Chapter Twenty-One
Lucy
Half of Truckee was standing in the parking lot to watch it.
The fire crew in their navy T-shirts. The committee in folding chairs.
Kids from the elementary school in red plastic helmets somebody had handed out by the box.
The woman from the hardware store with a thermos.
An old man in a Korean War veteran cap who’d come every single day since August and sat on the same overturned bucket by the fence, and who saluted the building every morning when he left.
“Easy,” the crane operator called. “Easy—bring it left—”
The framers on the top plate reached up in their harnesses and caught the truss by its ends like they were catching a sheet off a line, and walked it into place, and drove the first nails, and the sound of the nail guns rang across the lot, pop pop pop, and the whole crowd cheered as if somebody had scored.
Owen stood next to me with his arms folded and his jaw working.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I’m not.”
“You are. Your eyes are doing the thing.”
“It’s sawdust.” He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “It’s a very dusty day.”
The chief climbed the ladder with a little fir tree in one hand, not two feet tall, its roots bundled in burlap.
It’s an old builders’ tradition—when the highest beam goes up, you nail a tree to it for luck, to thank the forest for the wood.
The chief was a solid woman and not a graceful climber, and when she got to the top and held the tree up over her head, the kids screamed like it was Christmas.
She looked down at me from the ridge. “Lucy! Get up here!”
“Absolutely not.”
“This is your building!”
“It’s your building. I just drew it.”
“Same thing,” she shouted, and nailed the tree to the peak with three blows of a framing hammer, and the fire engine parked by the curb let off one long happy blast of its air horn that made every dog in the lot, including mine, lose its mind.
I stood there with my clipboard pressed flat to my chest and looked up at the roofline against the blue. My roofline. The slope I’d argued with the engineer about for a week in August. It was exactly what I’d drawn. It was exactly right.
And then, because apparently I can’t have one clean feeling anymore, I looked across the lot and found Rhys.
* * *
He’d come every Saturday for three weeks now.
The first time, the Saturday after the tape measure, he’d shown up at seven with a jacket, finally, and asked Owen if there was anything he could carry.
Owen had looked at him for a long, long moment and then pointed at a stack of two-by-tens and said, “Those. Over there. Don’t drop them on anybody who matters. ”
He was terrible at it. He was a man who’d spent twenty years carrying nothing heavier than a phone, and it showed.
He carried lumber the way you’d carry a sleeping toddler, clutched to his chest, both arms, face pressed against the wood.
He got splinters. He got a bruise the size of a plum on his shin from a sawhorse.
The second Saturday he put his whole weight on a board that wasn’t nailed down and went through a floor joist bay up to his hip, and Owen hauled him out by his collar and said, “Lift with your legs, CEO,” and walked away, and I heard him laughing behind the dumpster for a full minute.
Today Rhys was helping the framers’ kid haul scrap to the pile. His sleeves were rolled up. There was sawdust in his hair and a smear of something blue on his cheek. A woman from the committee was talking to him, and he was listening, really listening, nodding, not selling her anything.
The memo was in Cilla’s safe in San Francisco now.
I’d photographed it at four in the morning and sent it to her, and at eight I’d driven down to Glenbrook with the original in a manila folder on the passenger seat and put it in Rhys’s hands at the kitchen island in the owner’s house, without saying a word.
He’d read it standing up. All four sentences. Then the two letters in the corner. I watched him find them. I watched the color leave his face in a single sheet, the way frost comes off lumber.
“I don’t remember it,” he’d said finally. “Luce, I swear to God. I don’t remember signing that.”
“I believe you,” I’d said. “That’s the problem.”
“I initialed everything she gave me. Everything. I thought that was trust.”
“It was,” I’d said. “Just not in me.”
Because I did believe him. He’d initialed forty things a day in 2018 that Margot put in front of him, and he’d trusted every one of them, and this one had been less than three months after he wrote she’s the designer to our architect.
The same hand. The same pen, for all I knew.
It wasn’t that he’d chosen to erase me. It was that he hadn’t noticed he was doing it.
And I didn’t know which was worse, and I’d stopped asking myself, because I didn’t like either answer.
He’d asked, when I was already at the door with the folder under my arm, very quietly, if he could still come on Saturdays.
I’d said I’d think about it. And then Saturday came, and there he was at seven, and I hadn’t sent him away.
* * *
At noon the committee set up folding tables on sawhorses, and somebody’s husband showed up with four slow cookers of chili and a sheet cake with a fire truck on it in red frosting. The kids got the corner pieces. The old man from the bucket got the first bowl, and the chief carried it to him.
I carried two bowls across the lot to where Rhys’s truck was parked by the fence and put the tailgate down and sat on it. After a minute, he came and sat on the other end, not close.
“You made it through without going through the floor,” I said.
“It’s a slab today. I checked.” He took the bowl I handed him. “Thank you.”
We ate. The chili was too salty and very good. Juniper sat below us on the gravel with the focused, spiritual patience of a dog who knows about chili.
“Lucy.” He set his spoon down. “Can I say something?”
“Is it a pitch?”
“No.”
“Then yes.”
“I want to pay for the roof.” He said it fast, like he’d been holding it all morning. “The committee’s short. I heard them talking. Something with the metal panels, the supplier raised the price. I could just—”
“No.”
“It’s not a gesture. It’s money that’s sitting there—”
“No.” I put my own bowl down. I dug in the pocket of my canvas coat for my carpenter’s pencil, and I looked around, and there was a scrap of roof sheathing leaning against the fence, a clean triangle of plywood about the size of a cutting board. I pulled it over and laid it across my knees.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing it down. So neither of us can say later that we didn’t know.”
I wrote in big flat capitals, the way I letter a title block.
1. NO MONEY.
He watched me do it. He didn’t argue.
2. NO FIXING.
“That one’s for me,” he said.
“They’re all for you. I’m not the one who keeps trying to buy a fire station.”
3. ASK FIRST.
I underlined the last one twice. Then I turned the plywood around and held it up so he could read it.
“You want to come on Saturdays,” I said.
“You want to be in my life right now, in any way at all. These are the rules. You don’t pay for things to make me feel better, or to make you feel better.
You don’t fix things. You don’t call a guy, you don’t make it go away, you don’t buy a building.
And before you do anything that touches my life—anything—you ask me first. Out loud. And you wait for the answer.”
He looked at the plywood for a long time. Around us, the kids were throwing chunks of fire-truck cake at each other and the old man from the bucket was telling somebody’s teenager about Korea.
“Can I ask something now?” he said.
“That’s the rule working. Yes.”
“Can I keep it?” He nodded at the sheathing. “The sign.”
I hadn’t expected that. I held it for a second longer. Then I handed it across the tailgate, and he took it in both hands, the way he’d taken the tape measure that first morning, like it might go off.
“It’s plywood, Rhys.”
“I know what it is.”
My phone buzzed in my coat. CILLA. I almost let it go. Cilla doesn’t call on Saturdays. Cilla thinks Saturday phone calls are for emergencies and grandmothers.
I slid off the tailgate and walked a few steps away toward the fence. “Hey.”
“Are you somewhere you can talk?”
“I’m at a fire station eating chili.”
“Okay. Keep eating. Listen.” I heard papers turning. “Summit’s counsel sent me their position this morning, and it’s coordinated with Margot’s lawyer. They’re not arguing the dates anymore. The email killed that. They’ve changed the whole theory.”
“To what?”
“Work made for hire,” Cilla said. “They’re going to argue that you were effectively an employee of Sterling Resorts when you drew all of it, so the company owns everything you made, automatically, no assignment needed.”
“I was never an employee. I was never paid a dime.”
“I know. But they found a page from the old company website. 2019. The About Us section, with the team headshots.” She paused, and in the pause I could hear her deciding how to say it. “You’re on it, Lucy. Your picture, your name. And under it, your title.”
My mouth had gone dry. “What title?”
“Design Director,” Cilla said. “In parentheses, underneath: unpaid.”