“It was serious?” Hanna asked.
“We’d been together since I was twelve years old,” Grace said. She could say that truthfully because she’d had so much practice saying it before. “We lived together.”
“And you didn’t know they were going to do this crazy thing? What, were you locked in the basement?”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Grace said, angry with Hanna for joking about abuse that, as far as she knew, was very real.
“You were an appraiser’s assistant all through college, weren’t you?”
Grace nodded. She had exaggerated her biography a little for Jacqueline when she’d started. Hanna thought Grace—Julie—was twenty-six.
“I think he thought I would help him,” Grace said. “When I came home.”
“But he didn’t tell you?” Hanna blinked at her.
“He only told me exactly what he wanted me to know,” Grace said. “And I’d never had any reason not to believe him, you know?”
Every time she the missed the turnoff, it got harder to see the way back.
Amaury came in mumbling and took his spot, immediately bending over the collection of tiny brass movements before him.
Hanna nodded toward the computer screen, where she’d pulled up a photograph of the three trees in the centerpiece’s fall quarter. “Acorns,” she said to Grace. “Twenty.” She held out the envelope of surviving original acorns, and Grace had to get up and fetch it from her.
Grace hadn’t noticed how clammy her hands were until her fingers touched Hanna’s.
Back at her table, she grabbed a fresh thumb-sized lump of wax and started pinching off balls the size of peppercorns.
“Too big,” Hanna said.
Grace pulled over the magnifier and tried to disappear behind the lens.
She carved each bead of wax into an acorn on a needle mount, a T-pin stapled by its arms to a square of plywood. She perched a ball of wax on the upended needle and carved the groove that separated the cap, and then she pulled the end upward, tapering the nut. The first one took twenty minutes, but the second took her only ten, and then she cranked out nine more at six minutes apiece. She was grateful for Amaury’s silent presence. Hanna wouldn’t ask her any more questions in front of him.
The studio was quiet for the next two hours except for the tap and scrape of their tools. Just after eleven, Jacqueline opened her office door and stuck her head out. “Julie, I have some good news for you,” she sang. “You’re getting a visit from an old friend today.” She laughed, and all the coffee Grace had drunk rushed up the back of her throat.
Jacqueline clomped out of her office in her heeled sandals holding a burgundy cardboard box that was warped at the corners. Grace knew it well: the ugly teapot, again, far more welcome than any real old friend.
Jacqueline leaned over Grace’s table. She had a sunglasses tan, pale goggles across her face. “What are these tiny things? Are we making microbes now?”
“Acorns,” Grace said, and her boss rolled her eyes. Poor Jacqueline, so disinterested in decorative arts, stuck in the business most obsessed with their minutiae.
Jacqueline flapped a hand toward the red box. “Do it now,” she said. “She’s coming back for it late this afternoon—needs it for a luncheon tomorrow, or something.”
Hanna grunted as though losing Grace would present a great hardship for her project. Her hand darted greedily for one of Grace’s acorns, and she began to inspect it.
“She’s very good at this tiny work,” Hanna said to Jacqueline, peering into her palm. “You should look at this. It would have taken me longer.”
Hanna was trying to help, Grace knew, and she was grateful. If only it mattered.
The teapot was a trompe l’oeil cauliflower. The top half formed a nubby white floret, the lower half and spout a cradle of green cabbage leaves. Strasbourg, 1750, but who cared? It looked like something from a sidewalk sale in Garland, something that would sit next to a rack of leopard-print reading glasses. Perhaps it had once been a good example of its kind, but it was a Frankenstein piece now. The owners, entertainment lawyers in their forties, broke the teapot again and again. The first time, the bowl was cracked in three pieces; the second time it was the handle; the third, the bowl again. Why did they keep fixing it? What did the cauliflower teapot mean to them? A burdensome inheritance? The cracked hopes of their marriage embodied by an ugly wedding present?
There had been a time when a teapot was just a teapot.
Now the pot’s lid was fractured, the knob broken clean away, and several of the porcelain cabbage leaves at the bottom were busted up along their green veins. A mess. In the box, nestled in the raffia frizz, was a plastic bag holding all the missing pieces and shards of broken porcelain, in sizes ranging from Communion wafer to steel-cut oat. Grace emptied the bag onto her blotter and examined the smallest shards, wondering who had done what to whom that they needed to punish their teapot like this, and why in hell they cared about it so much. She called it her Cabbage Patch Kid, but nobody here got the joke.
But the same couple had also given Grace the most beautiful job she’d ever laid hands on, more than a year ago, another teapot. Maybe they collected them, or perhaps they had one of those accidental collections forced on people after someone noticed they had two of something.
That teapot was too breathtaking to have been acquired casually. Stunningly fragile, 1820s, sunlight-colored glass with finely detailed brass trim that formed the handle, a pheasant’s graceful neck, and the spout, a lamb’s head. On the lid, a swan reared back as if to attack. The animals looked alive, trapped and furious. That teapot was in near-perfect condition too, but for the tiniest speck of discoloration on the base. The surgery would be dangerous, and Grace was loath to risk it. She remembered the Hawthorne story she’d read in high school about the man who became obsessed with removing his wife’s birthmark. The surgery removed the spot and killed her.
The teapot survived Grace’s ministrations. She would give its owners this: When they threw a teapot across the room, they threw the right one.
She had hoped that if she could just keep the truth inside her, a nicer story than the real one would grow like a seed, taking root and getting stronger, until it grew around the truth and consumed it. The good twin would destroy the evil twin, or something like that. In her fantasy, no one, not even Grace, would be able to tell the difference.
But she had never forgotten the truth. She’d told shoddy lies. The story was pale and underdeveloped and looked like the impostor it was.
She took up a shard of green porcelain with her tweezers and slid it into the space she believed was its home. The piece just fit.
? ? ?
When Jacqueline had stepped out for her afternoon coffee, a man rang the bell.
“Puis-je vous aider?” Grace asked him at the door, but she knew. The teapot’s owner was just how she’d pictured him. He wore a navy blue suit with peaked lapels and high armholes, and he looked ashamed. Grace slipped on some clean gloves, but just for show; the teapot was a salvage title at this point. She tucked it into its raffia nest and draped some tissue over it, as though she were putting it to bed.
“Don’t touch it for at least twenty-four hours,” she told him. “It looks solid, but it’s still very fragile.” He grimaced and took the box from her. “You really can’t use it anymore,” she said. “Especially not for coffee, okay? It will stain the cracks, and then everyone will know.”
Amaury clucked from his corner. The man opened his mouth as if he were about to explain. “I hate this fucking thing,” he said.
When he left, Grace thought she saw a smirk on Hanna’s face.
“What?” she asked.
“Don’t stain the cracks,” Hanna gently mocked her. “Then everyone will know.”
? ? ?