Harder (Caroline & West #2)(61)

“Hey, West,” he says.

“Hey, Professor Collins.”

“Laurie.”

I can’t call him Laurie to his face. It’s not only because he’s a professor—it’s also because he’s my landlord and he’s got a Wikipedia page that calls him an internationally acclaimed multimedia three-dimensional artist.

“What is that thing?” I ask.

“Sandblaster.”

“What are you blasting?”

“Glass.”

He withdraws his arms, unscrews the wing nuts on either side of the window he was looking through, and extracts a beige shape.

“That’s … what is that?”

“It’s a hammer.”

“A glass hammer.” It’s almost entirely wrapped in masking tape, like a hammer mummy with just the round surface you hit with and the bottom of the handle showing. “What for?”

“It’s a series. Tools. This one’s just a study—I have a commission to do a big one. But the logistics are a pain in the ass.”

He takes his mummy-hammer inside the barn. I hear water running. I edge closer to the sandblaster, curious what it looks like inside.

There’s a brass-colored nozzle attached to a hose laying on top of an open plastic grid. The nozzle must shoot sand at the glass, and then the sand falls off and through the grid to come out the hole in the bottom.

Neat.

Laurie comes back out drying his glass hammer with a paper towel, a roll of masking tape dangling from his fingers. Unwrapped, the hammer is aqua blue, shining, and I want to touch it. I want to wrap my fingers around the handle and pound something with it—which is all wrong, because it would shatter if I did that, and I’d be f*cking disappointed.

It reminds me of Studio Art last week, how Rikki was debating with Raffe about what art is. Raffe said art has no purpose—that if something has a purpose, it’s not art. And Rikki said the opposite. That the purpose of art is to make you feel or think, and a lot of the time both.

Art provokes a response, she told us. Be provocative.

“You want to try the sandblaster?” Laurie asks.

“Sure.”

“Give me a minute to mask it again.” He wraps tape over the polished surface of the hammer, leaving one strip around the handle bare. “So what we’re doing is blasting off the polish to give it a frosty surface.” The hammer is heavy when he hands it over. I touch the strip, cool glass beneath my fingertip.

“Put it inside there,” he says. “Careful with it, though—I had that thing in the kiln more than a week.”

“Just to cast it?”

“Yep. You have to bring the temperature up slowly, hold it there, bring it back down just as slow. Otherwise it’ll crack, explode, God only knows. Glass is fussy. Took me eleven tries to get that hammer.”

Eleven tries. A week in the kiln for each one. This thing is worth a f*cking fortune in fuel and labor.

I place it on the grating carefully, close the observation window, and push my hands into the gloves. They’re bulky. The nozzle is hard to hold on to. When I first pull the trigger, the hammer jumps from the compressed hit of air, and I almost drop it.

“Good,” Laurie says. “Just do that back and forth evenly.”

“For how long?”

“Until it’s done.”

It’s meticulous work, satisfying. After I get the hang of it, I relax enough to say, “I wanted to thank you for watching Frankie last night.”

“No thanks necessary. It was fun.”

“She behaved herself, I hope?”

“Always,” he says. “And I was happy to see your truck wasn’t out here when I went to bed.”

A minute passes. Laurie comments, “Rikki says you’re doing well in Studio Art.”

“I’m spending three times as long on that class as everything else, just praying to get out of there with a B.”

“She says you have an interesting mind.”

“I have the least interesting mind in there.”

“What makes you say that?”

I tilt my head toward the sandblaster. “This kind of stuff is easy for me. Machines, problems, figuring out one step after the next. But Rikki wants me to be creative, and I’m not.”

Laurie seems to accept this. He’s quiet for a while. Then he asks, “You ever use a wheel to grind glass?”

“No.”

“Want to try?”

I do.

I want to see the kiln, too, and find out what it costs to run it for a week. Ask what happens when you scale it up—what kind of logistics problems does he mean? How’s he going to cast a giant hammer? Can he make it in pieces?

“I’d better get back to my reading,” I say.

I draw my hands out of the box and turn the art back over to the artist.

He takes the hammer and holds it lightly with his fingertips, flipping it one way and the other.

“How’s the factory?” he asks.

“I’m giving notice. I need to find something where I’ll be home more with Frankie.”

“You want to work for me?” he asks. “I need an assistant. Flexible hours. Decent money.”

“What kind of work?”

“Stuff like this. Finishing. Polishing. Answering email or phone calls. Whatever I don’t feel like doing, to be honest. I’m behind on this commission. I could use the help.”