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What was coming off that truck was white vinyl going yellow at the seams, with a scalloped valance around the entire perimeter. There were pennants. And along the front edge, in a script font eighteen inches high:

JUBILEE EVENTS & PARTY — SANTA ROSA — "MAKE IT A JUBILEE!"

And at each of the four corners, four enormous plastic finials shaped like pineapples.

"Harold," said Rhoda, in a voice from beyond the veil. "Harold!"

"I see it, sweetheart."

"There are pineapples."

"I see the pineapples."

"On the cathedral." She had both hands over her mouth and her bracelets had gone completely silent, which I have come to understand is the Cauthorne equivalent of a fire alarm. "Harold, that is where our son — there are pennants — Harold, is that lettering—"

"It says jubilee," said Harold, helpfully.

"I KNOW WHAT IT SAYS!"

Benny was already on the phone, walking a tight nine-foot circle in the grass, and I could hear the exact tone — the flat, courteous, homicidal calm of a professional being told something unacceptable by somebody with no authority to fix it.

He hung up.

"Right," he said. "Here's the situation."

"Benny—"

"Let me get through it, Rhoda, and then you can have your feelings." He consulted the iPad, which I do not believe he needed. "Our sailcloth is in Healdsburg. It went up yesterday at a different wedding, because the yard pulled the wrong order sheet on Monday. That wedding is Saturday. Our tent is currently spoken for by a family in Sonoma County who have also paid for it."

"Then they can take it down," said Rhoda.

"They will not be taking it down."

"Harold will call them."

"Harold calling them will not make them take it down."

"Everyone has a price," Rhoda said, in the tone of a woman who has spent forty years saying otherwise.

"Not this week." Benny shut the cover on the iPad. "It is the second Saturday in June. Every sailcloth structure between here and Mendocino is standing in somebody's field with somebody's grandmother sitting under it. I have called four vendors. There is nothing. There is this—" he gestured at the pineapples "—or there is open sky."

Rhoda made a strangled sound.

"I'm sorry," Benny said, and to his credit he meant it. "This is the one that got past me."

And that — right there — that was the moment.

I want to be honest about what happened inside me, because I've had two years on a boat to think about who I am, and I had about four seconds that morning to demonstrate that I'd learned anything at all from it.

What happened was: I felt wonderful.

Every part of me came online at once. Because I have solved this exact problem — not a similar problem, this problem — probably forty times. A hundred and forty people, no cover, and a location the client is emotional about. That's a Tuesday. That isn't even a bad Tuesday.

I had my phone out before I decided to have my phone out.

"Give me ninety minutes," I said.

Everyone turned around.