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.”
“So law’s your thing, then?”
“Yeah.” And then, “I mean no. No. It’s not.”
Aiden looked over at me.
“No.” My voice was firmer. “No. It’s definitely not.”
“So you’re doing it because…” Aiden gestured with his hand, indicating that I should go on.
I looked over Aiden’s head at the trees, raised like a green arch behind him. A large shadow on the right obscured most of the leaves, but on the left, where the sun was bright, I could see them perfectly. Some hung limp and flat; others were curled over slightly, just at the tips, like shy little girls.
“Julia?” Aiden’s voice was soft.
“I don’t know.” I lowered my eyes so I was looking at Aiden again. “I honestly don’t know anymore.”
chapter
42
It rained the next two days—a steady, heavy rain that turned most of Main Street into one giant puddle, and saturated the rest of the ground into a muddy, squishy layer. With her repeated trips to the Rutland bank—which took a good amount of time—along with her trip to get roofing tile, and now the rain forcing us to work inside, Sophie was hell-bent on picking up the lag.
We concentrated on the front room, which was by far the most time-consuming. Most mornings were spent on our hands and knees, sanding ourselves into oblivion. In the afternoons, we spread drop cloths over the floor and got to work painting. Sophie had chosen a pomegranate red for the walls, with cream trim around the edges. The color looked putrid in the can, but as we began to spread swaths of it over the walls, I stood back, surprised. It was gorgeous.
I was about two-thirds of the way done with my wall when Sophie leaned over and turned down the radio. She had splotches of red paint on her nose and a hole in the knee of her overalls. “I just thought of something,” she said.
“What?”
“About Maggie. Well, about Dad, really. Back in Milford. Before you came along.”
I could feel my shoulders tense slightly as I dipped my brush back into the vat of paint. “Okay.”
Sophie coated the wall in front of her for a few seconds and then reloaded the roller, working the excess off along the ridges of the paint tray.
“His practice was struggling,” she said. “And I guess to cope with that, he started drinking. A lot. Beer mostly. He might’ve drunk other stuff, but I don’t know. And it wasn’t a regular thing. The refrigerator might just be a refrigerator for weeks at a time, which meant that things were okay. And then other days when I’d open it, looking for a piece of string cheese or an orange, I’d see the stacks of blue and white cans lined up on the left side, neat as could be. It was always a Friday night when the cans appeared, and they were always, always gone by Monday morning.” She wrinkled her forehead, remembering. “One time, I counted the whole mess of ’em. There were thirty-six.” She shook her head, as if the number still amazed her. “He would drink thirty-six cans in a single weekend. That’s a case and a half of beer.”
The only cans I had ever seen in the refrigerator growing up were Diet Coke and the occasional Slim-Fast, when Mom was trying to lose a few pounds. There were never any surprises when I opened the refrigerator; the shelves were always filled with hamburger and green grapes, bottled water, eggs, salad greens, and orange juice. Sometimes, if Mom had cooked the night before, there would be leftovers, carefully wrapped in foil, stacked like little pyramids on one side. No blue and white cans. Ever.