HEARD THE CRACK

Ruth Burndt-Burkett remembered dearly her father, who was a gifted orator, a handsome devil, and, concomitant to those two qualities, an irresistible salesman. He sold custom glassware, tumblers into which the customer could etch up to four letters and a small illustration no larger than one in ch square, and she accompanied him on one of his trips, leaving Boston, working the hundred-miles radius, Hindale to West Mystic, Wellfleet. He called out the stops like a conductor and in a sense that was exactly what he was. He would pull up in front of a house, listening for any shattered jingling as they slowed, and then walk around and take his sample case out of the trunk. One sample was modeled on Ruth, who was at the time a simple Ruth Anne Burndt, and carried an RAB and then a small sketch of a pony. He had made one for her mother, too, MMB, the former Milly Minnard, and the sketch there was unaccountably of him, her father, holding up what she always remembered as a tube of lipstick alongside his grinning face. That glass had broken up around Casco Bay. He heard the crack back in the trunk, the second it happened, and opened both the trunk and the case with resignation. “It’s going to rain,” he said, wrapping the jagged pieces in a towel and heading for the garbage can. There was, she knew, a meteorology to the whole thing.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas