Page 7 of The Boo Next Door

He goes home to his wife. I go home to a bone dragon.

Wednesday, five forty in the morning, I'm in the garage with coffee, and the compressor sits there primed and ready, and I don't turn it on.

I stand there like an idiot with my hand on the switch. Six years, the fog test runs at six a.m., because dawn fog photographs wrong and I like to check the density against dark sky. It's the routine. Routines are load-bearing. You take out one bolt and you find out real fast which ones were structural.

Her bedroom light isn't even on. She wouldn't know. That's the thing — she would never know, and I'd have the density data, and the only cost is a woman who called me the competition getting a full night's sleep in a house that's hemorrhaging money she doesn't have.

I take my hand off the switch.

I test the fog at eight thirty like some kind of amateur, and the density reads fine, and I stand in my own yard in the drift of it, annoyed at the sky, annoyed at the readout, annoyed at a sticky note I've never seen that apparently introduced me as a con man.

He'll act like it's a favor to him. That's what stings. Not that Bee said it. That Bee was right. It is a favor to me. All of it was ever a favor to me — the ladders, the wiring, the moon, hold this. She let me believe I was helping an old woman, and by the time I figured out the direction the help was flowing, I belonged somewhere, and it was too late to be embarrassed about it.

Her granddaughter figured out my whole operation in one porch conversation.

There's no version of October where I keep both promises. And the worst part — the part I'd never say in this bay or anywhere else — is that when she pointed that staple gun at me and declared war with paint on her hands, my first thought wasn't strategy.

It was: there she is.

The one out of all the photographs. Standing in my sight lines. Loud, stubborn, wired wrong for the load she's carrying.

Across the fence, her porch light comes on. A shadow crosses it hauling foam board, one sheet at a time, talking the whole trip — to herself, to the boards, to the cat riding shotgun on the porch rail like a site inspector. Forty sheets. She'll be at it past midnight.

I could carry ten at a time. I could have it done in two trips.

I go inside and shut the garage.

I'm in trouble, and it's not the kind the fire code covers.

Chapter 3

Lila

Foam board does not carry itself, and by sheet thirty-one I have renamed every muscle in my back after people who have wronged me.

But by Friday, the porch has bones.

Here's the design, and I'm allowed to say this because I did it professionally for nine years: it's good. A Victorian séance parlor, built out from the porch in forced perspective, so from the sidewalk you're looking into a room that shouldn't fit — velvet drapes, a table mid-lift, chairs pushed back like the guests just fled, and a medium who is very much no longer with us presiding over it all. Motion-triggered. The table actually rises. I have the sight lines drawn in colored pencil, because I learned from the binder, and across the top of my build sheet, where a normal person would write a title, I've written WWBD.

What Would Bee Do. It's not a title. It's a load rating.

"Talk me through it," I tell the medium, who is currently a wig stand and a dream. "You died at this table in eighteen ninety-one. You have unfinished business and outstanding library fines. Give me tragedy."

The wig stand gives me nothing. Everyone's a critic.

What Bee would do, specifically, is have this build half-wired by now, and this is where the campaign hits its first supply problem, because at four fifteen on Friday afternoon, I plug in the second fog machine, and the entire house dies.

Not flickers. Dies. The refrigerator makes the sound of a large animal lying down.

"No, no, no." I take the stairs to the basement two at a time with my phone flashlight. The fuse box is down here somewhere behind Bee's canning shelves, and when I find it, I make a noise I'm not proud of.

Fuses. Actual fuses, glass-and-ceramic, museum-grade, and the one for the porch circuit has a black scorch through its little window like a tiny dramatic sunset.

Grady Ellis's voice arrives in my head uninvited. Sixty years old. Fuses, not breakers. Whatever you're planning, that panel won't hold it.

"I know," I tell the fuse box. "Don't you start too."

I have two spare fuses. At my current burn rate that's one and a half days of October. And the person who stocks fuses locally is Marge, who will tell Grady before the register drawer shuts, and the person Bee's own binder says to ask about rewiring is — no. Absolutely not. I did not declare war on Tuesday to file a surrender by Friday.