"A Coke sign!" she said, awed. "And the bottle caps… it's the inevitable commingling of commerce and religion. I love that!"
Wes just nodded: a fast learner, he already knew to just go along with her. "Right," he said. Then, in a lower voice to me he added, "Just liked the Coke sign, actually."
"Of course you did," I said.
A breeze blew over us then, and some of the halos on the smaller pieces began to spin again. A small one behind us was decorated with jingle bells, their ringing like a whistling in the air. As I bent down closer to it, the bells whizzing past, I saw the one behind it, which was turning more slowly. It was a smaller angel with a halo studded with flat stones. As I touched one as it turned, though, I realized it wasn't a stone but something else that I couldn't place at first.
"What is this?" I asked him.
"Sea glass," Wes said, bending down beside me. "See the shapes? No rough edges."
"Oh, right," I said. "That's so cool."
"It's hard to find," he said. The breeze was dying down, and he reached out and spun the halo a bit with one finger, sending the light refracting through the glass again. He was so close to me, our knees were almost touching. "I bought that collection at a flea market, for, like, two bucks. I wasn't sure what I was going to use it for, then, but it seemed too good a thing to pass up."
"It's beautiful," I said, and it was. When the halo got going fast, the glass all blurred, the colors mingling. Like the ocean, I thought, and looked at that angel's face. Her eyes were washers, her mouth a tiny key, the kind I'd once had for my diary. I hadn't noticed that before.
"You want it?"
"I couldn't," I said.
"Sure you can. I'm offering." He reached over and picked it up, brushing his fingers over the angel's tinny toes. "Here."
"Wes. I can't."
"You can. You'll pay me back somehow."
"How?"
He thought for a second. "Someday, you'll agree to run that mile with me. And then we'll know for sure whether you can kick my ass."
"I'd rather pay you for it," I said, as I reached into my back pocket for my wallet. "How much?"
"Macy, I was kidding. I know you could kick my ass." He looked at me, smiling. Sa-woon, I thought. "Look. Just take it."
I was about to protest again, but then I stopped myself. Maybe for once I should just let something happen, I thought. I looked down at the angel in his hand, at those sparkling bits of glass. I did want it. I didn't know why, couldn't explain it if I had to. But I did.
"Okay," I said. "But I am paying you back somehow, sometime."
"Sure." He handed it to me. "Whatever you want."
Caroline was coming back over to us now, picking her way through the smaller sculptures and stopping to examine each one. She had her purse open, her phone to her ear. "… no, it's more like a yard art thing, but I just think it would look great on the back porch of the mountain house, right by that rock garden I've been working on. Oh, you should just see these. They're so much better than those iron herons they sell at Attache Gardens for hundreds of dollars. Well, I know you liked those, honey, but these are better. They are."
"Iron herons?" Wes said to me.
"She lives in Atlanta," I told him, as if this explained everything.
"Okay, honey, I'm going. I'll talk to you later. Love you, bye!" She snapped the phone shut, then dropped it into her purse before slinging it back over her shoulder. "All right," she said to Wes, "let's talk prices."
I hung back, holding my angel, as they walked through the various pieces, Caroline stopping the negotiations every so often to explain the meaning of this or that piece as Wes stood by politely, listening. By the time it was all over she'd bought three angels, including the Coke bottle cap one, and had gotten Wes's number to set up an appointment for her to come see the bigger pieces he had out at his workshop.
"A steal," she said, ripping her sizeable check out of her checkbook and handing it to him. "Really. You should be charging more."
"Maybe if I show someplace else," he told her, folding the check and sticking it in his front pocket, "but it's hard to get pricey when you have baked goods on either side of you."
"You will show someplace else," she told him, picking up two of her angels. "It's only a matter of time." She looked at her watch. "Oh, Macy, we have to run. I told Mom we'd be home for lunch so we could look at the rest of those color swatches."
Something told me my mother, who that morning had picked out windows and a skylight with about as much enjoyment as someone getting a root canal, would not be broken up to miss that conversation. But I figured it wasn't worth pointing that out to Caroline, who was already distracted checking out another angel with a thumbtack halo, which she'd somehow missed earlier. "Well," I said to Wes, "thank you again."
"No problem," he said, glancing over at my sister. "Thanks for the business."
"That's not me," I told him. "It's all her."
"Still," he said. "Thanks anyway."
"Excuse me," a woman by the big sculpture called out, her voice shrill, "do you have others like this?"