I turned the cracked mug over in my hands at my table in the farmers market, with the lemonade going warm in the thermos and my daughter sitting beside me on the stool, and I studied the stamp on the bottom as I once studied the thumbprint on a lunch tray. It was the M of Merle, deep and a little crooked. The glaze had run down into the crack, a smooth blue stream, and that told me the whole story. The crack was there before the fire. Merle would never have put a flawed pot in the oven.
I smoothed the receipt from the gallery flat on the table. It was typed neatly. Fourteen pieces, it said, consigned in April by a man who gave his name as the executor of the estate of Merle, and described them as late works, rare, from the final year. The gallery, a small shop on Lyndale Avenue, had priced them at ninety five dollars each. Under the list somebody had written the number and underlined it. I did the sum in my head. It came to thirteen hundred and thirty dollars.
“Shelby,” I said, “did you know?” She shook her head so hard that her earrings swung. “Mom, I swear on Grandpa. Jace told me he was selling some of his old camera gear.” She was crying. “He asked to see the studio in April, when you were at the church supper. He said he wanted to take pictures for his channel. I stayed in the car on the telephone. He was in the shed for an hour. I did not think anything of it.” She covered her face with both hands.
I knew exactly what he had taken. On the lowest shelf at the back of the shed, behind the sack of clay, Merle kept what he called the rejects. Pots that had cracked in drying, or sagged on the wheel, or come out of the first firing with a flaw. He never threw them away. He meant to smash them with a hammer on a Sunday, he said, but he never found the heart. They were rough, unfinished, and signed with the stamp, because he stamped every pot the moment it left the wheel.
The work of a man who loved what he made is worth more than the price on any tag, and cannot be sold by someone who never knew him.
I called the gallery from the market, standing between a table of honey and a table of pickles. The owner, a woman named Ms. Aldana, listened with a patience that I admired. I explained who I was and who Merle had been. There was a long silence. “Mrs. Lindahl,” she said, in a low voice, “I am so sorry. He showed me a paper that looked like a letter of authority. I should have asked for more.” She said she would pull the remaining pieces from the shelf that very hour.
By the end of the week, she had done more than that. Eight of the fourteen pots had not yet sold, and she shipped them back to me, wrapped in tissue, with a note of apology. The six that had gone to buyers she traced by their receipts, one by one, and she wrote to each of them herself. All six agreed to return their pieces for a full refund, which she paid from the gallery. She also sent a check for the difference to cover my trouble. I framed the note and put the check in the bank.
Jace was another matter. The gallery had his name and address on the consignment form. Ms. Aldana gave them to me, and I wrote him a letter, a plain one, in the careful hand I used to use for notes to parents. I said that I would not report him if he repaid the gallery the thirteen hundred and thirty dollars in thirty days and wrote to apologize. I said that a man who borrows the work of the dead owes the living an explanation. He sent a money order in nineteen days with a short, ashamed note.
Shelby ended it with him on the porch, in the rain. She came to my house afterward and slept in her old bedroom for a week. We did not talk about it much. We made grilled cheese sandwiches and watched an old movie. On the fifth night she asked whether I could teach her to use the wheel. I said that I was a beginner, but I could show her what I had learned. We went out to the shed together in our pajamas, and I lit the stove.
Her first bowl collapsed into a puddle. She laughed until she had to sit on the floor. The second one stood up. I took the cracked mug from the shelf and told her about a Japanese art I had read of in a magazine at the dentist, where broken pottery is mended with gold, so that the crack becomes the most beautiful part. We ordered a little kit that week. It took us a whole Saturday, with tweezers and a lamp, and a good deal of swearing.
The mug sits now on the shelf of the Coulee Cup, with a small card beside it that tells the story. It is not for sale. It holds a seam of gold down its blue side, bright as a river on a map. People ask to touch it, and the barista lets them. Shelby works a Saturday shift there, and on Sundays we throw pots in the shed, side by side. We stamp every one with a small M and a small S.
On the first of June, the market opened for the season, and I set up my table with two hundred mugs, every one with a little thumb rest. Shelby arranged them by color while I made change. A young man in a baseball cap lifted one and turned it over to look at the bottom. “Who is the M?” he asked. “My husband,” I said. “And the S?” I looked at my daughter and smiled. “That is the next one.”
