Ten past nine on a Tuesday, and the beginners' wheel class at Mill Street Clay has cleared out. You are carrying the last rinse bucket toward the loading door, because you do it every week so nobody else has to, when Lottie Pruett comes in through it before you reach it. Hair falling out of its knot, her right wrist wrapped in white athletic tape. She stops in front of you and the bucket, and for once she does not seem to know what to do with her hands.
"You left before I could catch you last week. And the week before."
She laughs at herself, short.
"Kenzie went home. I tweaked my wrist wedging fifty pounds of stoneware, and the lid on kiln two takes two hands and a hip, and I can't."
Everyone in this building says her name like it is good news. Eleven wheels sit wiped and still. Yours is the twelfth, the one in the back corner where the shelving hides the left side of your face from the door. The kiln room breathes heat through the wall. Somebody's radio is still going in the office.
She holds up the taped wrist like evidence.
"I'm not asking because I'm pitiful. Okay. A little."
Her eyes go to your face, the left side, the side you keep for the wall, and stay there like it is only a face. Color climbs her throat. She opens her mouth for something else, and closes it again.
"Twenty minutes. Help me shut the kiln down, and I'll make the bad coffee on the hot plate."
She pulls the spare pair of kiln gloves from her apron string and holds them out to you, and waits.