Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The gymnasium still had the homecoming banner up. It hung from one corner over the far basket, purple and gold.
The people of Rocky Ridge were filing into the building, a place most of them were quite familiar with.
The bleachers on both sides were pulled out.
The council sat at a cafeteria table under the near basket with a microphone stand in front of it and a pitcher of water nobody had poured from.
The woman at the center had her gavel on the table beside her reading glasses.
Cecelia counted. It was an old habit. She’d paid to print a flyer for every window and mailbox in town, and the room looked ready to hold most of them before the woman with the gavel had finished getting the microphone to work.
“Front row,” Wendy said in her ear. “You promised.”
She had.
The Dennisons had taken the front row on the left side as they took a row anywhere when they were all together. Rylee had saved her a seat. Tripp and Brent stood on the side with their hats in their hands, since seats had run out and real men didn’t sit when women were standing.
Jason wasn’t with the family.
She found him where she’d known she would. Back wall, by the doors, one shoulder against the cinder block, hat on. Tate beside him. Two of the same face, and only one of them looking at her, and she’d have known which from the parking lot.
He didn’t wave. He didn’t need to.
Her father came in through the side door with a leather portfolio and an easel under his arm, and he set them up himself.
There was nobody else to do it. Two renderings.
The lodge road with a resort where the trees were.
The same view from above, with the helipad drawn small and the trees drawn large.
He’d worn the navy suit, not the charcoal.
She’d been the one to tell him, years ago, that navy read as honest.
He didn’t look at her. He looked at the council, and then at the renderings, and then at his hands. That was new. Her father had never in his life looked at his hands in a room he meant to win.
The gavel came down once.
“This is the rezoning hearing for the parcel adjacent to the Dennison and Black properties,” the councilwoman said.
“Second notice. Properly given, this time.” She gave that time to go around the gym and come back.
“Everyone here got a piece of orange paper. A few of you got six. The proponent will present. Then public comment, three minutes each, and I mean three. Then we vote. Mr. Williams.”
He stood.
Cecelia had sat through her father presenting in six states, and she’d written half of what he’d said in them.
He was very good. He was still very good.
He walked the room through the numbers. Forty jobs in construction and sixty after, a tax base, a road the town had been promising to pave for a decade would be paved for this development.
He didn’t oversell. He never had. He said the helipad had been removed from the proposal, which was news to her, and he said it the same as he’d have said the weather.
Then he stopped, and turned a page in the portfolio he didn’t need to turn, and looked up at the room.
“There was a first hearing,” he said. “You know what happened to the notice for it. My daughter has already told this council who carried that out. She didn’t tell you whose instruction it was.
” He closed the portfolio. “It was mine. I’d like that in the minutes before you vote, so you’re voting on the proposal and not on the mystery. ”
He sat down.
The gym was unnaturally quiet. Beside her, Rylee’s hand had found her wrist and closed on it.
“So noted,” the councilwoman said, and wrote it down herself.
Public comment took an hour and cost a year.
An old rancher whose place ran up against the parcel talked for his three minutes about water rights and got a round of applause for going over.
A young man in a feed store cap said he’d been driving to Billings for work for two years and forty jobs in construction sounded like a good thing, and he got applause too, though not as much.
He sat back down with a red tinge to his face.
The woman who owned the building that housed the Bloom Shop said nothing about zoning and a great deal about what a resort did to a Main Street, testifying that she’d lived in a town that found out.
This town had the Overlook Grand, she said, and that was more than met their needs.
Mrs. Bailey spoke. Cecelia hadn’t expected that. She kept both hands on the microphone. “I was wrong about quite a few things over the past few months. I’ll be wrong about this, too, if I cast a vote based on who owned the land instead of what they plan to do with it. That’s all I have to say.”
She went back to her seat with her eyes down, not meeting the gaze of anyone she passed.
Then there was a gap at the microphone. “Anyone else?” The councilwoman looked around the room as quickly as possible. Her look said she didn’t want anyone else to decide to speak out.
Cecelia stood up and went to the podium.
The microphone was too tall for her and she didn’t lower it. She’d stood at taller.
“My name is Cecelia Williams. Most of you know that.” A few people laughed, which she hadn’t planned on, and she nodded.
“I’m not going to speak for the proposal or against it.
I’ve spoken for it often enough and it isn’t my job anymore.
I won’t speak against my father in a room where he can’t answer.
Since he’s already had time to speak his mind, he can’t respond to any comments on the record. ”
She looked at the council, one face at a time.
“I’m asking one thing. Vote on the land.
Not on him, and not on me. That’s the whole reason I paid for the flyers.
I wanted to make sure everyone who has a stake in this has a chance to speak on it.
” She took a breath. “I’m going to be living here in Rocky Ridge either way.
I’ll be just fine no matter what happens next. ”
She stepped away from the microphone before anyone could clap. She didn’t want it, and she’d said what she came to say. She took her seat between Rylee and Wendy, and neither of them said a word. Wendy put her hand on her knee and left it there.
She didn’t look at her father.
She looked at the back wall, and the man in the cowboy hat hadn’t moved.
“Call the vote,” the councilwoman said.
It took less than a minute. One yes, from Kyle Sinclair on the end, who’d been for it from the start and everyone knew it. Four no. The councilwoman said “The motion fails” as flatly as she’d said everything else, and brought the gavel down once, and that was the sound. Not a cheer.
Then the noise came, everything at the same time, chairs and coats and people who’d been sitting a long while, and Cecelia sat in the middle of it and didn’t get up.
Her father was folding the easel.
Nobody was helping him and nobody was going to. He had the renderings under one arm and the portfolio under the other. He was trying to collapse the legs with one hand, and it wasn’t working. He didn’t look up as the room moved around him without touching him.
She stood.
Rylee let go of her wrist. Faith moved her knees so Cecelia could get past, and didn’t ask, and that was the whole of the Dennisons in one motion.
She crossed the gym floor in the gray suit with everyone looking on, and the last twenty feet were the longest walk of her life, longer than the one into City Hall that she’d done in front of strangers.
She took the renderings out from under his arm.
He let her.
She held them while he got the easel legs to fold, and when he straightened up he was close enough that nobody else could hear, and he looked at her as he had in the hallway. The full appraisal. The one that found the wrinkle.
There wasn’t one.
“Front row,” her father said.
“I told you.”
“I saw.” He took the renderings back from her, carefully, as you take a thing from someone who’s earned the right to hand it to you. “I saw you the whole time.”