Retribution (Secrets & Lies #3)(47)
Chapter Nineteen
Melissa
The angle grinder whines in the quiet of the afternoon, but I don't want to make a mess inside the chapel, so I'm working outside. Thankfully, I'm wearing hearing protection, and I'm not deafened by the powerful DeWalt 4.5 inch grinder. We bought two of them, along with a lot of other tools for stone, metal, and woodworking, to the point that the first thing we did as a family after our shopping trip was to build a lean-to off of the chapel that could keep all of our new stuff out of the weather. It's not much, but it keeps our work areas dry.
I press lightly, letting the motor do the work, pleased with the results of my experiments so far. We were able to find more than enough equipment for everyone's individual projects, with Jackson's archery project needing a side trip to a sporting goods store. He's about halfway done with his second bow, his first one cracking when he made the limbs too thin and he pulled back too hard and far. He grumbled a bit about it, but Jackson's enjoying the process as much as the actual bow itself.
The piece of granite I'm working with is about an inch long and three quarters of an inch wide, held on my workbench in a padded vise that we all share. I'm using a diamond blade right now, just adjusting the angle of the face cut I've put into the stone.
When I turn off the grinder, I see Jackson's joined me, taking out his bow. I pop out my earplugs just as he speaks up, friendly and relaxed. “Hey, how's the work today?”
I hum, studying the angle of my cut and liking what I see. “Good. I might get this one finished today, and I'll only have one more to do to complete the stones for the set.”
“What are you making a set of?” Jackson asks. “I mean, you've kind of been busy out here three or four hours a day, but you've kept mum about what it is you're actually building.”
I nod. “I know. I just wanted to make sure I can actually work with granite before telling anyone, but it's coming along well.”
“What?” he asks, making another draw. “If you don't want to tell, that's fine.”
“No, it's okay,” I reply, going over to the box I'm keeping the pieces in before I made my next step. I empty them on top of the storage box we're using, showing one of them to Jackson. “That one is yours.”
“Mine?” he asks, turning over the stone and studying it. “What's it for?”
“Well,” I say, taking it back and putting it back in the box along with the other four finished stones and the one rough cut stone I have set aside for my piece, “we're having this... whatever you want to call it, Andrea's calling it a wedding, right?”
“Yeah, although I think it's going to probably be the weirdest wedding I can think of,” Jackson says with a chuckle. “Who'd have thought I would end up serving as a minister? But go ahead.”
“I was at first thinking rings, but I don't have the tools or the patience to cut the stone that small,” I tell him, going back to the stone I have clamped in right now. “Besides, I'm better at working with metal anyway. So I cut all of these into smaller pieces that I'm going to set into different metal chains we can all wear as pendants. The whole set is subdivided into three smaller pairs, one for each couple.”
“Amazing,” Jackson says, going over and looking over the four completed pieces. “I see it. The one you showed me, it's like a flat pyramid, and I can see Katrina's. The other pair, the triangular one, what's that?”
“That's for Carson and Andrea,” I tell him, setting the angle grinder aside to get out the stone polisher. The motor's nowhere near as loud, and I don't want to deafen him or force him to leave the work area. “I chose it because a triangle is the most stable shape in existence. Carson's been my stable foundation for over twenty years, and Andrea's another source. Until recently, the three of us were a triangle, too.”
“And for you and Nathan?” Jackson asks, and I unclamp the piece I'm working on, turning on the stone polisher. I've gotten the hang of it pretty well, and I'm making progress.
“Rectangles,” I say, holding up Nathan's stone. “This one I chose just for Nathan because it has more of the green flecks than the others. They remind me of his eyes.”
Jackson hums in appreciation as I turn to my work, working slowly. This first run is just to get the scratches caused by the diamond blade out. It's four o'clock before I finish up, Jackson having finished his work for the day a while back.
I go inside and wash up quickly, dumping my work clothes in the entryway to find Nathan relaxing with BA in the living room, both of them sitting back and watching a cartoon on the computer, BA giggling at the antics of the cartoon buses on the screen. “What's this?”
“Tayo,” Nathan says, shrugging. “It’s cute, and BA loves it. Katrina says it is her favorite cartoon. It's a lot different than when I was a kid. Just how in the world did we survive our childhoods?”
I chuckle and sit down next to Nathan, taking his free hand and giving it a kiss. “Hey, I had the Transformers, Carson loved those. Just wait until she here gets older, and she's going to be following her mother and aunt looking like some crazy funky anime anarchist or something.”
Nathan laughs and bounces BA on his knee, tickling her belly. “Are you going to be an anime girl, BA?”