“Galleries, mostly.”

Mom looked disappointed. “Nothing new?”

The aunt turned. “Not really.” She lightly touched one of the dozen pots on the worktable—tall jars, still ragged at their bases with untrimmed clay.

“She’s going through a functional phase.” Sam’s mouth quirked.

“Ha. There’s an idea. That’d be a good phase for me.”

The assistant nodded and sighed, glum again, then disappeared into the back room.

Mom wandered past the row of windows. The lake and sky cut the world into two bands: bleak gray and bleaker gray. She halted when she got to the garbage bin and pulled out half of a pale-green pitcher. “What happened?” Holding the broken piece with one hand, she reached inside for a curved shard of something else in the same shade of green.

“Bad firing.” The aunt made a face. She went to stand by her sister and toed a cardboard box on the floor. “These all have to go.”

“What? That’s nuts.” Mom let the broken pieces drop back into the garbage and bent to inspect the box’s contents. She pulled out a mug. “Goodness gracious. Don’t throw these out.”

“They’re rejects.”

Mom thumbed a frozen rivulet of glaze at the mug’s foot. “They just dripped a little. I’ll take them.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll send you home with a shitload, but not these.” The aunt took the mug from Mom and threw it into the garbage. It landed with a loud crack. Aunt Wren scowled at the box. “Too much flux in the glaze. Thought I had the recipe down, even added a few minutes to the firing hold, but the celadon’s still giving me crap.”

Mom clucked. “I hate to see them destroyed.”

Aunt Wren crossed the room. “I don’t believe in giving away seconds. Seconds stick around as long as the firsts do. For years and years, thousands of years. So no. Those are garbage. But these…” She picked a mug out of her inventory and waited for her sister to join her. “How about this one to start with? You can have your morning coffee in it. See this?” She thumbed the lip. “I call it cream-breaking-red. Sam calls it blush.”

“So pretty.”

“It’s yours.”

She thanked her and pressed the mug against her chest. Her smile disappeared when she glanced at Maggie. “Why are you way over there?”

“Oh.” She straightened from the wall and walked over.

Mom held out her new mug.

“Beautiful.”

Aunt Wren selected a second cup in earthy browns. “And for Margaret. To go with the Bambi eyes.”

“Thank you.” It was curvy and big, the browns in matte and gloss, and with a perfect ribbon of a handle. Maybe not the kind of sculpture her mother was looking for, but sculptural in its own way.

Inspecting her mug, Mom asked, “You don’t use any lead glazes, do you?”