Working With Heat by Anne Calhoun Page B

an outlet so she could recharge.
    “How long has your family lived in the East End?”
    He tore off a piece of flatbread before he answered. “We can trace back nearly four hundred years through church registries,” he said. “Tanner as a name comes from the leather trade. Making leather is a disgusting, smelly process involving significant quantities of urine. The business owners wanted to avoid complaints and fines, so they situated downwind. We’ve also been dockworkers, match girls, rope makers, pieceworkers, costermongers—”
    “What’s a costermonger?”
    “Sells fruit and veg out of a cart,” he said, then crammed the warm bread into his mouth. He was ravenous. Weeks of near constant work and irregular meals had caught up with him.
    “Got it,” she said.
    “My dad was a costermonger, and my mum cuts hair,” he said when he’d finished chewing. “My brothers have all left for uni and semi-d’s—you’d call them dupluxes,” he added when her brow furrowed in confusion, “in the suburbs. I left, too, but now I’m back.”
    “I can’t see you living anywhere else,” she said. “It’s quite the family history. I know where my grandparents lived, but not much farther back than that.”
    It wasn’t exactly a family history to brag about, but he owned it, through and through, as a point of pride. He had none of the qualities that kept popping up in Milla’s date polls, no school ties, no steady job, but he had the history of a vibrant, diverse, thriving and highly resilient neighborhood in his veins, in the air he breathed. He felt remarkably possessive of the East End, as if it belonged to him as much as he belonged to it.
    She laid her cutlery across her plate, folded her arms on the table and leaned toward him. The sunlight picked out the red highlights in her dark brown hair and lay across the curve of her cheek like silk. “Are you sure you want to show me what you’ve been working on?” Her eyes were wide, serious, absolutely sincere.
    The question surprised him. She obviously meant it, was giving him a chance to change his mind and protect the most vulnerable part of himself. After Chelsea, the hot shop was the only safe place he had, the place where he disappeared and created beauty out of sand and chemicals. Other than Billy, a cousin he trusted with his life as well as his art, he let no one into his creative process. No one.
    “Absolutely,” he said.
    Her smile spread slowly, crinkling the corners of her eyes. He pulled out his wallet and left a couple of bills on the table. “Come on, then,” he said.
    * * *
    He unlocked the side entrance to the hot shop, reached inside to flick on the bank of lights over the vast space, then held the door for Milla.
    “Furnace, glory hole, lehr,” he said after the lights powered up, pointing at the three furnaces along the back wall. “The furnace and glory hole are heated to thirteen hundred degrees Celsius—”
    “That’s what, twenty four hundred degrees Fahrenheit?”
    “Yeah,” he said.
    “Hot.”
    “Hot enough to melt sand,” he said. She was taking pictures, of course, but he found he didn’t mind. “We initially heat the glass in the furnace. The glory hole is for reheating it as we’re working on a piece. A finished piece cools in the lehr before we start the cold work.”
    “Would it take long to heat up the furnace?” she asked.
    He laughed. “We don’t shut it down, love,” he said. “Won’t take a moment. Want to help?”
    “Sure,” she said, and set down the camera.
    His tools clustered around his bench, the punties and blowpipes sharing space with his hand tools, the rails waiting for him.
    While the furnace heated, he hefted a steel blowpipe, then reached into the crucible and gathered a blob of molten glass on the end of the pipe. Milla gave him a wide berth as he turned to his bench.
    “You roll the glass on the marver,” he said, nodding at the table as he transformed the blob into a cylinder. “Open