Page 27 of The Boo Next Door

Ravi next, at the station. He hears the whole architecture and leans back against the engine and looks at me the way he looked at me over the hoses in week one.

"So let me get this straight. Plan is: bust yourself down from secret patron saint to regular citizen, put the funding where people can see it, and stop needing to win."

"That's the shape of it."

"Great plan. Love it. Been saying it for two years." He crosses his arms. "How long's it take?"

And there it is, because I've run the numbers six ways. Council doesn't meet until the second week of November. Sponsor commitments need paper, the bank needs a nonprofit shell or at least a town line item, and none of it — none of it — exists by Saturday.

"It doesn't fund this year," I admit. "This year, either I win it again, or the Fright runs on fumes and hope."

"Or," Ravi says, "you tell her. Tonight. All of it — letter, moon, money — and let the two smartest builders in town solve it together, instead of you solo-rigging it in the dark like every load-bearing idiot in history." He shoulders past me toward the bay, then stops. "You watched her preview. You really think a woman who builds a chair for the missing wouldn't understand a man funding a town's whole holiday off a trophy? That's the one person in New England who'd understand it, Grady. That's maybe the only person."

I don't answer. The tones don't save me this time either. He just leaves me there with it, in the bay, under the stuffed cat that's still zip-tied to the ladder truck, wearing its little scarf.

Six days. After Saturday, I tell her everything. The plan holds. The plan is a bad weld and I know it and it holds.

Wednesday night she cooks, and asks me about the first October.

Not out of nowhere. We're at her table, the cat's on his third chair — he has three chairs now, it happened gradually, like erosion — and she's been circling something all dinner, I can feel the flight pattern, and finally she sets down her fork and says, "Tell me about your first build. Here. The one that started it. You said somebody asked you to help."

"It was a long time ago."

"Four years. It was four years ago, Grady, it's not the Bronze Age. Who asked?"

And the whole thing is right there. On the runway. Cleared for takeoff. Your grandmother asked. She saw a man drowning in his own quiet from fifty feet away and drafted me, and everything I am in this town, she built, the way she built everything, seeing the finished thing inside the raw stock. There's a letter. There are forty-one props. There's a machine we should run together.

Three days before judging. It sounds like a tactic, says the old load calculation. It sounds like the incumbent showing the new kid whose town it is.

"Neighbor," I say. "Needed a hand with a heavy prop. It got out of hand from there."

She looks at me for a long moment. There's something in her face I can't read, and I'm good at her face now, I've been studying for the final, and this is a page I haven't seen — something patient and sad and braced, like a person holding a door open for someone who keeps not walking through it.

"Got out of hand," she repeats. "Yeah." She picks her fork back up. "Funny how much of you got built by other people's heavy props."

We do the dishes. She hip-checks me at the sink, tells the cat I wash like a surgeon and dry like a crime, laughs at the right speeds. And under all of it, one degree off true, that new page in her face I can't read.

I drive home the long way, which is a strange thing to say about forty feet, but I take the truck to the station to swap gear and come back the long way through town, past the green, and the Gourd's up there glowing over everything, and I have the conversation with the windshield that I keep not having with her.

Saturday. After the math can't be a weapon. Three more days of one bad weld.

Devil's Night makes the group chat by Wednesday.

It's a Hollow Creek tradition the way tetanus is a gardening tradition. Every October thirtieth, some rotating federation of teenagers conducts operations — soaped windows, egged mailboxes, and in the bad years, dead displays. Two years ago they got the Hendersons' whole inflatable navy in one night; Denise still posts the crime-scene photos on the anniversary. The chief doubles patrols. It helps the way umbrellas help in a car wash.

DEVIL'S NIGHT FRIDAY, the group chat hollers. LOCK UP YOUR SKELETONS. Denise has made a graphic. The graphic has a countdown clock on it. Ruth replies with a prayer-hands emoji, Marge replies with a photograph of the padlock aisle captioned like an arms dealer's holiday card, and Walt Henderson replies, with the weariness of a man who has lost a navy before, we know the drill.

Thursday night, I do my rounds like a man with two houses. Dragon anchors: checked. Floods: aimed. Then I stand at my kitchen window with the lights off, which is officially where I live now, and I look at the two yards. Her ghost family, paused mid-arrival on the dark lawn. Her windows, lit. Her porch light, on — she leaves it on all night, every night, and three weeks ago I didn't know that about her, and now it's load-bearing information, now it's the gauge I check before I can sleep.

The moon should go up tomorrow. She hasn't asked me for rigging help, which is her right under the treaty, and something about that sits wrong and I can't find the fastener that's loose. She's been quiet since Saturday. Runs her checks. Laughs a half-second late.

I check the locks on the garage twice, like the past is a thing you can padlock. Bee's forty-one props sit in the dark behind door number three, staged and clean, because I couldn't stand to store her work badly, and Saturday — after the Gourd, after the math stops being a weapon — I hand the whole museum home across the fence where it belongs, letter and all.

Tomorrow night, Hollow Creek's teenagers go monster-hunting.

I should worry about the dragon. Instead I stand at the dark window watching her porch light like it's a heartbeat on a monitor, guarding, it will turn out, exactly the wrong thing.

Chapter 11