Page 6 of The Boo Next Door

"I told Behrens he was being an idiot, which covers premature." She takes off her glasses, which is how I know we've arrived at the actual conversation. "Bee's granddaughter registered last night. Crossed her grandmother's name off the returning-entrant list and wrote her own over it. Ruth at the table said it was like watching someone re-flag a country."

"I heard."

"You heard." She looks at me the way she's looked at me across three years of quiet arrangements, deposit slips passed across her kitchen table, both of us pretending it's normal for a contest prize to boomerang back into the contest. "This got complicated, didn't it."

"It was always complicated."

"No," Dottie says. "It was heavy. There's a difference." She puts her glasses back on. "The girl's got Bee's hands, you know. Ruth said she filled the form out in draftsman's lettering without thinking about it. You should see what that turns into by Halloween before you get comfortable."

"I'm never comfortable."

"You're the most comfortable-looking man in this county. It's your whole disguise." She takes her popcorn from Marge and goes, pausing at the door. "Sunday deposit, usual time. And Grady. Whatever you're carrying about that girl — and I can see you carrying it, you're doing the thing with your jaw — set it down before it sets you down."

The bell over the door announces her exit. Marge rings me up, sixty feet of chain and a silence with popcorn in it, and doesn't ask a single question, which for Marge is a cardiac event.

"Go ahead," I say.

"She bought forty sheets of foam board this morning." Marge doesn't even pretend to fight it. "And a staple gun. The good one. And she asked me what gauge cord her grandmother used to run the moon off, which, Grady, that girl asked it in gauges, and I nearly cried right at the register." She bags my wire. "It's like Bee walked back in twenty-nine years old with worse credit."

"You going to tell me everything she buys?"

"Absolutely. Same as I tell her everything you buy." Marge beams at me, a woman with a popcorn machine and no allegiances. "It's called community, honey."

Firehouse, Tuesday night. We're doing hose inspection, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds, and Ravi is doing what Ravi does, which is inspect me instead.

"So she yelled at you," he says.

"She didn't yell."

"Marge said yelling."

"Marge was two hundred yards away inside a hardware store."

"Marge has instruments." He racks a length of hose. "You gonna tell her about the shed?"

I take my time with a coupling that doesn't need it. Ravi has known me nine years. He was there when I moved to Hollow Creek with a truck, a divorce, and a plan to speak to no one indefinitely. He was also there the first October, when the old woman next door looked at me over the fence, said, You're big, hold this moon, and drafted me into something I didn't have a name for yet.

"The letter says look after her," I say. "It doesn't say hand her a grief bomb in week one. She just buried her grandmother. She finds out Bee's props are in my garage, that Bee wrote me a letter, before she's even slept a full week in that house—" I rack the hose harder than the hose deserves. "She'd read it wrong. Anyone would read it wrong."

"So you're going to read it wrong for her. On her behalf. As a gift."

"I'm going to wait for the right time."

"Yeah." Ravi nods, slow, the way he does at car fires when someone says they're pretty sure the extinguisher handled it. "Famous plan. Historically great results."

I don't answer, because the truth doesn't fit in the bay. The truth is the math I've been doing since the bandstand. The prize money goes where it always goes — Dottie knows, the bank knows, nobody else. Three years of winnings is the only reason there's still a kids' Haunted Walk, still insurance on the Gourd, still a Founders' Fright at all, because the town cut that budget line the year Bee got sick, and Bee handed me the fix like a work order.

If I win a fourth time, the Fright lives another year.

If she loses this contest, she loses the house. Marge got that out of the lawyer's secretary in a day and a half. Eighteen grand of roof between that woman and a for-sale sign.

Keep the Fright alive. Look after my Lila.

"You know what your problem is," Ravi says, when the hoses are racked and we're standing in the bay door watching nothing, which is a firehouse tradition older than hydrants.

"You're going to tell me."

"You think if you hold everything carefully enough, nothing counts as a decision." He claps me on the shoulder. "The tarp in your garage is a decision, man. Every day it stays on, you're deciding."