Matt
Heather Starling texted me a dinner invitation the night after my first meeting with Elizabeth, and I spent the better part of a day deciding how to feel about it.
The message was friendly and completely unambiguous.
We feed the people who work this festival.
Dinner tomorrow, six o’clock. Bring nothing but an appetite.
There was no polite way out of it that wouldn’t insult the whole family at once, and I didn’t want a way out of it anyway, which was the part that took me the day to admit.
Then Elizabeth texted me the morning of.
Elizabeth: Fair warning. My family is a lot, and they will devour you whole. Come out early, and I’ll walk you through who’s who before you’re outnumbered.
Me: I’ve served warrants. I’ll manage.
Elizabeth: Dinner is at six, but come a little early. Bring nothing. Tiffany will interrogate you regardless; this is just so you know which questions are traps.
Me: There are traps?
Elizabeth: Several.
Me: Copy. Show up early. I’ll wear something I can run in.
So that’s how I ended up on the Starling farm early, standing in the yard with a woman in a canvas jacket and a pen behind her ear while she briefed me on her relatives like I was going into a hostile building.
“Donna does not miss a word,” she said. “She’ll be elbow-deep in dinner prep with her back turned and somehow come out of that kitchen knowing what you said, who you said it to, and what you meant by it.
Whatever she asks you tonight, she’s confirming, not learning.
Aunt Tiffany’s going to ask you something wildly personal in the first ten minutes—that’s affection; she doesn’t do it to people she dislikes.
Delilah’s sixteen and thinks all of us are idiots, and honestly she’s got a case.
Beau’s twelve and will simply tell you things.
He has no filter of any kind. It’s very relaxing. ”
“Your mother?”
“My mother,” Elizabeth said, “already likes you, which means she’s going to be perfectly polite and you’ll never know what she actually thinks until she mentions it in passing at the co-op sometime next spring.”
“And your grandmother?”
Something flickered across her face and got smoothed over fast. “Under doctor’s orders up at the Big House.
She’ll want a full report. She’ll get one, probably from Tiffany who can’t keep a secret from her even if she were paid.
” She started walking. “Come on. We’ve got time to kill, and I’m not standing in a driveway. ”
We came around the equipment shed, the barn stood up in front of us, and I stopped.
In daylight, off duty, with nothing to do but look at it, it was worse than I’d thought.
The June storm had peeled the northeast corner of the roof back like the lid of a can, and the tarp strapped over it had only ever been a stopgap, lifting at a loose grommet, letting the weather work underneath.
Rain had gotten into the decking. You could see the dark stain spreading down the inside wall where the doors stood open.
“Don’t,” Elizabeth said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You made a face. You made a very specific face at my barn.”
“That’s going to come through the first hard storm.”
“I’m aware.” She said it lightly, but she’d stopped walking too, and she wasn’t looking at me. “It’s on the list. It’s a long list.”
And there it was, that old pull starting up in me, the one I’m not proud of.
A problem with a clear solution and nobody currently solving it.
It isn’t a noble feeling. It feels like relief.
A problem I can fix is a problem that can’t surprise me, and a man who’s busy fixing things doesn’t have to stand still long enough to be asked what he wants.
Jonas came around the shed with a coil of rope over one shoulder.
Donna’s oldest is a big man, but he carries it easy, all of it earned off this farm rather than out of any gym—forearms hay bales built, a jaw that hadn’t seen a razor in a few days, dark hair shoved back under a ball cap.
He has a tape measure on his belt and the deeply unbothered expression of a man who says what needs saying and not one word past it.
He followed my eyes up to the wounded corner of the roof.
“That decking’s rotting from the top down,” I said. “You got a ladder?”
Jonas looked at the barn. Then at me, off duty in a flannel, clearly not dressed for a roof. Then back at the barn, and something crossed his face that was close kin to relief—the look of a man who’s been trying to solve a problem alone and just heard a second set of boots on the gravel.
“Got two ladders,” Jonas said.
“Absolutely not,” Elizabeth said.
We both looked at her.
“You are a guest. My mother invited you to dinner. You are not spending your whole afternoon on my grandmother’s roof.”
“I’ve got time before dinner and nothing to do with it.”
“Matt.”
“Elizabeth.” I held her eyes. “It’s going to rain this week.”
She stood there in the yard with her arms crossed, and I watched her run the whole calculation—the pride, the manners, the tarp, the winter feed stacked in that loft—and I watched exactly which one won.
“Fine,” she said. “But you’re eating extra dessert, and I’m not taking any argument about it.”
So I left my truck keys on the porch rail and climbed up onto Iris Starling’s barn roof with her grandson, and spent the next three hours doing the kind of work that empties your head out clean.
We pulled the ruined tarp and surveyed the decking; it was bad, but not beyond saving if somebody got to it before the rains set in for real.
Jonas had salvage lumber in the shed and a nail gun and a generator, and we got a proper patch over the worst of it—square, weather tight, the kind that would hold through the season, barring any big weather events.
We didn’t talk much. There’s peace in working beside a man who also doesn’t see the point in narrating it.
Below us, the farm went on doing what a farm does on a good fall afternoon.
Cars turning in off the road, the stand’s screen door slapping, somebody’s kid shrieking down by the wagon, Delilah’s voice carrying over all of it as she talked a customer into a second jar of honey.
Nobody paid us much mind after the first hour.
A cop on a barn roof stops being news pretty quick when there’s cider and treats to buy.
The women knew we were up there inside of ten minutes.
Heather came out to look, put both hands on her hips, and said something to Elizabeth I couldn’t hear that made Elizabeth laugh and go red at the same time.
Donna appeared at the base of the ladder with two glasses of iced tea and the flat announcement that anybody who fell off that roof was going to be very embarrassed at his own funeral.
Tiffany hollered up something about liability from the direction of the stand.
And every so often, when I stood up to stretch my back, Elizabeth was down there in the yard.
Not watching, exactly. She had a clipboard and a hundred things to do, and she did them, moving between the stand and the booth and the house.
But she came past that barn about four times more than the day’s work required, and once, when I looked down, she was just standing there at the bottom of the ladder with her arms folded, looking up at us working.
She caught me catching her.
“Structural inspection,” she called up.
“Sure.”
“I’m the coordinator. I inspect.”
“You’re supervising a man you told an hour ago not to get on the roof. And you’ve got a stand full of customers.”
“Delilah’s on the register.” She didn’t move. “New information came in. I adjusted.”
She went back to her clipboard, and I got back to my hammer with a stupid grin on my face that I was glad the roof pitch hid.
Beau came out around four. Tiffany’s boy—twelve or so, all elbows, wearing a coat he hadn’t zipped—and stood at the base of the ladder with open interest.
“Are you a real cop?”
“I am.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Not currently.”
“Mom says you’re Aunt Lizzie’s contestant.”
“I’m helping Jonas with the roof,” I said, which was true and not an answer.
“He’s the contestant,” Jonas said from the peak, without looking up from the nail gun.
I made a note to discuss loyalty with Jonas.
Beau considered the whole situation with the gravity of a kid taking a deposition, decided the roof was less interesting than whatever Delilah was doing in the barn, and left.
That was the extent of the interrogation.
He came back once with a package of cookies, handed two up the ladder without comment, and left again.
The rain held off. The light went bronze across the fields.
And around dinner time, the screen door of the little house by the patch banged open—the kitchen window had gone warm and yellow, and a good smell was rolling out of it across the whole yard—and Heather leaned out with her apron on and hollered that dinner was on, and that if her mother’s roof had eaten a police officer there would be consequences.
“Wash up. There’s a sink in the mudroom and a plate with your name on it, and I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. Beau made place cards.”
I had been managed. I knew I’d been managed. I went and washed up.
Dinner at the Starlings’ is not so much a meal as a controlled collision.
They’d packed into the little house’s kitchen, more people than the room was zoned for, and the whole operation ran on some system nobody had ever written down.
Heather at the head. Donna working the stove and the conversation at the same time.
Tiffany and Delilah going back and forth about a car.
Beau, the place card artist, had seated me next to himself, which I understood to be a position of honor, and spent the first ten minutes explaining his design choices to anyone who slowed down enough to be captured.
Dishes came around without anybody asking for them.
Somebody’s hand appeared over my shoulder with a basket of rolls and was gone before I could thank it.