The Roughing Curve

Otis Nichols was twenty-nine years old and he had driven five hours to stand in front of a smoking hut in the middle of nowhere, Ontario. The GPS said he had arrived. The GPS was a liar, but only a little. There it was, the kiln hut, squatting at the end of a gravel lane outside Magnetawan like something the forest had coughed up.

His wife had died two years ago. He had not been on a first date since before he met his wife. This was, technically, his first date in ten years, and he was already sweating through his good shirt.

The hut smelled like burnt clay and, weirdly, burnt chocolate. He would find out later that both smells came from the same chimney. For now he just pulled the door open and stepped inside.

Mollie Seuss was wrestling a glass blank the size of a car tire. She was twenty-seven, five foot four, and losing. The blank sat on a low bench and she had her arms wrapped around it, boots braced, face going red.

"Hang on," she grunted, without looking up. "I almost have it."

"You almost have it where?"

"Off the bench. Don't just stand there. Grab the other side."

He grabbed the other side. The thing weighed as much as a stove. Together they got it down to the floor, and Otis straightened up, proud of himself, took one step back, and put his heel into a stack of curved glass discs that had been sitting there since roughly the Nixon era.

The stack went over like dominos. Roughing curves, Mollie called them later. Right now they were just a waterfall of breaking glass and Otis standing in the middle of it with his arms out.

The noise was unbelievable. It went on and on. When it finally stopped, the hut was quiet except for the kiln ticking to itself in the corner, and Otis was standing in a minefield of glass shards.

"Well," he said.

Mollie had both hands over her mouth. He could see her shoulders shaking.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I'll pay for those. I'll pay for all of it, I swear, I'm good for it."

And that set her off. She sat down on the bench and laughed until she wheezed. It was a real laugh, an ugly laugh, the kind you can't fake, and Otis found he didn't mind being the cause of it.

"Pay for them?" she managed. "Otis. The guy who owned this place went bankrupt in March. The bank owns these. The bank does not know these exist. I'm getting paid by the hour to haul them out and I hate every one of them. You just did ten minutes of my job."

"Oh," he said. "Okay. Good."

"Good! He says good." She wiped her eyes. "God. You should see your face. You came in like a golden retriever and left a trail of destruction behind you."

"I was trying to help."

"You were. That's the sad part." She patted the bench next to her. "Sit down before you break something else. Sit on the bench. The bench is safe. Probably."

He sat. Up close she smelled like woodsmoke and, faintly, carob, which he learned was her actual job. Carob pod milling. The glass hauling was a side gig. He had pictured an office. He had pictured a coffee shop like normal people used. Instead she had driven him out to a dead lens grinder's kiln hut because, she'd said on the phone, it was the only place she could smoke indoors and her landlord had a nose like a bloodhound.

"So this is the tour," she said, waving an arm. "Cot. Desk. Kiln that should not legally still be running. Floor full of glass that only exists because a man in this town owed money to everyone in it. That's the whole museum."

"It's great," said Otis, and he mostly meant it. It was terrible and it was hers and she had picked it, which told him something about her that five hours of texting hadn't.

"There's one more exhibit." She scooted over and yanked open the desk drawer. Out came a wooden stick about the length of a pencil, dark red, with a limp black string sticking out one end. "Behold. Wax seal stick. Broken wick. The old man sealed every box with these. This is the last one and I refuse to throw it out until it works one more time, out of respect."

"That's a candle."

"It's a seal stick."

"It's a candle with delusions."

"It has a wick. See? Wick." She held it up. "It just needs a little encouragement."

"Give it here." Otis took it, because this was the sort of thing he was actually good at. He was a developer. He fixed small broken things for a living and then billed people. He fished a lighter out of his jacket and thumbed it.

The wick would not light. It was short, stiff, and bent sideways into the wax. He scraped at it with his thumbnail. He tilted the stick. He held the flame right down against the stub of it, at an angle he was pretty sure no candle had ever been lit at.

"Careful," said Mollie.

"I got it. I got it. See, it's catching, it's just catching sideways, the flame goes down the side of the stick and onto the desk, and from the desk onto that pile of packing straw, and from the straw onto everything else in the entire building."

That was not what he meant to say. It was just what came out, in order, in real time, as each stage happened. By "everything else" Mollie was already moving. There was a pile of straw by the wall where the old man had packed his blanks for shipping, thirty years of it, dry as a haystack in August, and it went up with a whoosh that Otis felt in his teeth.

"Fire," he said, helpfully.

"YES, fire!" Mollie snatched her jacket off the hook and beat the straw with it. The flames were maybe two feet high and very committed. She hit them again. The jacket smoked. The flames got smaller, then angrier, then smaller again, and then they were out, and there was a black wet-smelling patch on the floor and a woman standing over it breathing hard.

The hut was quiet again. The kiln ticked.

"So," said Mollie, turning around. She was holding her ruined jacket like it was a dead animal. "Do you always make this much of a mess on a first date, or am I special?"

"I think you're special."

"Because the glass was funny. The glass was genuinely funny. But I liked that jacket."

"I'll buy you a jacket. A whole jacket. Several jackets." He sat there with the dead seal stick still in his hand, which somehow made everything worse, like he'd been holding the murder weapon the whole time. "I'll buy you the jacket, no strings, tonight, there's a Canadian Tire in Sundridge, I looked it up on the drive."

She put the jacket down. She sat next to him on the bench. And she looked at him with an expression he couldn't read at first, and then could. It was the look of a woman doing math.

"Okay, here's what I don't get," she said. "You're not stupid. Five hours in a car with you on the phone, you're not stupid, you're actually kind of sharp. So how does a not-stupid man light a seal stick sideways over a straw pile on a first date with a woman he drove five hours to see?"

"Because I wanted it to go well."

"So do everything carefully and slowly."

"Because I wanted to look like I knew what I was doing." And there it was, out of his mouth before he could