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“You filed the permit.”
“I did.”
“Friday. The morning after I walked out of that meeting.”
“The morning after.” He pushed his chair in until its legs aligned with the table edge. “You can hate me on the fifth of January. I’ve built a whole career on people hating me in January.”
“That’s supposed to be reassuring?”
“No. It’s supposed to be true.” He got as far as the door. “The Morrison barn walk-through is Wednesday at three. Owen has us both on it.”
“I’ll be there.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“We’re co-chairs,” I said. “We should both be present.”
He looked at me for a beat longer than the remark deserved. Then he said to meet him in the community center lot at two fifteen because the barn was forty minutes away. He left, and the door shut with a small click. The office was too quiet after he was gone.
Without the fight, I was a woman sitting in a basement office with perfectly organized binders and no one to push back.
Frank found me there twenty minutes later. He had the lease binder under his arm, and he set it square on my table, a card played faceup. “I got a lawyer in Salem to read it,” he said. “There’s no exit clause. There’s no penalty clause either, which the lawyer says is either generous or stupid, and he wouldn’t tell me which for two hundred dollars.”
“Frank—”
“For sixteen years, I paid rent to a company in Portland that ignored my roof. Griffin has been in town less than two weeks, and he sent me a letter about the transom.” Frank pronounced “letter” like a summons.
Then he pulled out the other chair and sat, which Frank rarely did. “You’ve stopped talking to him.”
“I’ve stopped trusting him.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.” He rested both hands on the lease binder. “Patricia Vance called Owen on Friday. The grant is on hold until we have an independent structural review and a funded repair plan. Owen has had three calls from merchants, and he can’t answer them because he doesn’t know what Griffin’s assessment says.”
“Griffin caused that.”
“Griffin mishandled the meeting. He didn’t move your foundation.”
I looked at the binder. Food service left, crafts center, entertainment right.
“What did the assessment find?” Frank asked.
“The west footing moved. Griffin says it could pull the wall my shop shares with Pearl’s bakery out of alignment. He also says the electrical panel has to be moved.” I made myself meet Frank’s eyes. “I haven’t read the report. That’s what he told me.”
“Then ask him to explain it. Bring another engineer and make that person tell us whether he’s right.”
“You ask him.”
“I’m asking you to come with me. Griffin understands buildings. You understand what this town can survive.”
The furnace came on somewhere under the floor. Frank let the noise fill the room before he stood and picked up the lease binder. “I’m not asking you to forgive him,” he said. “I’m asking you to come with me when I talk to him, because I’d rather not do this alone.”
I closed at six, passed the stairs to my apartment, and walked the block instead.
It’s four hundred yards, end to end, and I’ve walked it in the dark probably two thousand times. I passed Ivy’s window with the typewriter and foil star, then the papered corner unit. The feed store’s gutters were clear because Frank does them in October along with his own without ever mentioning it. Sweet Provisions was dark, its snowflakes still taped inside the glass.
My building came last.
I crouched by the downspout, which is a ridiculous thing for a grown woman to do on a public sidewalk in November. At the west corner, the bottom row of bricks stuck out about half an inch beyond the row above it. I had known about that half inch since my second winter. Adele Fisk had called it the building’s bad knee and warned me not to place the heavy ceramic village display against the inside of that wall. I had filed it under charm instead of structural advice.
