Chapter 2
Grady
She talked to the yard for ten minutes last night.
I wasn't watching. I was winterizing the compressor with the garage door open, and her porch light was on, and a man can't help what's in his sight lines. She stood in the cold in a jacket built for Florida, said something to nobody, and the big black cat supervised from the window like a foreman.
I knew her face before she said her name at the fence.
Bee's fridge was covered in it. Bee's mantel.
Bee's wallet, the cracked leather one, first photo in the sleeve — a gap-toothed kid holding a paintbrush like a sword.
I spent six years hearing about Lila the way you hear about weather somewhere else.
My granddaughter builds monsters for a living, she'd say, like other people say my granddaughter is a surgeon.
And now the granddaughter lives forty feet from my kitchen, and I looked her dead in the eye and said the compressor runs at six.
Smooth, Ellis.
My phone buzzes on the workbench. Ravi.
Heard the Merriweather girl entered. Town's already taking bets.
I set the phone down. Pick it back up.
Who's favored?
You, it says. Then, a second later: For now. Marge saw her paperwork. Says she wrote her name like she was signing a declaration of war.
I put the phone face-down, which has never once stopped a problem from existing, and I look at the far wall of the garage. At the tarp.
Under the tarp, on shelving I built to museum spec because I couldn't stand to do it worse, is Bee Merriweather's life's work. Forty-one props. The bride. The pirate cannon. The moon with the chipped smile, packed in moving blankets like a patient in intensive care.
And in the drawer of the workbench, in an envelope soft from handling, the letter.
I don't need to read it. I could recite it. But I open the drawer anyway, because apparently today is a day we handle everything gently and feel terrible.
Grady, it says, in that handwriting like barbed wire pulled straight.
The doctors talk to me now the way you talk to your fog machine when the pump's going, so let's not waste paper. Three things.
Keep the Fright alive. You know what I mean and you know why I can't ask anyone else. The town won't fund joy. Towns never do. Make them think it's tradition and they'll pay for it themselves — you've seen how I do it.
Look after my Lila when she comes home. She will come home. She'll come home mad at herself and calling it something else, and she will not want looking after, so you'll have to be smart about it, which worries me, because you're about as subtle as your dragon.
And Grady. This is the one that matters. Don't you dare let her win out of pity. She'll know. She always knows. If she takes that Gourd off you, she takes it square, or it'll poison the whole thing.
The props are yours to keep safe, not to keep. You'll know the difference when it matters.
— B.
You'll know the difference when it matters. Six years I fixed that woman's wiring, hauled her ladders, learned fog timing off her like an apprenticeship I didn't know I was in, and she still signed off with a riddle.
I fold the letter along its worn creases and put it back in the drawer, under the socket set, where nobody looks.
Then I go do the stupid thing.
She's on her porch when I come around the fence line, halfway up a stepladder with a staple gun, running an extension cord along the gutter. One extension cord. Orange. The kind they sell in gas stations for people whose needs are modest.
Plugged into it: a power strip. Plugged into the power strip: another power strip.
My eye starts doing something involuntary.
"That's a daisy chain," I say.
She doesn't turn around. "It's ambition."
"It's a National Fire Protection Association violation."
"You know the fire code by heart. Of course you do." She staples the cord to my blood pressure. "Let me guess. You're also in a barbershop quartet and you coach youth soccer."
"I don't sing."
"But you do coach youth soccer."
I don't say anything, which is answer enough, and she makes a small victorious sound and comes down the ladder, and this close, in daylight, I finally see what the photos flatten out.
She's got paint on her hands already. Day two in town.
There's a pencil shoved through the dark knot of her hair like a structural element, load-bearing, and her eyes are Bee's eyes, that same brown that catalogs everything and files most of it under evidence.
"Your porch panel is sixty years old," I tell her. "Fuses, not breakers. Whatever you're planning, that panel won't hold it, and I'd rather not cut you out of a house fire in a month. Professionally speaking."
"Professionally speaking."
"I'll take a look at it. Won't take an hour." And because Bee is standing somewhere behind my ribs with her arms crossed, I add, "Honestly, you'd be doing me a favor. I've been meaning to check where her service line—"
"There it is." She points the staple gun at me. Not loaded, probably. "That's the move. Bee warned me about you."
Everything in my chest stops. "What?"
"Ask Grady before you rewire the porch," she quotes, and her mouth twists on the name like it kept a seed in it.
"He'll act like it's a favor to him. She left a note.
So whatever this is — the aw-shucks, the neighborly, the youth soccer — you can retire it.
You're the competition. I've been beaten to death with charm by professionals, and I quit my whole life to come here, so. "
She stops. Recalibrates. I watch her decide she said more than she meant to, and I watch her decide to double down instead of retreat, and God help me, it's the exact sequence Bee used to run.
"So I'm going to win the Gourd," she says. "And you're going to watch it happen from inside your fog."
The wind moves. Up the street, one of the Hendersons' inflatable tombstones deflates with a long sigh, like even the decorations are tired of the Hendersons.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?" She squints. "That's it?"
"That's it."
"You're not going to do a speech? Defend your title? Nothing?"
"Panel's still going to fail," I say, and I walk back around the fence, and I don't smile until there's lumber between us.
Marge's hardware store smells like every good decision I've ever made. Cut pine and machine oil and the popcorn machine by the register that Marge runs year-round on the theory that popcorn moves paint.
I'm at the counter with a spool of low-voltage wire and sixty feet of chain when Dottie Pruitt appears at my elbow. Dottie doesn't arrive places. She's suddenly present, like weather, like a clause in a contract you should have read.
"Grady." She examines my purchases over her glasses. "Chain. For the dragon's articulation, I assume."
"Wing joints."
"Mm." Dottie has a way of saying mm that files paperwork. "The committee had our little meeting Sunday. Behrens wanted to know if we should just engrave your name on the Gourd now and save the man at the trophy shop the rush fee in November."
"Tell Behrens I said that's premature."
"I told Behrens he was being an idiot, which covers premature.
" She takes off her glasses, which is how I know we've arrived at the actual conversation.
"Bee's granddaughter registered last night.
Crossed her grandmother's name off the returning-entrant list and wrote her own over it.
Ruth at the table said it was like watching someone re-flag a country. "
"I heard."
"You heard." She looks at me the way she's looked at me across three years of quiet arrangements, deposit slips passed across her kitchen table, both of us pretending it's normal for a contest prize to boomerang back into the contest. "This got complicated, didn't it."
"It was always complicated."
"No," Dottie says. "It was heavy. There's a difference." She puts her glasses back on. "The girl's got Bee's hands, you know. Ruth said she filled the form out in draftsman's lettering without thinking about it. You should see what that turns into by Halloween before you get comfortable."
"I'm never comfortable."
"You're the most comfortable-looking man in this county.
It's your whole disguise." She takes her popcorn from Marge and goes, pausing at the door.
"Sunday deposit, usual time. And Grady. Whatever you're carrying about that girl — and I can see you carrying it, you're doing the thing with your jaw — set it down before it sets you down. "
The bell over the door announces her exit. Marge rings me up, sixty feet of chain and a silence with popcorn in it, and doesn't ask a single question, which for Marge is a cardiac event.
"Go ahead," I say.
"She bought forty sheets of foam board this morning.
" Marge doesn't even pretend to fight it.
"And a staple gun. The good one. And she asked me what gauge cord her grandmother used to run the moon off, which, Grady, that girl asked it in gauges, and I nearly cried right at the register.
" She bags my wire. "It's like Bee walked back in twenty-nine years old with worse credit. "
"You going to tell me everything she buys?"
"Absolutely. Same as I tell her everything you buy." Marge beams at me, a woman with a popcorn machine and no allegiances. "It's called community, honey."
Firehouse, Tuesday night. We're doing hose inspection, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds, and Ravi is doing what Ravi does, which is inspect me instead.
"So she yelled at you," he says.
"She didn't yell."
"Marge said yelling."
"Marge was two hundred yards away inside a hardware store."
"Marge has instruments." He racks a length of hose. "You gonna tell her about the shed?"
I take my time with a coupling that doesn't need it.
Ravi has known me nine years. He was there when I moved to Hollow Creek with a truck, a divorce, and a plan to speak to no one indefinitely.
He was also there the first October, when the old woman next door looked at me over the fence, said, You're big, hold this moon, and drafted me into something I didn't have a name for yet.
"The letter says look after her," I say.
"It doesn't say hand her a grief bomb in week one.
She just buried her grandmother. She finds out Bee's props are in my garage, that Bee wrote me a letter, before she's even slept a full week in that house—" I rack the hose harder than the hose deserves.
"She'd read it wrong. Anyone would read it wrong. "
"So you're going to read it wrong for her. On her behalf. As a gift."
"I'm going to wait for the right time."
"Yeah." Ravi nods, slow, the way he does at car fires when someone says they're pretty sure the extinguisher handled it. "Famous plan. Historically great results."
I don't answer, because the truth doesn't fit in the bay.
The truth is the math I've been doing since the bandstand.
The prize money goes where it always goes — Dottie knows, the bank knows, nobody else.
Three years of winnings is the only reason there's still a kids' Haunted Walk, still insurance on the Gourd, still a Founders' Fright at all, because the town cut that budget line the year Bee got sick, and Bee handed me the fix like a work order.
If I win a fourth time, the Fright lives another year.
If she loses this contest, she loses the house. Marge got that out of the lawyer's secretary in a day and a half. Eighteen grand of roof between that woman and a for-sale sign.
Keep the Fright alive. Look after my Lila.
"You know what your problem is," Ravi says, when the hoses are racked and we're standing in the bay door watching nothing, which is a firehouse tradition older than hydrants.
"You're going to tell me."
"You think if you hold everything carefully enough, nothing counts as a decision." He claps me on the shoulder. "The tarp in your garage is a decision, man. Every day it stays on, you're deciding."
He goes home to his wife. I go home to a bone dragon.
Wednesday, five forty in the morning, I'm in the garage with coffee, and the compressor sits there primed and ready, and I don't turn it on.
I stand there like an idiot with my hand on the switch.
Six years, the fog test runs at six a.m., because dawn fog photographs wrong and I like to check the density against dark sky.
It's the routine. Routines are load-bearing.
You take out one bolt and you find out real fast which ones were structural.
Her bedroom light isn't even on. She wouldn't know. That's the thing — she would never know, and I'd have the density data, and the only cost is a woman who called me the competition getting a full night's sleep in a house that's hemorrhaging money she doesn't have.
I take my hand off the switch.
I test the fog at eight thirty like some kind of amateur, and the density reads fine, and I stand in my own yard in the drift of it, annoyed at the sky, annoyed at the readout, annoyed at a sticky note I've never seen that apparently introduced me as a con man.
He'll act like it's a favor to him. That's what stings.
Not that Bee said it. That Bee was right.
It is a favor to me. All of it was ever a favor to me — the ladders, the wiring, the moon, hold this.
She let me believe I was helping an old woman, and by the time I figured out the direction the help was flowing, I belonged somewhere, and it was too late to be embarrassed about it.
Her granddaughter figured out my whole operation in one porch conversation.
There's no version of October where I keep both promises. And the worst part — the part I'd never say in this bay or anywhere else — is that when she pointed that staple gun at me and declared war with paint on her hands, my first thought wasn't strategy.
It was: there she is.
The one out of all the photographs. Standing in my sight lines. Loud, stubborn, wired wrong for the load she's carrying.
Across the fence, her porch light comes on. A shadow crosses it hauling foam board, one sheet at a time, talking the whole trip — to herself, to the boards, to the cat riding shotgun on the porch rail like a site inspector. Forty sheets. She'll be at it past midnight.
I could carry ten at a time. I could have it done in two trips.
I go inside and shut the garage.
I'm in trouble, and it's not the kind the fire code covers.