Page 14 of The Boo Next Door

"Sentence first, appeals never," Dottie says. "The gym's open evenings. Ruth has the key and Carol's binder. Any questions?"

"Is there a budget?" I ask, because I have been part of institutions before.

"There's a bake sale," says Ruth.

"So no."

"There's a spirited bake sale."

Beside me, four chairs down, the most annoying thing happens. Grady Ellis laughs — one syllable, caught late, smothered fast, but I hear it, everyone hears it, it's like hearing a statue sneeze. Dottie looks briefly, professionally satisfied, the way you look when a machine you built passes its first test.

"Wonderful," she says. "Co-chairs, exchange numbers. Committee stands adjourned, we've got a potluck setup at five."

In the aisle, on the way out, he stops next to me. Up close in daylight he smells like cedar and fog fluid, which shouldn't be a real smell, and is definitely not a good smell, and I need to stop cataloging it.

"Monday," he says. "My garage. The gym's got no table saw, we'll pre-cut everything at my place and haul it."

"Your garage."

"Six o'clock. I'll leave the fence gate unlocked." He's already walking, because leaving is his native language, and then he adds, over his shoulder, not quite turning, "Bring the cat if he wants to inspect."

I stand there in a folding-chair aisle experiencing a chest event I refuse to diagnose.

"It's a work site," I tell Marge, who has materialized beside me with popcorn and a face like a Renaissance painting of I Told You So. "Don't."

"I didn't say a word, honey." She offers the bag, and her face does not stop being the painting, and the popcorn, I notice too late, is the celebration batch, the one with the candy corn mixed in, which Marge deploys exclusively for town milestones. "Popcorn?"

His garage is unfair.

I want that on the record. I walk through the fence gate Monday at six with my drill, my speed square, and my hostility, fully prepared to workshop alongside the enemy in professional silence, and his garage cuts me off at the knees. It's insulated. It's lit like a surgical theater. There's a table saw older than both of us, cast iron, tuned like an instrument, and a wall of clamps in descending size order like organ pipes, and the whole place smells like cedar and machine oil and — I'm going to say it, fine — like him, and every tool has a drawn outline on the pegboard where it lives.

It's Bee's shed, is the problem. Bigger and squarer and masculine, but it's her shed, the same religion practiced in a different church, and I wasn't ready for that.

"You're staring at the clamp wall," he says.

"I'm not staring at the clamp wall."

"People stare at the clamp wall."

"Your dust collection has zoning." I point at the ceiling drops with my speed square, arm steady, voice steady. "This is a cry for help. You know that, right? Somewhere in this town there's a support group."

"There is. It meets at Marge's register." He rolls out Carol Finch's binder on the workbench.

The fence gate clicks behind me. Beetlejuice walks into the garage like the building has been expecting him, does one full perimeter lap with his tail up — the clamp wall, the lumber rack, the dark corner where a tarp covers something big — and then sits down in the exact geometric center of the floor and looks at Grady.

"He does inspections," I say. "Don't take it personally."

"Wouldn't dream of it." Grady opens a drawer, takes out a folded moving blanket like he had it staged, and drops it on the end of the workbench, up high, out of the sawdust line. Beetlejuice flows up onto it in one motion and assumes the loaf of final approval.

I look at the blanket. The blanket that was in a drawer. Pre-folded. At cat height.

"That was already there," Grady says.

"Sure it was."

"It's a shop blanket."

"It's a cat bed, and you had it ready, and this is the single most incriminating thing you've ever done." I clamp my butcher paper down before he can answer. "The town saint keeps a guest bed for my cat. Wait till the group chat hears."