The Sweetness of Salt(56)

“Wow,” I said softly. “If I was that good at something, I can’t imagine never wanting to look at it again.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you’re a perfectionist, I guess,” Aiden said. “Nothing’s ever really good enough. And if nothing’s ever good enough, then what’s the point of looking at it, right?”

I kept my eyes on the vase—or pot, or whatever it was. The piece was much bigger than I originally thought it would be. Aiden had started off with a lump of clay the size of a fist, but it had transformed into nearly double its size. “She was really fun too,” he said suddenly. “She had this weird kind of laugh—sort of like a giggle that would go up real high and then come back down again. It made you laugh, just hearing it.”

“Did you guys do things together? Just you and her?”

He nodded. “She loved the quad. When I was little, she took me all over the place on it. Then when I learned how to drive it, I’d take her. She’d put her arms around me and hold on real tight and say, ‘Take us to the moon, Aiden. Go on, take us to the moon.’”

“The moon?”

He smiled. “It was just her way of telling me to go wherever I wanted. As far as I wanted.”

“Did you ever get lost?”

He nodded. “God, lots of times. That was the best part.”

“Why?”

He sat back down slowly, still angling his fingers along the inside of the piece. “Who wants to know where they’re going all the time? That’s boring. When you get lost, you see things you never knew were there in the first place.”

The wheel was slowing down. Aiden’s fingers slowed with it, tapping the sides gently until it came to a complete stop. My eyes widened as I stared at the perfect little bowl—no bigger around than an orange. “It’s so cute!” I said. “But what’re you going to eat out of that? It’s so small!”

“It’s not for eating,” Aiden said. “It’s a different kind of bowl. For something else.”

“Like what?”

“You’ll see.” He looked at it for a moment, and then leaned in and touched the rim again, very lightly, with the pad of his index finger. “There,” he said. “Perfect.”

Aiden put the tiny bowl on a shelf next to another bowl and a small vase. “This is where I leave everything to dry,” he explained. “It takes a few days.” He walked over to what looked like a large black canister in the corner of the patio and checked a tiny thermometer attached to one side. “This is the kiln. There’s a vase in there I’m firing.” He picked up a small bowl and dipped his fingers into it. “And now that it’s reached 1660 degrees, I can salt glaze it.”

“What’s that?”

Aiden held up the bowl. “Watch.” He pinched a small amount of salt between his fingers and deposited it through a hole at the top of the kiln. There were actually many holes along the rim, tiny rectangular openings, and Aiden moved from one to the next, sprinkling fingerfuls of salt through them. “Salt does amazing things to clay,” he said. “The crystals actually explode when they hit the heat, and then turn into a vapor. It’s the vapor that transforms the look of the clay.”

“How?” I asked. “What’s it do?”

“It makes the clay glossy, and the surface gets this sort of orange-peel texture. But the really cool thing about salt glazing is that no two pieces ever look the same. Each one is completely unique, depending on how much or how little salt you use.”

“Who taught you how to do all this?” I asked.

Aiden shrugged. “My mom got me lessons when I was about twelve. That was where I learned all the basics.”

“So…” I paused. “I mean, did they tell you you should be a potter?”

Aiden looked at me curiously. “Tell me to be a potter?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, did they see that you were good at it and tell you that that’s what you should do?”


Aiden’s face took on a blank quality. “They encouraged me to do it. But they didn’t tell me that I should be a potter.” He laughed. “Actually, though, I made it easy for them. After I found pottery, I didn’t want to do anything else.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever try anything else?”

“You mean like accounting?” Aiden grinned.

I shrugged. “Anything.”

“No,” he said. “But I didn’t have to. Pottery’s my thing. It’s always been my thing.” He paused. “How about you? You have a thing?”

School. Being smart. Grades. Or maybe—possibly—drawing.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” he repeated. “It ain’t your thing if you say maybe.”

How were you supposed to know? Apparently I didn’t possess that gut-feeling thing that Zoe did. So how did it work? Was someone going to show up eventually and tell me? “Julia Anderson, your thing is law.” Or, “Julia Anderson, your thing is sketching.”

“Okay,” Aiden said. “I’ll bite. What is it?”

I stared at the orangish blue flames behind the tiny peepholes of the kiln. “Well, I’m majoring in prelaw. In college, I mean.”