The look on his face told me he thought I should just buy it on credit. An imperious expression, haughty, his half-hooded eyes almost looking down on me. Then the expression vanished.
A kid from a rich family could afford anything he liked, and perhaps he was remembering that. The memory mixed with that of a young man who had measured slices of banana and mourned the lack of milk in his tea. Two different young men now.
I wondered who he’d be once he got his memory back. Whether he’d be embarrassed having known someone so poor.
I prepped collections of gimp for each lanyard design, and Blue started weaving, tightening the strands with his fingers, leaving a tassel at the end. I thought about moose hide and how much softer it would be to work with, tough and soft at the sametime. And how Blue’s fingers would look, weaving those supple strands.
Real leather lanyards out of moose hide, goat leather, bison, would go for a lot more than ones made out of gimp, but I couldn’t afford the outlay, at least not yet.
Then I joined him. I had thicker fingers than he did, and the work went slower for me, which might have been why I’d been putting the project off. After two hours, I’d only made two lanyards, and one was so lumpy, Blue would have to redo it. So I turned to sketches of key rings, round loops of ordinary cowhide, which would have a leather flap through which a key ring could go. The key rings themselves would have a design, only I’d not decided yet.
My mind was distracted, and the warmth in my gut made it extra hard, extra important, to focus on the work and not the pretty young man, face flushed, bent over his work as though his life depended on it. It did not. We had two months before the Christmas bazaar. Ages.
“What are we going to do with those?” he asked, pausing, his hands in his lap, fingers tangled in gimp.
“Punch in designs,” I said. I pointed to a few of the punches I’d come up with: circles, stars, designs I could make with the punches I already had. Nothing fancy. “Then we stain. Deeper stains in the punch, lighter all around.”
“Could you do trees?” he asked. “Like Christmas trees?”
“I could,” I said. “Make a drawing, send it in. Get a custom punch.”
“Bet that would help you make enough money to buy a lace master.”
I could. The idea was not new to me: that expanding the production line, doing custom punches for Christmas, would help me make more key rings. Help me make more money to buy a tool I wanted. But the idea of focusing on that productionline and abandoning custom work made my skin itch. Art versus money, it always came down to this point.
Blue took the clipboard and pencil from me and quickly drew a Christmas tree. It was sweet, as though it had come from the mind of a third-grader with a very dab hand. A treetop with a simple star, three evenly spaced boughs on either side, a single, criss-crossing loop of garland, five round balls that were meant to be ornaments.
“Punch it in,” he said, handing the clipboard back to me. “Then stain and hand-paint the details. Can you hand-paint leather?”
“You can,” I said.
“You could do a tree, one with a wreath, one with a present on it. Stockings. A snowman. All Christmas stuff. To match the lanyards, sort of.”
Really good custom punches were a hundred bucks, or thereabouts. I could get cheap ones for fifty. They’d last me a season. Normally they wouldn’t be worth it, but did I have enough money in the bank for the good stuff? I did the sums on the clipboard and came out with an amount I could afford, enough to buy five good stamps or ten shitty ones.
“Tree,” said Blue, counting on his fingers. “Wreath. Snowman. Present. Candy cane. That’s five.”
“Can you draw me some nice designs?” I asked. “Clean lines, strong lines. Then I can send in the order.”
Blue took the clipboard from me and leaned back, curling his spine into the chair. His feet went up on the desk as he started to draw.
I believed I was seeing a gesture from his previous life. He looked like he’d been an indoor kid, one who lived wintery all year round, indoors, bundled up. Cups of hot chocolate on tap. Buds in his ears so he could listen to something jazzy and organic.
I didn’t make him take his feet off the desk, even though he was wearing boots. Instead, I thought about leather punches and leather paint, and how pleased Mabel would be to get unique key rings for the bazaar rather than the simple ones I’d been planning.
While Blue sketched, I made myself not stare. Made myself take another stab at a lanyard made of plastic gimp, when what I wanted was to order a nice comb or a hairbrush, one of those fancy ones from England. If Blue was still here at Christmas, which was very doubtful, I’d give it to him.
CHAPTER 15
wolfe
We worked all day Thursday, catching up on the lanyards, stopping a short while for BLTs eaten standing up, holding the sandwiches over the sink like a pair of bachelors. When the sun went down, the cold deepened.
For dinner, we ate meatloaf I’d made, using a pound of ground meat, and only half of it was leftover to slice up for sandwiches, much to my dismay. After dinner, I put on my coat and boots and walked around the outside of the cabin, checking the headline to the pipes, checking the foundation because another blizzard was coming and I wanted to be able to sit in front of the fire while it wailed, and not have to trudge out into it, not for anything.
Blue watched from the open doorway, letting the heat out, his arms across his chest. Watching me as though he feared that, like some sailor, I might disappear among the waves of white. Foolish notion on my part. He probably wasn’t thinking any such thing, but was waiting for me to build up the fire.
Temperatures had dipped to forty below overnight, according to my weather app, which I checked when I woke up, realizing that Blue was starfished around me, plastered to my side. I squinted up through the half-opened blinds at themorning sky, a swath of dove-gray, as though the world had been wrapped in soft cotton wool.
