Page 29 of The Difference Between

“Remember when you learned about it?” he asked.

“How can I forget?” I was nine, the minimum age required by a local studio for the fusing class. I made a shitty mosaic coaster my mom still has. “Mom refuses to destroy the evidence.”

“I heard that!” Mom hollered from the kitchen.

“Mom didn’t want to shatter your dreams.” Dad grinned. “And I meant before.”

That story is worse than the fused coaster and has been told to death. Every time my mom runs into Iris Conway in the grocery store or sees a little boy that reminds her of me.

“Can’t say that I do.”

“Bullshit,” Dad said, his words turning to a deep cough that sounded like cancer. I stuck a straw in his water and gave it to him. He took a sip. “You learned to read because you fell in love.”

“I was seven!”

“Ah.” He set the water on the nightstand. “Still a damn good story.”

I snorted a laugh. It wasn’t that good of a story. Little Gavin had stars in his eyes for a teenage girl who ultimately taught him to read through the wonders of glass. My parents still have the book somewhere on a shelf with all the words we underlined and favorite pictures we circled.

I was seven—then eight—and she was seventeen. To any normal person, it would be an innocent crush long forgotten.

But not for my parents.

And especially not for Greg. He ran with it like a dog with a bone that led to the dream he had until the day he died.

“It’s not that good.” I looked at him sideways. Dad was tired and thin. Older than I’d ever seen him. Time shrank like hot glass in an annealer. I cleared my throat. “John emailed me about a teaching position.”

Dad nodded a single, strong nod that said Take it.

I’d already told John yes.

I snatched the remote from the bed. “Now can you stop talking so we can hear what they’re saying?”

Dad grunted. “You already know it all.” Before I could turn the volume up loud enough to drown him out, he said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

I looked at him then, both of us serious. There was a lump in my throat, there was a relieved resignation in his eyes. He was tired of fighting.

“Dying’s made you too reflective, old man,” I said, then turned the volume up as loud as it could go.

He laughed and I laughed—what else was there to do?—then we watched people make glass.

Much like the last day with my brother, I think of that last good day with my dad often. Every remembered word spoken accompanied by a bittersweet pain.

It was a good day; I just wish there would have been more. More of his documentaries, more jokes, more of him.

Six months later, he’s gone, but in front of me is that teenage girl he loved to talk about. Now a grown woman with a scowl on her face, glaring at me from the middle of her mom’s front yard.

She’s older—we both are—with a few lines around her dark eyes that pull me right to them. If I hadn’t already heard through the Fontain grapevine that she was in town, I might not have recognized her. But there’s no denying it’s Reese Conway. Just as pretty as that little boy thought she was all those years ago.

She doesn’t know it’s me; of course she doesn’t. Just because she set the trajectory of my life by simply doing a school assignment doesn’t mean it stayed with her for a minute after it was done.

My dad would have loved seeing her standing here, covered in fancy clothes and a face full of pissed off. He would have shaken her hand, thanked her, and told her the whole story she started over a glass of his wine.

Hell, maybe one day I’ll work up the nerve to tell her the same thing, but today’s not that day.

“Gavin,” I say, wiping a hand on my shirt before extending it out to her. “Nickels.”

Nine