the past three years, ever since she took the supervisor job, and tonight's excuse was the annex renovation finally being done. Liv had known the woman for thirty years, back to when they both ran hoses at barn fires, and Hillary did not take no for an answer. So here Liv was, in her good jeans and a blouse she'd bought at the outlet mall two seasons ago and worn maybe twice.

What she hadn't told Hillary, what she hadn't told anybody, was that she knew at least one other person would be in that room tonight. Bruno had let it slip at the hardware store last week, cheerful as anything, that his coworker Eli was doing the plaster repair on the annex and would be at the party. Eli Riggs. She had not heard that name spoken out loud in twenty years.

Twenty years ago she'd been forty-three and he'd been forty-two and they'd met at some craft fair booth in Hanoi that Bruno had dragged them both to, of all places, and within two weeks they'd been carrying on like a couple of fools. Hotel rooms, her apartment when her shift schedule lined up, the back seat of his old Chevy. It had been the most alive she'd felt in years, and then one Tuesday in October she'd ended it with a phone call that lasted about forty seconds and never told him why.

Why hadn't she told him? That was the question she'd been turning over for two decades like a stone in her pocket. Her mother had been sick that fall, the diagnosis fresh, and Liv had made some snap decision that she couldn't carry a man and a dying mother both, and then her mother had hung on another six years and by then it felt too stupid to bring up. So she'd just let it sit. Let him think whatever he thought. Probably that she was a flake, or cruel, or both, and honestly he wouldn't have been wrong on either count.

"Okay," she said, and got out of the truck.

Inside, the annex smelled like potluck, which meant somebody had brought the funeral potatoes again. The room was long and low-ceilinged, shelves of local pottery lining both walls, and there at the far end stood a glass cabinet with a cracked glass armonica blank displayed on a little stand like it was the crown jewels. Liv had no idea what a glass armonica even was until tonight, and she still only half knew. Some old musical instrument, Hillary had explained, the blank being the bowl part, and it had cracked during firing so the maker donated it to the township as a lesson in humility or something.

"Liv! You came!" Hillary came across the room with her arms out, sixty-nine years old and still hugging like she meant it. "You look wonderful. Is that blouse new?"

"Two seasons old, but thanks for lying."

"I never lie, I compliment strategically. Get a plate before Bruno finds the potatoes, he eats like a thresher."

Liv was loading up a paper plate when the alarm went off.

It was that horrible rising whoop that fire alarms do, the one she'd heard ten thousand times and never once gotten used to, and about thirty guests all started talking at once. Somebody near the kitchenette yelped. A woman in a green cardigan actually got under one of the pottery shelves, which was going to end badly if she kept that up.

"Hold on, hold on!" Hillary shouted over the din, looking genuinely rattled. "Nobody panic. There's no fire."

Liv set her plate down and walked to the kitchenette at an unhurried pace, because that was what you did, you walked, you didn't add to the stampede. The toaster was smoking lightly. Somebody, and she had her suspicions it was Hillary herself, had left the dial set to "bagel," which on that particular model meant roughly twice as long as a normal person would ever toast anything.

She popped the lever, pulled the smoking half-bagel out with a fork, and then went to the panel by the door. The system was a simple one, new install from the renovation, and she had the silence button figured out in about eight seconds.

"Everybody breathe," she called out. "It was a toaster set to bagel. Which, by the way, who did that? Because bagel setting is a trap. It's for people who want their bread to have a crust like a cinder block."

"That would be me," Hillary admitted, coming over with her cheeks pink. "I bought it last month and I never changed the factory setting."

"Well, the factory assumes you eat hockey pucks. There." The alarm shut off and the room let out a collective breath. "Panel's reset. You'll want the battery checked in that unit, it chirped twice before the whoop, but it'll hold for tonight. I'll look at it tomorrow if you want, no charge."

"You're a lifesaver. Literally, I suppose. Retired and you still walk toward the smoke." Hillary squeezed her arm. "Half my guests were about to end up in the parking lot."

Liv picked her plate back up and that was when she saw him.

Eli Riggs was standing over by the plaster work, of course, because of course he'd want to look at his own seams. He'd come straight from the shop, apparently, because his hands and forearms were dusted white with horsehair plaster, that fine pale powder that gets into everything, and there was a smear of it across one cheek like he'd pushed his hair back without thinking. He was sixty-two now and grayer than she'd have guessed, but he stood the same way, weight on one heel, hands loose, like a man perpetually about to pick something up.

He saw her looking. She saw him see her looking. And then neither of them did anything about it for what felt like sixty seconds, which was absurd, they were two adults with something like eighty combined years of just walking over and saying hello.

He got there first.

"Liv Bowman," he said, and wiped a hand on his pants leg before offering it, which did almost nothing about the plaster dust. "Hillary said you might come. I didn't believe her."

"Because I'm famously unreliable?"

"Because I figured you'd hear I was on the job and stay home." His voice was the same. That got her, more than anything else, that it was exactly the same.

She took his hand. His grip was careful, like he wasn't sure of his welcome. "Well. Here I am. You did the seams in the north wall? They look good. That corner had a sag in it since before I moved here."

"That corner had a sag because the original crew skimped on the horsehair. You can't skimp on the hair, it's the whole point of the stuff." He said it lightly, but his eyes were doing that thing they used to do, going over her face like he was reading it. "You look good, Liv. You look really good."

"Thanks. You've got plaster on your face."

"Do I?" He wiped at the wrong cheek.

"Other side. Honestly, you'd think after fifteen years of the stuff you'd quit wearing it home."

"Fifteen? I've been at the shop eighteen." He smiled a little. "Bruno tells everybody fifteen so it sounds like he trained me. So. Twenty years, huh?"

There it was, laid right out on the table between them with the potato salad. "Twenty years," she said. "Give or take."

"Give or take about four months. Not that I counted." He looked down at his dusted hands. "I heard about your mother, a few years back. I was sorry. She was a pistol at that craft fair in Hanoi, remember? Told Bruno his pottery looked like ashtrays made by a scared man?"

Liv laughed before she could stop herself, and it came out ragged. "I'd forgotten she said that. She wasn't wrong, though. Bruno's ashtrays were a cry for help."

"So why'd you never tell me?" he asked, quiet, right out with it. "That you were leaving. Why it ended. I got a phone call that was shorter than a smoke break and then nothing, for twenty years, and I've had a long time to wonder what I did."

And there it was, the question she'd been carrying in her pocket all this time, and she had no answer ready that didn't sound like an excuse, and Hillary was calling everyone to sit down for dinner, and the bagel was still sitting in the sink smelling faintly of burnt bread.

"Can we not do this in front of forty people and a cracked glass bowl?" she said.

"Not in front of the cracked glass bowl, sure," Eli said. "But we're doing it. Right?"

"Yes," Liv said. "We're doing it. Just give me a minute to eat Hillary's meatloaf and pretend this is a normal party."

"Take all the minutes you need. I'm not going anywhere. I live here."

"You live here in Moc Chau or here at the party?"

"Both, apparently. Bruno's driving."

Dinner was dinner. Hillary made a toast about the annex renovation and how long it took and how the north wall was finally straight, which got a polite round of applause and one loud whoop from Bruno, who had clearly been into the punch bowl since before the fire alarm. Liv sat at the far end of a folding table and watched Eli laugh at things Bruno said and thought about how strange it was that you could know a man's breathing pattern and still be surprised by his table manners.

Afterward, when the crowd had thinned out to the older folks and the ones too stubborn to leave a free buffet, Eli appeared at her elbow with two cups of coffee.

"Kitchenette's still standing," he said. "Barely. There's scorch marks on the toaster."

"I saw them. That thing's set to bagel, by the way. Factory setting. Hillary bought it last month and never touched the dial."

"Of course she didn't. She's been supervisor three years and she's never once touched a dial." He handed her a cup. "Come on. There's something I want to show you before everyone leaves and Hillary locks the cabinet."

"What cabinet?"

"You'll see."

He led her across the long low room, past the shelves of local pottery that Hillary had been collecting since before she took the job, to a glass case standing against the far wall. Inside it, lit by a little strip of LED that somebody had stuck up crooked, sat a glass armonica blank. A wide glass bowl, meant to spin on a rod and be played with wet fingers, and a crack ran clean across one side of it as a lightning bolt moves in slow motion.

"What is that?" Liv asked, though she'd been looking at it all night from across the room.

"Armonica blank. Benjamin Franklin's instrument, the glass one, you play it with your fingertips. My uncle tried to make one, back when I was a kid. It was his white whale." Eli stood there with his hands in his pockets, plaster dust still on his forearms like he'd given up on it. "He never got the annealing right. Cooling it too fast, that's all it takes. One crack and twenty hours of work is a yard ornament."

"Is that his?"

"That's his. Hillary bought it off my cousin at an estate sale two years ago, God love her, and put it in a case like it's the crown jewels. She thinks it's charming. It's a failure, is what it is. But it's a good-looking failure."

Liv looked at it. It was, actually. The glass had a greenish tint at the edges and the crack caught the light and threw a thin line of it across the inside of the bowl, like a hair of light. She reached out and put her fingers on the case, not the glass itself, the case, and felt something old move in her chest. Twenty years of it, sitting there like sediment.

"You okay?" Eli asked.

"Fine. It's just strange, seeing something broken displayed like that. Like it's proud of it."

"Maybe it is. Maybe that's the point." He looked at her instead of the bowl. "Maybe things that crack can still be worth looking at."

"Are we talking about the bowl?"

"Are we?"

Liv took her hand off the case. "Eli."

"Yeah."

"Walk me out. I need air and I need to not do this where Hillary can hear it through the walls."

They went out the side door, past the kitchenette and the guilty toaster, into the early dark. The terraced tea fields below the annex were green-gray in the evening light, row after row of them stepping down the hillside, and there was a path between the terraces that Liv remembered from other parties, other years, when she'd walked it alone with a beer and left early. Not tonight. Tonight she walked it next to a man she'd last spoken to on a forty-second phone call two decades ago.

The path was dirt and it held the day's warmth. Somewhere down the hill a dog was losing its mind about a motorcycle. Liv counted about six steps of silence before she broke.

"You went first at dinner, so I'll go first at nothing. I shouldn't have ended it that way. That's not an explanation, that's just the truth. A forty-second phone call. I've been ashamed of it for twenty years."

"Forty seconds. You counted too?"

"Forty-one, maybe. I hung up before you finished a sentence and then I didn't answer the next three calls and then I moved."

"You moved."

"You know I moved."

"I know the version Bruno heard, which is that you went back to your life and your life didn't have a slot for me. I built a lot of other versions on top of that, Liv. Most of them had me doing something unforgivable that I couldn't remember doing."

"You didn't do anything." She stopped walking. Below them the tea rows made pale lines in the dark. "That's the whole problem. You didn't do anything wrong and I still ended it, and I'm not going to explain why standing on a hillside, because the reason is stupid and sad and it's about my mother and a doctor's office and none of it was about you."

"Your mother was sick that fall."

She turned. "Who told you that?"

"Nobody. You got a call at the craft fair in Hanoi, the second day. You went white and you told me it was nothing and then you left the room. I put it together later, after the phone call. Took me about a decade to put it together, actually, which shows how good I am at puzzles."

Liv stood there with her coffee getting cold in her hand and felt twenty years of a story rearrange itself. "You figured it out and you never came looking?"

"I figured it out twelve years ago. By then you'd have been what, fifty-one? Fifty-two? And I thought, what do I say to her now? Sorry I figured out your grief? So I