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"That's the assessment."
"Mm-hm." A creak — the chair, leaning back. "You know, Wes called me Tuesday. Wanted to know how you got roped into three weeks of candle duty. Called it above and beyond. Said, quote, 'that's Brady for you, the man doesn't do anything halfway.'" A pause with a whole conversation in it. "He's right about that. Send me the security plan when it's drafted. And Callahan — whatever you're doing up there. Do it careful."
He hangs up before I can decide which thing he meant, which is the point of how Alden hangs up.
I look at the ridge in the rearview, the black scar on it, the town below dressed up in dry timber and fairy lights.
Not just the barn.
Chapter 6
Sloane
Not just the barn is apparently the theme of my week, because the whole town has opinions about my insurance assessment now.
I'm in line at Steep Grade on Thursday morning, picking up the order Junie started making the moment she saw my car pull in — my usual and Brady's, which is a fact I will be taking to my grave — when Bev Hollis materializes beside me the way she does, from nowhere, like weather with a purse.
"Sloane, honey." Bev's hand lands on my arm. Bev has opened every conversation of her seventy-one years with physical custody of the other person. "We're all just so excited about your big party. Whole town's coming. I'm bringing my sister from Oneonta, she's mad about candles, I told her about your Mountain Man one—" and here Bev's voice drops into the register she thinks is subtle, which can be heard from the pharmacy, "—speaking of which. Are you seeing him? The mountain man? The big one, with the truck?"
The espresso machine chooses this moment to go quiet, and I swear the entire café leans in one degree, like a field of sunflowers.
"He's doing my fire assessment, Bev."
"That's not a no, sweetheart."
"It's a professional — he's my brother's friend. He's assessing the barn. There's paperwork. Reams of it. It couldn't be more boring." I'm talking too fast. I hear myself talking too fast, and I hear the too-fast get logged by every retiree in a nine-table radius, and somewhere behind the counter Junie makes a noise like a teakettle being smug.
"Course, course." Bev pats my arm, satisfied, already composing tonight's phone calls. "It's just he watches you, is all. At the hardware store Tuesday. You were up the ladder after the ember mesh and he stood under you the whole time like a man waiting to catch a piano." She collects her scone. "Anyway. My sister wants three of the musk ones. Bye, honey!"
The worst part — the part I will deny under oath — is that the piano thing lands somewhere soft. Because I know exactly the moment she means. Tuesday, the hardware store, me up the rolling ladder hunting ember mesh on the top shelf, and when I came down with it he was right there, one hand loose at his side, not hovering, never hovering, just — positioned. Load-bearing. I'd clocked it and filed it under professional liability concern and now Bev's got it filed under courtship, and honestly her filing system might be better than mine.
Junie slides the two cups across the counter. On mine, in Sharpie, she has drawn a small piano.
"I hate this town," I tell her.
"You'd die anywhere else," she says, correct. "Also, ask him what happened at the bandstand overnight — Deputy Ferro was in at six a.m. looking like a rock slide, wouldn't say a word, which for Ferro is a press conference." She lowers her voice, and for once there's no tease in it. "Second cruiser's been parking on Main after dark. People are locking their barns, Sloanie. Ask your fire priest what he knows."
What my fire priest knows, he is not saying, but I'm developing a translation guide.
He's on my property when I get back — early again, third day running — walking the field with a wheel measure and a roll of marking flags, laying out the fire table positions like the world's most severe wedding planner. Cedar-and-coffee steam comes off him in the cold when I hand over his cup, and our fingers do the thing.
The thing has been happening all week. An accidental brush at the coffee handoff. Both of us reaching into the kit bag. Yesterday, passing the paint pen — a pen, an object with a hundred safe square inches — and somehow managing full palm contact like a couple of Victorians.
Today it's the cup, his fingers closing over mine for one second too long, warm through the cardboard, and neither of us pulls back on schedule, and Wick watches from the fence post with his tail doing slow, judgmental math.
"Thanks," Brady says, to the cup.
"Mm-hm," I say, to the field.
We are professionals.
We work the morning side by side. He measures, I flag, and somewhere in hour two it stops being his layout or mine and becomes just ours, this thing we're building in the grass with little orange flags. He tells me the fire tables cleared freight in Albany. I tell him ticket sales crossed one-ninety — I flipped the RSVPs to real tickets the day the fire tables got real, because free maybes don't pay for propane — and he doesn't flinch, he just adds a flag to the access lane like one-ninety is a number he's already planned around. When I hop down off the flatbed trailer, his hand is there — at my elbow, barely, gone before it lands — and Bev's voice in my head says like a man waiting to catch a piano, and I flag the next position with unnecessary violence.
The freight truck arrives at eleven with my fire tables, and I get to watch Brady Callahan receive a delivery, which turns out to be a whole genre of entertainment.
He checks the manifest against his spec sheet line by line while the driver, a philosophical man named Gus, leans on his hand truck and mouths is he serious at me over Brady's shoulder. He inspects each table's valve assembly before signing. He tests the auto-shutoff on the floor model twice, timing it against his watch, and when it passes he says "good" with such quiet finality that Gus straightens up like he's been knighted.
"Sir, I've delivered these to four venues this year," Gus offers. "Nobody's ever tested the—"
