She stirred her tea elegantly, with a smirk. Once again, I told myself there was something familiar about her.
“What a beautiful story. It’s so sad though!”
“I got so angry the first time I heard it. I thought it was so unfair what happened to the poor mermaid, and that she didn’t rebel or fight back. But later I came to realize there are times when love just doesn’t have a future, and you have to make sacrifices, and those sacrifices are another form that love takes. We think if you love someone crazily, that’s enough to overcome all obstacles, but it isn’t like that. Sometimes, painful as that is to admit, there’s just nothing you can do. The mermaid and the captain didn’t even belong to the same worlds. There was no future there. She knew that. But still, she sacrificed herself for him.”
“And the man never knew she existed or how much she had done for him,” I whispered. Then I took a sip of tea, thinking about what all that had meant. “Why are we women so stupid? We fall in love and turn into idiots. It’s like ‘Okay, goodbye, brain!’”
Adele observed me from behind her long black lashes. “I sense some resentment behind those words, and I must say, you’re very young to be talking that way.”
I shrugged. “You’re never too young to have your heart broken.”
“That’s true.”
There was warmth in Adele’s curiosity, and I wondered if she saw the same things in me that I saw when I looked in the mirror. I was like an eggshell, cracked, empty, but I longed to be full of something, and not just neediness. I worried she’d end up asking me about that broken heart, and I hurriedly changed the subject, setting my crystal on the table. “So this is just a piece of glass?”
“That’s right. Before plastic was invented, almost every container people used was made of glass: bottles, plates, glasses, jugs, lamps. And lots of those things wound up in the ocean. Not to mention allthe ships that sank at different times with their cargo of alcohol. Just think of all the bottles of beer, whiskey, and gin that ended up down there… The sea currents break them into little pieces and slowly polish them. One like yours”—she pointed at the table—“might take thirty or forty years to get to that shape and wind up on the shore. Some of them are centuries old.”
“That’s incredible!”
“Yeah. They can be very valuable, depending on the color. The gray ones, or pink or red. They’re getting harder to find, too. There are fewer and fewer of them left. What washes up on the beach now is mostly plastic.”
“What do people want with them?”
“They collect them, make jewelry out of them, decorative objects, all kinds of things.”
“So that’s why you asked me what I was thinking of doing with it,” I said, picking it up and rubbing it between my fingers.
“That’s right.”
“How do you know so much about all this?”
She winked and stood. “Come here, I’ll show you something.”
I followed her through the house to an open door on the second floor. When I walked into the room, what I saw took my breath away. It was full of jars of sea glass in every color imaginable. In the center of the room was a square table with tools, glue, wire, a tiny anvil, a magnifying glass, and boxes with tiny compartments with even more bits of glass inside, organized by size. An unfinished piece was on another table under a window, and there was a glass case with finished jewelry: rings, pendants, bracelets…
“You do all this?” I asked, unable to believe it.
She blushed. I could tell she was proud of what she did. And she was right to be. Every object I saw in there was a work of art. On the table I found a nearly finished bracelet. The silver bezel holdingthe crystal was minutely shaped to match its form. She smelted and molded the metal herself. I couldn’t hide my admiration.
“You’re a true artist!”
She tried to wave me off. “I’m an artisan at best. But I do enjoy my work.” Then her face lit up. “He’s the artist.”
I turned around and found a man covered in sawdust and wood shavings who was looking at me with curiosity. He must have been well over six feet tall, and his shoulders were nearly as broad as the doorframe. His hair was black and straight and shimmered under the bandanna tied around his head.
“Honey, this is Harper. We met on the beach, and I invited her up for a tea.”
“Hi,” I said, a little reserved.
“Happy to meet you. I’m Sid, Adele’s husband.”
He offered me his hand, and I shook it.
“Sid’s a sculptor. He carves wood. His creations are the real artworks in this house.”
Sid laughed.
“I’m the more modest of the two of us,” he said.
