Page 56 of Meant to be Mine

“I didn’t want to add to your pile. What exactly is he proposing to change?”

I walked her through what he’d told me on the phone. The umbrellas instead of tents. The repositioned DJ setup. The idea of making the space feel like something people wandered into rather than something they were directed through. She listened without interrupting.

“That all sounds good,” she said. “But we’ve got less than two weeks.”

“I know.”

“So whatever he’s envisioning, it needs to be achievable in less than two weeks. I’m not pulling off miracles.”

“That’s exactly why I need you in this conversation,” I said. “He’s going to get big. He always gets big. I need someone to keep it real.”

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go down and walk the space before he gets here so I know what we’re actually working with.”

Micah pulled up forty minutes later. He climbed out of his truck in board shorts and a faded tee and sunglasses, looking like he’d come from the beach because he probably had.

He pulled his sunglasses off and looked up at the front of the building, then at the plaza in front of it. He was taking it in. “Okay,” he said finally. “I see it.”

“See what?” Kensey asked.

He pointed toward the center of the plaza. “That’s where the energy wants to go. Right there. Everything should pull toward that point.”

Kensey had her notebook open already. “Walk me through it.”

He did. We moved through the space with Micah talking and gesturing and occasionally stopping to crouch down and look at something from a different angle. He talked about the umbrella clusters, about the way the light moved across the plaza at different times of day and not wanting people to get too hot.

We moved along the north end of the plaza and Micah stopped again near where the DJ platform had been positioned in the New York layout. He shook his head slowly.

“It’s wrong up here,” he said.

“That’s what I said on the phone,” I told him.

“You said move it center,” Kensey said. “What does center look like exactly? Because if we pull the DJ into the middle of the foot traffic, we’ve got a crowd management issue. People stop moving when there’s music. They cluster.”

Micah pointed to a spot roughly fifteen feet south of where we were standing. “There. Not dead center. Offset slightly west, which means the sound carries east into the shopping area but the heaviest foot traffic stays clear. You create a natural gathering point without blocking the vendor corridor.”

She walked to the spot he’d indicated and stood there, looking in both directions. I didn’t have any idea what they were talking about but they clearly knew. I was going to accept they were better at this than I was.

“That could work.” She was already writing. “What else?”

He walked her through three more ideas in the next twenty minutes. A flower installation at the entrance that doubled as a photo backdrop. Scatter seating instead of grouped tables. Each time he got ambitious, she caught it and shut it down.

“No,” she said.

“Hear me out.”

“We have twelve days. No.”

Micah looked at me. I raised my hands.

“She’s not wrong,” I said.

He made a face that conceded the point without quite admitting it. “Fine. Forget the water feature.”

“The rest of it is good,” she said. “The rest of it is genuinely good, Micah. I mean that. But I need it to be achievable.”

“It’s achievable.”

“Then put it on paper and get it back to us tomorrow so I can start making calls.”