Page 33 of The Boo Next Door

"I'll pour the footings today," he says, into my hair, completely level, and the laugh comes up through the crying like the two were always the same system — the scream into the laugh, the whole machine — and we kneel there in the middle of one lawn holding on, while up and down Foxglove Lane, porch by porch, Halloween wakes up around us.

There's a length of silence, and then, against my temple: "There's more to tell. The money part. It's worse and stupider than you think."

"Worse how?"

"I've secretly been the contest's entire budget for three years and it has made my personal finances gothic."

"Oh my God." I pull back and look at him. "You're the town's Halloween. You've been the town's Halloween the whole time."

"I'm the town's bucket," he says. "Apparently. Dottie explained me to myself at midnight. It's on the agenda to be furious about, but the committee meets in November."

And then, because he's Grady, because the man does nothing without checking the whole load path, he pulls back far enough to look at me straight, and delivers the one he's clearly been machining all night.

"The moon didn't come with the house. Your grandmother built it in nineteen eighty-one, she taught me everything I know over six years of pretending I was doing her favors, and there was never a day this month I didn't want to tell you. That's the sentence. I've owed it to you since your first night in my bed, and I paid you a lie instead because I decided — I decided, like it was mine to decide — that you couldn't carry the truth and the contest at the same time." His jaw does the thing, and then, deliberately, stops doing it. "You could have carried both. You'd have carried them better than I did. I'm sorry, Lila."

"Yeah," I say. "You are." I flatten my hand over his fire-bell heart, where the paperwork's filed. "Sentence accepted. Footings today, Ellis. I want to see equipment."

The form arrives at noon, hand-delivered, because Behrens does not trust joint entries to the postal system.

CONSOLIDATION OF ADJACENT ENTRIES (EMERGENCY PROVISION), it says across the top, in typeface that can only be described as freshly grieving. Two signature lines. Behrens watches us sign like a notary at a hostage exchange, then reveals, from a folder, a second document — a hand-drawn site map of both lots as one entry, which he has clearly stayed up producing, complete with a small, careful, unasked-for illustration of the moon.

"For the archive," he says, with dignity, and drives away at eleven miles an hour.

Judging night arrives the way it's arrived for forty-one years, at the exact speed of dusk.

By six the lane is a river. Word of the annexation made the group chat by eight a.m. — Denise, scooped by four hundred pedestrians, has been livestreaming since noon in penance — and the whole county comes down Foxglove at a slow parade shuffle, cider in hand. They flow up the walk between the storm lanterns, past the bride and her travelers, under the folded dragon's outward stare, and the door opens itself, glad, and the table waits with its chair pulled out, and the moon rides crooked over all of it, and I stand at the cider table watching four hundred strangers do the exact thing I engineered and it never gets old: slow up. Go quiet. Reach for whoever they came with.

The scream into the laugh into the third thing. The lump. Bee's favorite. The one you build twelve champions deep and maybe touch twice.

Barb Finch — Carol's sister, out-of-county, has a police scanner and no filter — reports at six thirty that the vandals got caught in Millbridge hitting displays with the same truck they used on mine. Bowling league exonerated in full. Mr. Henderson accepts the town's apologies on the twins' behalf with tremendous grace and one lap of the green with his coffee raised, four last places avenged in a single evening.

At seven, the committee walks the entries. At seven forty, on the bandstand on the green with the Great Gourd glowing overhead, Behrens takes the microphone, taps it three times because he learned from the master, and reads from a piece of paper trembling with its own historic weight.

"The committee wishes to note that this year's deliberation required the creation of two new forms." A pause. Nobody breathes. Behrens's forms are town scripture. "By unanimous vote, with founder's discretion invoked under bylaw one — the bylaw," and here his voice actually cracks, "handwritten by Beatrice Merriweather in nineteen eighty-five, which reads, in full, if it ever gets complicated, remember what it's for⁠—"

Dottie takes the microphone from him, because Behrens has begun to weep on it.

"Oh, give it here. The Golden Gourd goes to thirteen and fifteen Foxglove Lane," Dottie says. "Jointly. First time in forty-one years. The check gets split, the trophy gets shared, and the Haunted Homes Tour has already called twice because their feature slot goes to — I'm reading the form — one property. Which it is." She looks up, finds us in the crowd, and permits herself one entirely unprofessional smile. "Come get your pumpkin, you ridiculous people."

The green does not cheer so much as detonate. Somewhere in the roar Frankie is screaming directly into my ear that the wedding fund is real and accruing interest, Marge is ringing the hardware store's fire bell, which has never once been rung for a fire, and Ravi and six firefighters have gotten the probie up on their shoulders in his monster suit, head off, beaming, the good monster, and I take Grady Ellis's hand and we go up the bandstand steps together into the orange light and take hold of one small golden pumpkin with four hands, exactly the way we've held every strap this month, and I look out at Hollow Creek losing its mind in the cold and think, with the specific clarity that only ever arrives on bandstands and ladders: ten thousand dollars, split, does not fix my roof.

And I could not possibly care less, because the man holding the other half of this pumpkin fixes roofs, and I know for a fact he works cheap for family.

The bonfire goes up at nine in the field past the green, and the costumes come out, and this town in costume is a fever dream — Dottie is a very small Athena, Marge has come as her own register, POPCORN $1 pinned to her cardigan, Frankie and her staff are all mutually incompatible eras of Dracula. Grady appears at my elbow in turnout gear he has creatively distressed with cobwebs, which for a volunteer firefighter is either a costume or a Tuesday, and hands me cider, and stands beside me at the fire with the whole town orbiting, and then does the thing.

In front of everyone — in front of Denise's actual raised phone — he takes off the helmet, drops it in the grass, turns my chin up with two paste-scarred fingers, and kisses me at the Halloween bonfire like a man signing something notarized. The town roars. Somewhere Frankie screams about compound interest. Beetlejuice, at home, senses a disturbance and is smug about it, I'd stake my half of the prize.

"That's the reveal," Grady says against my mouth. "Mask off. For the record."

"You were wearing a helmet."

"You know what I mean."

I do. I lace my cold fingers into his warm ones, and the fire roars, and the moon rides crooked over two houses that are apparently one address now, and the town is still cheering when he leans down and asks, low, just mine, what I'm doing for the rest of the holiday.

Every holiday.

I don't answer until we're all the way across the field, off the far edge of the firelight, headed up the dark lane hand in hand toward the yard with no fence in it.