"I'm starting to think it was a good idea for you to not have a car," I said, gingerly stepping out of the golf cart. "You're a crazy driver."
"I'm a great driver!"
"You're aggressive," I said, hauling the bags of fertilizer out of the back of the golf cart.
"Nothing like a big strong man!" Ida said when I walked up with the bags.
"Ida," her sister, Edna, snapped. Edna was a judge in Harrogate, and no one wanted to end up in her courtroom. She was known for making grown men sob like little babies.
"This is looking good!" Hazel said. There was an array of flowers in a gradation of oranges, pinks, and yellows.
"Yes, we needed to spruce the place up a bit," Edna said. "It would be great if more people would help instead of lollygagging about."
"I'm working," Ida grumbled. "Hey, when's lunch?"
* * *
After several more harrowinggolf cart rides to drop off more paint, tell the people prepping the mural areas to confirm the sizing, and give Olivia a ride to several of the historic buildings to make sure people were pressure washing them correctly, we took glass cleaner and newspaper inside the historic city hall building. My brothers were all scurrying around inside, on ladders, cleaning the huge windows.
"I see streaks," Hunter said, his low voice slipping throughout the large room.
"Why do we have to clean?" Otis was whining.
"Part of the Art Zurich tour is to take the people through these historic buildings," Hazel said. "It's what makes our town unique."
"It's so much glass." Peyton sighed, squirting more Windex on his newspaper.
"Well, hop to it," I told them, "because there's three times as much glass in the exhibition hall, where we're holding the gala."
Otis looked at me in shock.
"I'm just kidding," I said, laughing. "I'll hire a cleaning firm for that!"
"The windows look great!" Hazel said to my brothers. They beamed. The hall did look nice. The sun streamed through the sparkling windows and lit up the mural on the opposite wall.
Hazel checked her clipboard as we left the building. "It's almost time for lunch. Because we didn't want people leaving the work site," Hazel said, "we're bringing the lunch to the different workers."
When we arrived at her café, she loaded me down with boxes of sandwiches, and we zoomed around, delivering drinks, chips, and sandwiches.
"I didn't put nice labels on them," she fretted as I took several boxes to the families painting the colorful bikes.
"I think people are going to be so happy to have something to eat, they won't care," I assured her while trying to sneak a sandwich.
"Those are for the volunteers!" she said.
"Then maybe I'll eat something else," I whispered, leaning over to kiss her.
* * *
Most of theteams wrapped up a few hours after lunch. Many people went up to Svensson PharmaTech to see the progress on the main attraction.
In addition to the volunteers, Mace also had a construction crew on-site.
"So the land is pretty well cleared of debris," the foreman was saying to Mace as Hazel and I walked up. "We're going to start digging the pathway."
"Is the concrete going to be set by next week?" Mace asked.
The foreman nodded. "We're going to dig today and start laying gravel while we have daylight. Tomorrow I have concrete trucks scheduled. We'll pour, and while it's curing, the electrician will start pulling the wire."
