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I hired her in the doorway on a handshake after she’d spent eleven years driving an old man in for his Christmas cardinal. I couldn’t run the shop while I was underneath it wearing a headlamp. At thirty-six, I’d run out of ways to pretend I could.

She reorganized the ribbon wall inside two hours. It was better. I have not said so.

Because the council’s safety order required immediate shoring, the work started at six that evening, after close. Three paid Cole Development crew members handled the shoring, steel, and underpinning under the company’s commercial license and insurance. Lena Ortiz, the electrician who had priced the festival service, controlled every electrical connection. Volunteers moved materials and cleaned, logging eligible grant hours. Other neighbors cooked and staffed the shop. Frank’s cousin’s flatbed brought the steel. The Whitmores’ generator ran the alley lights, so we weren’t pulling on the shop’s panel. Somebody’s teenager guarded the cord covers and took the job more seriously than anybody has ever taken any job.

By nine there were four casseroles on the counter by the register, and by ten there were seven. Marcy started writing names on masking tape and sticking them to the lids so the dishes could go home. There was chicken and rice, two tuna casseroles, and a green bean thing of Colette’s mother’s that has been at every funeral and wedding in this valley since the seventies. Ivy brought a bottle of something and a stack of paper cups, said it was for the eleventh day, and put it on the high shelf where Frank couldn’t reach it.

I spent Saturday night on my back in thirty-one inches of crawl space under my own floor with a headlamp and a piece of chalk, marking the line Griffin called down to me through the floorboards.

“Eighteen inches south of the pier.”

“There isn’t a pier.”

“There’s a pier. It isn’t on the plans, which means somebody added it later and never told the county.” Griffin paused, and I heard the scrape and grunt of him lowering himself to the shop floor to talk into a gap in it. “Move your hand left. Left. That’s brick. That’s your pier.”

The crawl space smelled of cold dirt, dry brick, and dust. Somebody had left a 1974 penny down there, along with a bootlace and one blue marble. While I waited for Griffin’s next measurement, I rehearsed what I would tell Owen if he tried to say the reinstated festival did not count toward my grant. The town had done the work and put the festival back on. If that was not public programming, his form needed better instructions. The penny offered no objections. At eleven, Pearl’s compressor kicked on nine feet away through the party wall. I pressed my hand to the underside of my shop floor and left it there.

Overhead, through the boards, I could hear Marcy selling one of the volunteers a nutcracker after hours, and doing it better than I do, because she was not apologizing for the price.

An independent structural engineer came from Salem on Sunday because Owen’s daughter-in-law had gone to school with her.

Dana Whitlock, P.E., arrived in coveralls and steel toes with a crack gauge, flashlight, camera, and no interest in anyone’s feelings. She spent six hours under three buildings and came up filthy and unimpressed. “Your footings have moved,” she said. “The crack in the corner unit matches a 1962 repair tag and a permit photo in the town file. That repair is sound, and the gauge shows no new movement. One-fourteen is different. Its west corner is still moving, but the temporary supports are carrying the weight, and the building is not about to collapse. Keep the permits active, finish the underpinning, and monitor it.” She peeled off a glove. “The engineer who wrote the Sacramento report measured the old crack and left out the dated repair record. That was a choice.”

“And one-fourteen?” I said.

“One-fourteen is live. Your corner is going. Whoever’s doing the underpinning is doing it right and should have started in October.” She looked at Griffin. “You the one who stamped the November assessment?”

“I am.”

“It’s a good assessment. You understated how far the movement extends along the west wall.” She delivered the verdict as if she were checking a ledger.

She stamped her report on the spot, standing up, using Frank’s counter, with the pen from the string.

Frank made a copy on the machine in the back that jams and put the original in the safe where he keeps his old deed, and Colette took a photograph of the stamp with her phone at four different angles because Colette does not trust one photograph.

Outside the front window, the garland over the intersection came on at four thirty with the center span still dark. The fire district’s lift truck was available Tuesday.

Frank looked at it through the glass with his arms crossed. “Tuesday,” he said. “I’ll call the fire district first thing tomorrow.” For the first time all month, I looked at something broken and knew we would fix it.

CHAPTER 21

GRIFFIN

At half past seven on festival morning, I checked the wiring at Holly and Third for the third time. It had not changed since Sunday.

Thirteen days had passed since the committee voted to bring the festival back. In two and a half hours, we were going to find out whether that had been a miracle or an expensive way to be publicly wrong.

The infrastructure was right. The replacement strings threw the same warm light the old ones had and would hold it through all three days instead of quitting on the second night the way the originals had in 2019. The rebuilt platform sat solid at the center of Main Street, bolted to the concrete footings Frank’s father had poured in 1983. The garland over the intersection ran wall to wall with no dark span. Frank had called the fire district, and its truck came Tuesday. Four grown men spent an hour forty feet above the street arguing about zip ties while Pearl sent coffee up in a bucket.

Nobody was going to notice that span. That was the entire point of it.

“You’re spiraling,” Nora said behind me. “I can see it from Pearl’s.”

She came across with two cups. She’d been watching me make the same rounds from Pearl’s for longer than I’d have liked.

“I’m evaluating.”

“You’re panicking.” She put a cup in my hand. “Vendors are set. Volunteers are in position. The fire marshal signed off yesterday, and Owen has the insurance binder in his coat. Colette moved check-in indoors, which she did without asking anyone, and which I am choosing to be grateful about.”