Sweat is rolling off Alex Harris’s neck, beading on his nose, and darkening his gray T-shirt. “I’ve never been this hot in my life,” he says.
At the marver again, he rolls the egg in powder-blue and cobalt glass powders, coloring its exterior.
Harris first came to Ignite last fall, and soon began working for Dick part-time. He’s nearly as keen about glassblowing as she is. “It amps up your awareness,” he says, his finished egg resting in an annealer, an oven that cools completed pieces gradually so they won’t break. “When I’m working in the hot shop, I get in a zone. The work consumes me.
The boys asked their grandmother if they could go out for a while. She said yes.
In the first weeks after Aaron’s death, “You could see the pain on Alex like a coat,” Vicky says. But he wouldn’t talk to her about it, and she didn’t know how to comfort him. She had her own grief to contend with, and she could only imagine how hard it was for Alex, given how close he was to Aaron and the fact that he’d witnessed the shooting.
Alex gave in. They made an appointment, and Alex kept it.
