Chapter Nine
Lucy
The agenda had my name on it, and I read it three times while the chief hunted for a working dry-erase marker.
It was one sheet of copy paper, run off crooked on the machine in the back of the temporary station, which was a double-wide trailer on cinder blocks with an engine parked beside it under a fabric shelter.
Item one: call to order. Item two: grant update.
Item three: Schematic design review—Lucy Hart.
Not Lucy Sterling. Not Mrs. Sterling, which was what the woman at the bank called me, or Rhys’s wife, which was what everybody else did. Just my name, the one I was born with, in twelve-point Times New Roman between the grant update and the coffee fund.
I folded the agenda in half and put it in my back pocket like a ten-dollar bill I’d found on the sidewalk.
“Okay,” said the chief. She’d been running a department out of a trailer for a year without once, as far as I could tell, raising her voice. “We’ve got the grant people at four, so let’s not do a whole town hall. Lucy, you’re up.”
There were seven of us around a folding table: the chief; two firefighters in navy T-shirts; a retired contractor with a hearing aid and opinions; a woman from the town council; a man from the water district who said nothing all afternoon; and me.
I pinned Scheme B to the paneling with pushpins from my pocket and felt my heart going the way it used to before a client presentation, back when I had clients.
“So,” I said. “It’s a kitchen table with a building around it.”
One of the firefighters laughed. The young one, with the sunburned neck. “That’s the most accurate thing anybody’s ever said about a firehouse.”
I walked them through it. The bays, the decon corridor, the kitchen in the middle with sightlines to the doors. The bunks on the east side for morning light. The watch office. The hose tower with its one window facing the pass.
The contractor leaned back until his chair creaked. “That tower’s gonna cost you.”
“It’s eighteen feet taller than the roof,” I said. “You need it anyway for hose. The window is four hundred dollars. I priced it.”
“Four hundred.”
“Four-twelve. With the flashing.”
He grunted and wrote something down, and the chief looked at me over her reading glasses with an expression I hadn’t seen aimed at me in a long time. It took me a second to name it. It was respect. Plain and professional. The look you give somebody who’s done her homework.
The older firefighter tapped the east side of the plan. “Bunks upstairs. That means a pole?”
“No pole.”
“Aw, come on.”
“Poles break ankles. You get a stair with a wide tread and a handrail on both sides, and it’s twelve steps to the bay door. I timed it at the old station in Kings Beach. It’s faster than you think.”
“You timed it,” he said.
“I timed it with a stopwatch and a guy in socks.”
“Who was the guy in socks?”
“My brother,” I said, and the whole table laughed, and the chief wrote no pole on her legal pad and underlined it twice.
“How long’s the table?” asked the young firefighter.
“Fourteen feet. Seats sixteen.”
“We’re only twelve on a shift.”
“When the mutual-aid crews come through from the other districts, you’ll want to feed them.”
He looked at the chief. The chief looked at the drawing. Nobody said anything for a second, and in that second I understood that I’d guessed right about something that mattered to them, something they’d never have thought to ask for.
“Where do we get a fourteen-foot table?” the chief said.
“My brother builds them.”
The councilwoman had been studying me since I walked in, in the careful way people in a small town study you when they’re trying to place your face. Now she snapped her fingers.
“Hart Owen had taken Juniper to Mom’s for dinner, because Mom believed a dog that old deserved pot roast. The light had gone long and gold, laying the shadow of the building out across the gravel like a second building lying down.
I had the drawings under one arm and the agenda in my back pocket and my keys already out, and I was halfway up the stairs, humming, actually humming, before I looked up.
Margot Kline was standing at my studio door with a bottle of wine.