Page 35 of Finding Forever

Everyone hurried to see what had happened to the wall. On her way past the fireplace Hank and Dave had restored, Beth smiled. It was a beauty. Even with all the dents and scratches, the fireplace added lots of character and charm to her future office.

When she saw the splatter of blue paint across the wall she thought of the budget but smiled anyway. “We’re going to need to repaint that section.”

“We’ll add it to the list,” Susan said. “The list that keeps getting longer and somehow keeps getting done anyway.”

By the time their meeting was finished, the plywood table was buried in paper. Beth thought about the council’s terms and Walt Harvey’s refusal to see anything good in what they were doing.

As she looked again at the crowded calendar, Beth didn’t feel as if she needed to prove anything to anyone anymore.

The proof had already started writing itself, one small piece at a time, in the calendar of events, the positive publicity the center was getting, and in the friends who were with her all the way.

Chapter 21

By eight in the morning the parking lot outside the arts center held more trucks than Dave had ever seen there. By nine, the building was full of people who had no earthly reason to be here except that Beth and her friend, Rachel, had asked them to come.

When Beth first asked about holding a building bee, he’d been horrified. They were restoring an old building. It took time, patience, and skill. Letting volunteers loose on a building of this size was asking for trouble.

But after Beth pointed out how much money they could save, and how much time it would free up for the subcontractors to do other work, he’d listened a little harder. What finally convinced him was her argument that the center was for the community. And if they needed council support, they were more likely to get that if the community felt involved.

So, here he was, welcoming people onto the building site and handing out high-vis vests.

“I count forty,” Hank said, surveying the scene from just inside the door. “Maybe fifty. Mabel brought her whole mahjong club.”

“I didn’t know Mabel had a mahjong club.”

“She does now. Started it Tuesday, apparently, so she could bring everyone here today.” Hank grinned. “Woman’s a marketing genius. Ought to run for council.”

Dave watched the room fill in around him. Folding tables were being set up with paint trays and ladders were going up along the gallery wall. A knot of teenagers from the high school were hauling scrap lumber out to the dumpster under Colton’s cheerful, mostly competent direction. In the middle of it, moving from group to group with a clipboard she didn’t seem to need, was Beth.

He’d never watched her organize a crowd of people quite like this. She had a gift for it that he suspected she didn’t fully know. She gave each person a task that suited them, with no fuss and no second-guessing.

“Laurel,” she was saying, when Dave drifted close enough to hear, “you’re in charge of the supply table. You’re the only one who can find anything on it once Rachel’s touched it. Susan, your baking class parents are on primer duty in the back room. They signed up for messy and I intend to give it to them. Maria⁠—”

“I already know,” Maria called from the kitchen doorway, an apron already on. “I’m feeding everyone.”

Beth laughed and moved on to the next knot of volunteers. Dave smiled as he watched her work instead of doing any work of his own.

“You’re staring,” Hank said, not quietly.

“I’m supervising.”

“You’re staring, and you’ve had that roller in your hand for four minutes without touching the wall.” Hank clapped him on the shoulder and pointed him toward the gallery corner. “Go be useful before somebody notices you’re not.”

Dave went, but he kept half an eye on Beth for the rest of the morning. He thought about the council meeting, the speech she hadn’t planned, the way she’d said she’d only figured out what she believed by saying it out loud. He wondered if she had any idea of what everyone else could plainly see.

Around eleven, the piano arrived.

It had been donated by a woman on Lake Road who no longer had anyone to play it. Dave didn’t know much about pianos, but this one was magnificent. The dark walnut casing still gleamed, even though it looked incredibly old. They’d left it until now for delivery because it was about the size and weight of a small car. It was also, everyone quickly discovered, four inches too wide for the door into the main events area.

“Turn it on its side,” Rachel suggested.

Hank frowned. “You turn a piano on its side, you’re liable to break something that costs more than the piano.” He circled it with the deep suspicion of a man who’d fought this exact battle before. “Needs to go through at an angle. Feet first, then pivot.”

Rachel stuck her hands on her hips. “That’s not a real angle, Hank, that’s a guess.”

“It’s an educated guess,” Hank told her.

What followed was twenty minutes of genuine chaos. Hank directed, Rachel contradicted, and half of the volunteer crowd gathered to offer opinions nobody had asked for.