The Sin Eater 7: Glass

It was Christmas.

Uncle Wrath was not at Grandpa’s that night, or he had already thundered into the streets.

Uncle Ball was my godfather now, and I had saved my money to buy him a special gift.

Dinner was eaten and the doorbell rang.

We were all sitting in the second living room and the doorbell rang.

Ball had been waiting all night and the doorbell had finally rung.

He didn’t jump to his feet. He didn’t scramble or tumble, even though he was sitting on the floor. He was just on his feet. Well balanced. He was calm. He was smiling, but it was a different kind of smile, as if after seventeen years his mouth had finally figured out the riddle that was a smile. He moved differently as he went to the door. His hands were held up to his chest and slightly away from his body, fidgeting as if he were practicing opening the door. As if in his mind, he was trying to get this one last obstacle out of the way.

He opened the door. Silence.

“She’s here,” Rose whispered to Aunt.

They came in together. It’s a thing that soulmates do. Nothing is planned. Not the walk, the hands, or the positioning. He did not have his arm draped around her. He held her hand softly. He held it slightly up, chest level, as if the hand was floating ever so slightly and his hand was floating with it.

All I remember about Glass was her perfection. It’s because I saw her next to him. Her hair was brown but it wasn’t trying very hard. It wasn’t putting its shoulder into the whole brunette thing. There was too much gold in that brown to pull off brunette. Her hair rippled like relaxed curls, and I had never seen that before in real life. Only in movies. Only in the places where nothing is real. But Glass was real. Her face, I’m not sure how to describe her face. Dammit I knew you guys would ask.

Do you know what a cameo is? Not when a popular character pops their head in for a scene like Aunt just did, but a cameo the jewel. They are almost gone now. I have not seen a woman wearing a cameo in so long, I’m not even sure I can make you really see one, but they are oval and decorative, with a stone of some kind in the center. The entire piece is about the size of two quarters set on a table touching. The stone is dark. I’ve seen dark blue. I’ve seen dark green. I have seen deep red, but that stone is not what catches your eye. It is the profile.

On every cameo is the ivory profile of a woman. She is pale, she is soft, she is perfect. Her hair is bound high on her head with tendrils dripping. Her perfectly formed chin is lifted ever so slightly, and no one knows if she is smiling or not.

The smile might just be carved on and not real at all. I think the cameo’s smile is real on the women she approves of. The true and powerful woman who wears her proudly as a broach or a necklace. I have seen some women wearing a cameo and I know that smile is fake. That cameo does not want to be on that woman.

But then there are certain women who will wear a cameo and the smile on that carved face shines.

There, now you know what it was like to look in to Glass’s face.

She wasn’t wearing white, but I can’t see her any other way. She came directly into the house and walked right up to me. She dropped to her knees in front of me, kissed my cheek. “I’m happy to meet you. I have heard so much about you. You are just as handsome as I expected you to be.”

“My uncles say I’m ugly,” I said to her. I would have looked at my feet if they existed. I would have looked in my lap or anywhere else, but nothing was out there. No figure, person, or item was out there for me. It was just her face. The way her fingers twisted the lock of hair from my forehead.

“Needs a damn haircut,” Grandpa grumbled.

“I have to tell you a secret that only you and I can know, okay Jesse?” Glass said.

I figured out how to look past her to Uncle Ball, who was shining behind her. He looked down on us with that smile I had never seen before. She looked back at him and he nodded. She smiled, bent in close to whisper in my ear.

“If anything ever happens to your parents, I will be your mother.” The kiss she placed on my cheek is long gone. The Devil and his devices wiped it away. The plots and priorities of the Devil burned from my mind the memory of her kiss, but it was there. Not a butterfly wing. Not a wet smacker. Not a light brush of a kiss, but the kind of kiss she invented for the things she loved. A Glass kiss. So fragile and so fleeting.

Got him a chin-up bar. I told my mom I wanted to get him some weights and she insisted he would love this more. She explained to me what it was, and she explained that the only thing you have to struggle with when you are on a chin-up bar is the oppression of your own weight. When you grip a chin-up bar and fight to pull yourself above it, only you are in your way. A chin-up bar holds only you accountable.

They stretched it in the doorway between the kitchen and the second living room. There it stayed. I was in that house eight years later, after Stone had rolled down to Waynesville, and we moved in, after we moved out and Uncle Savior and Aunt moved in. Every time I went to that house, I saw that perfect gleaming chin-up bar. And the men of that house struggled with it all the time. Held back only by their own weight.

She sat with me. Uncle Ball dropped on one side. She slipped between us, slid over, under his arm, and took my hand in hers. I looked at them often. They were at that time the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

She had brought me a gift and no one else. She bought me a plastic knife. It was a big one, the good kind with the curved serrated side. Kinda like Rambo, but it didn’t have the compass. That knife. She bought me a plastic one of those.

I saw her one more time. She was not a cameo this night, but something akin to a fey. She was not human that night but a fairy without wings. A charm donned in a white dress, with flaring hair, the smile. The only smile. And a laugh. A laugh like, well a laugh like ringing glass.

At weddings, when the Best Man stands to give his speech, he rings his fork against his champagne glass to get everyone’s attention. That was her laugh. That was what Glass’s laugh sounded like.

He was in a white and black tux. Perfect flaming red hair. Slight mustache perched precariously on his lip. He looked regal. I had never seen anything like it. When Glass stood beside him, he was finished. The piece of art that was Uncle Ball could be picked up and placed on a shelf to gleam for the rest of our lives.

Well prom is such a way. Prom, the couple have to go to both families’ houses to take pictures.

Glass asked if I could be there and Rose drove us out to see them off.

And then like that, Glass was gone.

He had me brought to him. Called my mother and begged her to bring me to him. I walked into the coolest room I had ever been in and saw him curled up on his bed crying. I tried to ask. He just held me and wept. As I tried to get my tiny arms around him, I could feel pieces of him breaking off. I knew they had ended without being told. I held my godfather as the image of the family he would offer me crumbled, and I had no idea why.

But you do. You know exactly what went wrong. He had found the one he would marry. He had found his soulmate. But marriage cannot retire a man working his number. Never has, never will. Everything went sour after Glass shattered in the wicked embrace of the Mocking family men.

Wherever she is, she is not happy.