Chapter 21
By eight in the morning the parking lot outside the arts center held more trucks than Dave had ever seen there. By nine, the building was full of people who had no earthly reason to be here except that Beth and her friend, Rachel, had asked them to come.
When Beth first asked about holding a building bee, he’d been horrified. They were restoring an old building. It took time, patience, and skill. Letting volunteers loose on a building of this size was asking for trouble.
But after Beth pointed out how much money they could save, and how much time it would free up for the subcontractors to do other work, he’d listened a little harder.
What finally convinced him was her argument that the center was for the community.
And if they needed council support, they were more likely to get that if the community felt involved.
So, here he was, welcoming people onto the building site and handing out high-vis vests.
“I count forty,” Hank said, surveying the scene from just inside the door. “Maybe fifty. Mabel brought her whole mahjong club.”
“I didn’t know Mabel had a mahjong club.”
“She does now. Started it Tuesday, apparently, so she could bring everyone here today.” Hank grinned. “Woman’s a marketing genius. Ought to run for council.”
Dave watched the room fill in around him.
Folding tables were being set up with paint trays and ladders were going up along the gallery wall.
A knot of teenagers from the high school were hauling scrap lumber out to the dumpster under Colton’s cheerful, mostly competent direction.
In the middle of it, moving from group to group with a clipboard she didn’t seem to need, was Beth.
He’d never watched her organize a crowd of people quite like this. She had a gift for it that he suspected she didn’t fully know. She gave each person a task that suited them, with no fuss and no second-guessing.
“Laurel,” she was saying, when Dave drifted close enough to hear, “you’re in charge of the supply table.
You’re the only one who can find anything on it once Rachel’s touched it.
Susan, your baking class parents are on primer duty in the back room.
They signed up for messy and I intend to give it to them. Maria—”
“I already know,” Maria called from the kitchen doorway, an apron already on. “I’m feeding everyone.”
Beth laughed and moved on to the next knot of volunteers. Dave smiled as he watched her work instead of doing any work of his own.
“You’re staring,” Hank said, not quietly.
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re staring, and you’ve had that roller in your hand for four minutes without touching the wall.” Hank clapped him on the shoulder and pointed him toward the gallery corner. “Go be useful before somebody notices you’re not.”
Dave went, but he kept half an eye on Beth for the rest of the morning. He thought about the council meeting, the speech she hadn’t planned, the way she’d said she’d only figured out what she believed by saying it out loud. He wondered if she had any idea of what everyone else could plainly see.
Around eleven, the piano arrived.
It had been donated by a woman on Lake Road who no longer had anyone to play it.
Dave didn’t know much about pianos, but this one was magnificent.
The dark walnut casing still gleamed, even though it looked incredibly old.
They’d left it until now for delivery because it was about the size and weight of a small car.
It was also, everyone quickly discovered, four inches too wide for the door into the main events area.
“Turn it on its side,” Rachel suggested.
Hank frowned. “You turn a piano on its side, you’re liable to break something that costs more than the piano.” He circled it with the deep suspicion of a man who’d fought this exact battle before. “Needs to go through at an angle. Feet first, then pivot.”
Rachel stuck her hands on her hips. “That’s not a real angle, Hank, that’s a guess.”
“It’s an educated guess,” Hank told her.
What followed was twenty minutes of genuine chaos. Hank directed, Rachel contradicted, and half of the volunteer crowd gathered to offer opinions nobody had asked for.
Rosa arrived partway through. As far as Dave could tell, it was only to disagree with her husband, which she did with visible relish.
In the end, Dave and Colton dismantled the doorframe, and with a lot of maneuvering, they managed to get the piano through without destroying too much of the wall.
When the piano was finally in its temporary resting place, the volunteers let out a cheer that Dave suspected could be heard at the diner.
He caught Beth’s eye across the room. The noise of the crowd fell away, and it was just the two of them, seeing the same ridiculous thing and finding it funny at the same time.
It felt, for that one moment, like something closer than friendship, closer than colleagues.
It was the kind of recognition he hadn’t let himself feel with anyone in nine years.
Beth looked away first and Dave moved on to the next job he wanted to tackle, but Beth was never far from his thoughts.
By dusk, the arts center was transformed. The walls were primed, the piano was in place, and the piles of scrap lumber, sawdust, and other leftover building materials were gone.
Dave stood at the door as the last of the volunteers filtered out into the dark. Hank locked the main doors behind them, and Dave looked back once more at what they’d done.
Beth was still inside, walking a slow circle through it alone, taking in everything.
Dave didn’t go back in. Some moments, he thought, a person needed to have on their own. But before he got into his truck he looked back at the center.
He could see Beth through one of the windows. She was talking to Hank. The stripes on their high-vis vests gleamed under the fluorescent lights as they stared at the ceiling.
Someday soon, he’d ask her where she saw their friendship heading. But for today, it was enough to know they’d done a solid day’s work with people who cared about the arts center.