Epilogue
Lila
One year later, the fence never grew back.
Things that did grow: the Fright, which now runs on a sponsorship board with twenty-nine names and its own line in the town budget, restored by unanimous council vote in a meeting where Behrens presented forms for forty minutes and nobody minded.
The group chat, which has schismed into four chats, all of which I'm somehow in.
The wedding fund at Frankie's, which was a joke until it wasn't, and which paid for exactly one thing, this June — the good champagne, drunk out of jam jars on a lawn with no fence in it, by a town that took full credit.
And the compound, as the hashtag insists on calling it. Founders' Fright headquarters, one double lot, two houses, one moon.
Tonight is our second Halloween, our first as hosts, and from the porch — from Bee's rocker, specifically, with a clipboard and a headset and a cat — I can see the whole machine running at once.
The judged route goes down the far side of the lane this year, eleven entries deep, because with the champions retired into management, the field went wild: Marge built a haunted hardware store in her actual hardware store, and Frankie's staff have turned the coffee shop into something called The Depresso Zone that has to be experienced to be believed, and the Hendersons, the actual Hendersons, are currently sitting in third with an inflatable armada so shameless the judges keep going back.
Walt has waited six years for this. If he places, this town will hear about it until the sun burns out, and he will have earned it.
Our lawn doesn't compete anymore. Our lawn is the finish line.
Gary and the skeleton troops work the cider table now, semi-retired, posed in aprons.
Carla the flamingo has a witch hat for every weekend in October, funded by a group-chat dues structure nobody remembers voting for.
My build sheets still say WWLD across the top, except the new hires keep asking what it stands for, and I keep telling them the truth: it stands for whatever gets the town to the third thing.
The homecoming runs bigger this year — nine ghosts now, the bride leading, the travelers arriving up the walk all night with their luggage, the table set and steaming, the chair pulled out — and after the route, the whole town ends up here, cider in hand, under the moon.
The moon that got me proposed to in front of four hundred people, three weeks ago, at the pre-season rig check, and I want the record to reflect that I did it to myself.
Because here's the thing about the chip.
All summer, working in the shed on commission after commission — Bee Spooked Designs has a waitlist now, a real one, with a hotel on it — I kept glancing up at that chipped smile, and the glances compounded, the way they do with me, into a plan.
Love is maintenance. So the morning of the October rig check, with the whole volunteer crew and half the street standing around drinking Frankie's coffee, I got up on the scaffold with my paste kit, and I announced, to the moon, out loud, because I announce everything to everything, "Okay, old girl.
You've been places. This year the chip finally gets patched. "
And the crew went strangely quiet, and I should have noticed, and I didn't, because I was already working my fingers into the chip to clean it for layup.
And found it plugged. With a small cedar box, sanded satin, built by hand to fit the void exactly — perfect miters, of course, absolutely level in its little socket, the joinery a sentence, the whole thing a memoir — and my heart had already fallen off the scaffold before I got the lid open.
He'd had it up there for eleven months. Since the week the moon first flew over both houses.
"You patch everything," he said from the bottom of the scaffold, not even nervous, the enormous gothic romantic, four hundred people already screaming, Denise's phone already up, Beetlejuice already on the porch rail looking insufferably like the mastermind.
"Bee said when you finally went to fix the chip, I should let you.
She was right about everything else. Figured she was right about the timing, too. "
Reader, I threw the paste kit at him. And then I climbed down the scaffold at a speed that violated every safety standard I hold sacred, and said yes into his mouth in front of the entire assembled volunteer corps of Founders' Fright, and Ruth rang Marge's fire bell, and the wedding fund jar achieved sentience, and the chip — by unanimous vote of two — stays. Unpatched. Permanently.
A moon should look like whoever it belongs to. Ours has a place where a ring lived for eleven months. You can see it from the street when the light's right, a little shadow in the smile, like it knows something.
At seven, Dottie finds me on the porch for the annual passing of the clipboard, except this year, in place of the clipboard, she carries a velvet bag, the kind trophies sleep in.
"Committee voted last night," she says, without preamble, because she's Dottie, though a year of Sunday dinners on this porch has taught me her preambles just live in her face now.
"The Golden Gourd's retiring. Permanent display case at town hall, next to the photograph — you know the one.
Nineteen ninety-eight, the hay wagon." She sets the bag in my lap, and through the velvet I can feel the little pumpkin's familiar weight, one month ours, forty-one years everyone's.
"Starting this year it's the Beatrice Merriweather Memorial Gourd.
New trophy. Behrens designed it. He cried on the drawings, they're a little warped, we're calling it patina. "
I look down at the bag, and then at the yard, where the town is starting to pool under the moon, and I do not do the ugly cry, because I've reached the stage of grief where it comes out as architecture instead.
"She'd say it's gaudy," I manage.
"She'd say it's gaudy, and she'd polish it with her own sleeve when she thought nobody was looking." Dottie settles into the second rocker, the one that lives on this porch now, unexplained, exactly her size. "Nice crowd tonight. Bigger than last year."
"Eleven hundred forty," I say. "Denise counts. The methodology's consistent."
Midnight does what midnight does.
The route's gone dark, the last cider's poured, the crowd's thinned to family — which is a big word now, it turns out, it means a firefighter and his wife, a coffee empress with foam in her Dracula collar, a committee chair asleep in a rocker with a velvet bag in her lap, a man in the yard coiling cable in the cold because he physically cannot leave a cable uncoiled, and a cat on a rail, keeping the watch.
I carry the iron mold out to the middle of the lawn myself this year. He meets me there with the matches, and the first one takes — first one, this time, cupped in our four hands, and I choose to read that as administrative approval from the chair.
The little flame settles into the old iron face. It grins up between our boots, one small light for the dead, and behind us the porch is loud and gold and full of the living, and over us the moon rides crooked above two houses that stopped being two of anything a year ago.
"Happy Halloween, Bee." I say it out loud, on the front lawn, the way this town does everything, the way she taught me, the way I'll teach whoever's next, because there's a chair at the table pulled out for them already, whoever they turn out to be.
"The porch light's on. The show ran clean.
Walt might finally place, brace yourself. "
The wind moves the maple. The flame holds.
"I'm home," I tell my grandmother, and the man beside me takes my cold hand in his warm one under a moon we all built together, and from the rail, slow and green and unblinking, Beetlejuice closes his eyes.
Which in cat, as everyone in this family knows by now, means both things.