The Glass Gift

I moved into the new place on a Tuesday in October, and by Friday the living room was still a maze of boxes. I'm fifty-three years old, and I have moved eleven times in my adult life, and every single time I swear it's the last. The boxes breed. I swear they breed overnight in the dark.

The worst of it was the sofa. God, the sofa. My ex-husband bought it back when we were both thirty-eight, some solid oak monstrosity with a hide-a-bed inside it that weighs as much as a small car. Two of my nephews' friends had carried it up stairs in the old place, but nobody I knew now had the back for it.

Kenji did, apparently. He helped me move it in on Tuesday, no charge. I still don't know why I said yes when he offered, except that I was standing in the parking lot with my arms full of lampshades and he just took one end of the thing like it was a card table. He runs a glassblowing studio over on Fifth, small place, and I know him from the storage unit auctions. We've been bidding against each other for two years. He got the unit with the vintage soda machines. I got the one with the crates of old magazines and, as it turned out, some other stuff I'm getting to.

So I owed him. I hate owing. My mother was the same way, God rest her, she'd chase you down the driveway with a casserole if you so much as carried her groceries. So I called him Saturday morning and told him to come by and collect his thanks, and I spent an hour trying to make the living room look like a person lived there instead of a warehouse.

He knocked at four. I heard his truck before I heard him, that rattling diesel idle, and then three knocks, polite, right in the middle of the door.

"It's open," I called. "Don't step on the bubble wrap, it's load bearing."

He came in laughing and I noticed he'd brought flowers, which threw me. Carnations, orange ones, banded together with a rubber band from the newspaper.

"You said you were repaying me," he said, handing them over. "Flowers seemed backwards."

"Shut up and sit down. The only clear chair is that one by the window, the rest are holding boxes."

He sat. He's forty-eight, Kenji, keeps his hair short and his forearms bare, always in that canvas shop apron even when he's not in the shop. He looked around the room like he was reading a room's diary.

"So this is the famous thanks," he said. "I've been wondering all week. You sounded weird on the phone."

"I did not sound weird."

"You sounded like you were planning something. You get a little lawyer voice."

I did have a plan, and it was sitting in a shoebox in my bedroom, and I had gone back and forth about it maybe forty times that week. Here's where it came from. The storage unit I won in the spring, the one with the magazines, also had a locked wooden case from an estate. Turns out the guy who owned the unit had bought out the inventory of a glass studio that closed down, whole shelves of it, and never did a thing with it. I'd been selling pieces online a few at a time. Most of it was vases and paperweights. Some of it was not vases.

I went and got the shoebox. My hands were actually sweating, which at my age is embarrassing and funny at the same time. I sat on the arm of the clear chair across from him and put the box on my knees.

"Okay. So. Part of your thanks." I pushed it at him. "It's from that studio lot I won. Don't make a face, just open it."

He unwrapped it slow, the way he does everything, tissue paper crinkling, and then he went very still. What came out of the box was a handblown glass piece about eight inches long, a deep swirled blue with a curve to it, smooth as river stone. He turned it over twice.

"Laurie," he said. "This is a dildo."

"It is."

"You're giving me a dildo."

"You're a glassblower! It's a professional courtesy. Look at the work on it, Kenji, the swirl doesn't have one bubble in it. Whoever made that knew what they were doing."

He held it up to the window light and I watched his whole expression change, the way it does when he forgets to be rude. The blue caught the sun and threw a little curved shadow on the wall.

"This is decent work," he admitted. "The base is ground flat, see, so it stands. Where's the rest of the stash?"

"Boxes. There's maybe thirty pieces. I've been selling the ordinary ones. These I kept separate." I took a breath. "Because I use that one."

Silence. He looked at me. I looked at the carnations, which were lying on a box labeled KITCHEN, MISC, which is a lie, nothing in that box is kitchen.

"You use it," he said.

"Regularly. Since June. It's the best thing I've ever owned and I'm giving it to you because you hauled my sofa up fourteen steps and never once said a word about my ex, who I was still angry at, and who used to complain about that sofa constantly, which is a whole other story."

"June," he repeated, like that was the part to hold onto. "You said on the phone you figured out something about it. That's what the weird lawyer voice was about."

"You asked how I knew it was good. I said I'd tell you in person." I could feel my face going warm. Here is the part I rehearsed and here is the part I am apparently just saying now, with no rehearsal. "I found a technique with it. The curve, and the weight of the glass, and if you warm it first under water. It took me a few weeks but I worked out a way of using it that is, honestly, Kenji, it has ruined me for anything else. I lie there and think, well, this is it now, this is my life, I'm fifty-three and I've peaked in my own bedroom with a dead man's glass."

He laughed, a real one, head back. Then he got quiet and turned the thing over in his big