1
DELPHINE
On Thursday evening, I sat at my wheel in the garden studio behind the house, my right foot steady on the pedal as a mound of gray clay spun beneath my hands. The windows and door were open to the early June air, lavender from the border mixing with the wet-earth scent of the clay. Outside, my roses along the fence had turned a dusty shade of pink in the lingering light, and bees moved lazily through the foxglove doing the work they were made for. Somewhere beyond the hedges, a neighbor’s dog barked, then barked again.
Annie was at Seraphina’s, gathered around a beach bonfire with the rest of the kids. The school year was done and summer break officially started. I could only imagine what they were plotting around that fire. After putting their single mothers on a dating site, hoping to match them with allegedly perfect men, who knew what kind of domestic terrorism they might attempt next? Hopefully, they had finally gotten the hint and stopped strategizing about me. I did not need a man. My life was orderly, full, and manageable. The gallery was thriving. Annie was healthy and brilliant and busy. My pottery studio waited for me whenever I could steal an hour to create the work I felt I’d beenmade for. I had friends who loved me, a daughter I adored, and a house that had become a sanctuary after losing my husband.
That was enough. It had to be.
Seraphina had promised to bring Annie home by ten, which gave me a free night to work on my latest project. Running the gallery had taken more time than usual the last few months, leaving me little time for my own art. I’d begun to feel it in my body. This twitch that came from the need to create. If I didn’t, I lost the thread of who I was.
I dipped my fingers into the bowl beside the wheel and brought my hands back to the clay. The piece was meant to be the third in my Undertow series, a tall, narrow vessel with a long throat and a rim that would flare at the end, like a held breath finally released. Simple, in theory. Unforgiving, in practice. Mistakes could not be hidden. The walls had to rise thin but even, the silhouette clean, the movement almost imperceptible until the eye reached the opening.
I pressed my palms around the spinning mound, thumbs locked, elbows braced against my ribs, coaxing the clay toward center. Center was everything. If I lost it at the beginning, the piece was doomed before it became anything at all.
Water slid over my fingers, turning the surface slick beneath my hands. The wheel hummed, low and constant. I leaned in, applying pressure until the clay stopped fighting me and became still within the motion, a smooth gray dome spinning as if it had never been anything else. There. Better.
On the worktable, my phone lit up with a notification. I saw the glow in the corner of my eye but did not turn my head. If it was an emergency, Seraphina or Annie knew to call, not text. They understood how important it was for me to capitalize on the flow whenever it chose to visit. The wheel spun. The clay rose.
I opened the center with both thumbs, pressing down carefully, stopping before I went too deep. Then I widened the hollow, one hand inside, one hand outside, feeling for the thickness between them. This was the part most people misunderstood. They thought pottery was about strength, making a lump of earth submit to your will. But it wasn’t that at all. Clay could not be bullied into beauty. It had to be coaxed.
I began the first pull, outside fingers pressing in, inside fingers lifting, drawing the wall upward inch by slow inch. Slip gathered at my knuckles. A ribbon of water slid down my wrist and disappeared beneath the cuff of my old work shirt. The vessel rose, narrow and plain at first, nothing remarkable yet. In fact, it looked like a cylinder. A beginning no one would pause to admire. Most beautiful things didn’t begin that way. One had to see the beauty before it emerged. Believe in it, even when reality suggested otherwise.
I made the second pull, slower than the first. The wall thinned beneath my fingers. The vessel lengthened, elegant now, beginning to take the shape I had imagined. I could see it finished: pale glaze, maybe white with a wash of blue-gray near the base, like sea fog gathering at low tide. A piece that suggested movement without showing the wave itself.
Undertow. Pulling beneath the surface. Tugging away the sand beneath your feet.
A foolish, perhaps overly dramatic, title for the series, but I loved it anyway. In addition, tourists loved a title, and collectors liked to believe they understood the private language of an artist. Let them. I had made a career of creating beautiful objects people could interpret however they pleased. That was the nature of art. An artist created from their own experience and craft, but it was the viewer who made it come alive. No two people would ever see a piece the same way. They brought their own experiences, their own points of view. The artist could onlyhope that whatever they saw moved them in one direction or another.
A tremor slipped through the vessel, so small no one else would have seen it. I felt it at once. The faint shift from centered to not. The warning beneath my palms. I eased off the pedal, slowing the wheel, my breath holding as I steadied the wall before it could twist.
“No, no, stay with me,” I whispered.
The vessel wobbled once, then settled.
I let out the breath I’d not realized I was holding and reached for the sponge, smoothing the surface with more care. It had survived, but I could still feel where it had nearly gone wrong. A slight unevenness just below the shoulder. Invisible, perhaps, once glazed. Or perhaps not. Some flaws were visible only after the kiln.
I increased the pressure from the inside, coaxing the throat narrower. The clay stretched beneath my fingers, rising toward the shape I wanted. Long, controlled, self-contained, holding its emptiness with grace. A critic had once called my work contained. I was fairly certain he’d meant it as an insult. He had written that my pieces were technically accomplished, emotionally restrained, and almost austere in their refusal to reveal the hand that made them. I’d sold every piece in that collection, so what did he know?
I wet my hands again and began shaping the rim. This was the most delicate part. The opening had to flare, but only slightly. Not too dramatic or I risked sentimentality. And God knew there was enough of that in my life lately now that my best friends were happily married, leaving me behind as the lone single mom standing.
The kids had been successful meddling in my best friends’ lives and now they were all moving on, having weddings and babies. I was not and had no intention of doing so. I couldn’tseem to make anyone understand why either. Annie thought I would be happier with a man in my life. My friends, now that they were all fools in love, wanted the same thing. They actually believed that man was out there too. I did not.
Gillian, Esme, Lila, Seraphina. All of them had fallen so completely into love it was hard to remember what they were like in the years we’d banded together. Five single mothers without men. Esme and Lila divorced. Seraphina, never married to Tyler’s father or anyone else for that matter. Gillian raising her infant niece after her sister’s death, with only a distant memory of a great love she’d had for only a short time. Me, widowed. Now, though, they were happy. Ridiculously so. Glowing, settled, softened in ways I could not begrudge them even when I wanted to.
Because my friends were happy, they had become certain I should be too. They looked at me now with bright, hopeful eyes that saidjust give it a chance. Give yourself a second chance.Annie was no better. She had become frighteningly invested in the idea of a second chance for her mother.
However, most annoying about the whole thing was Seraphina. For the last year, she’d been insisting Dorian Flynn and I were a great match. She wouldn’t let it go either.
Dorian Flynn. Local bookstore owner. Hot, retired Navy guy. Prematurely silver hair that was at such a juxtaposition with his youthful face that one couldn’t help but stare at him. He was a spare man. Not in stature, but in sinewy strength. I imagined he would feel solid if I pressed against him. Not that I would ever do that. Obviously.
I had no interest in becoming someone’s second chance. I had barely survived being someone’s first. And he hadn’t survived at all.
My foot eased the pedal slower. The wheel turned beneath my hands with the patience of breath. I pinched the rim betweenmy fingers, lifting it outward, asking the clay to open without collapsing. For one suspended moment, it did. The vessel stood tall beneath my hands, imperfect but alive, the rim widening as if it had finally decided to trust me. Then one side dipped.
I cursed under my breath and eased off the pedal, but it was too late. The clay sagged inward just enough to ruin the line. Not destroyed. Not beyond saving. But no longer what I had intended, which was the worst outcome of all. I stared at the piece before me, proud, yet wounded, its elegant throat bent slightly to one side, reminding me of a damaged swan. I could probably save it. Maybe alter the form and make the flaw seem intentional. Artists did that all the time, calling it instinct or evolution. Anything but admitting the loss.
But not me. It had to be perfect or not at all.
