Page 15 of The Boo Next Door

"The group chat," he says, "is how I knew he likes fleece."

I have literally no comeback. Nine years of professional banter with union scenic carpenters and I've got nothing, because the man committed premeditated kindness with supporting research and then confessed to it in a flat voice like he was reading a materials list. And we go to work.

And here's the thing nobody warned me about, the thing I'd have paid to be warned about: working with him is easy.

Not pleasant. I'm not saying pleasant. But we speak the same language at the bench — I sketch the Walk's nine stations on butcher paper and he's already pulling stock, calling cut lists off my drawings without me translating, and when I say the tunnel section needs a pinch point so the kids bunch up before the scare, he doesn't ask why, he says, "Thirty-two inches?" and he's right, thirty-two inches is exactly right, and I hate that a man this size knows the choreography of small frightened children to the inch.

By eight o'clock the plywood's cut and racked, labeled in his blocky lettering on strips of tape. By eight thirty we're at opposite ends of the bench with coffee he made without asking how I take it — wrong, for the record, he makes it strong enough to shingle a roof, and I drink all of it — and the conversation slides somewhere I don't steer it.

"Why monsters?" he asks. Out of nothing. "Theme parks. Whole career. Why that."

"Everyone asks that like it's strange, and yet nobody asks accountants why numbers." I turn my mug a quarter-turn. "Because a good scare is a gift. It's the safest fear you'll ever feel. You scream, and then you laugh, because your body just found out the monster was foam, and for one second, everything that's actually chasing you is foam too. I got to build that feeling for strangers eleven hours a day." The next part comes out before I decide about it. "And Bee got there first. She built me a haunted maze out of storm fencing when I was seven, out back, all summer. It's her fault I had to move away to do it. Which is a sentence I've been thinking about a lot lately, standing in her house, going broke."

The garage is quiet. The good kind, mostly.

"Roof's really eighteen?" he asks.

"Roof's really eighteen. Estate's really two. Severance is really gone in eleven months, ten if Beetlejuice keeps eating prescription food." I look at him down the bench. "So that's me. That's why I need your pumpkin. What's your story, champ? Why does a grown man with a fire schedule and a business spend four figures a year fogging his own lawn?"

Something happens behind his face. Doors closing in a corridor, one after another, quiet.

"Tradition," he says.

"Tradition."

"Town expects it now." He shrugs, and it's smooth, and it's nothing, and I've spent nine years around performers so I know a rehearsed line when it walks past me in work boots. "Somebody's got to give the kids a headline."

"Huh," I say, which is his own move, and I watch it land on him like a borrowed tool.

I let it go. We're co-chairs, not friends. His secrets are his.

"You like the garage," Frankie says.

Tuesday morning, her counter, maple foam. I've made the tactical error of describing my evening honestly.

"I respect the garage. It's a professional respect. Between professionals."

"You described his clamp wall for ninety seconds. I timed it. Kayla wanted to order and I made her wait."

"The clamps are in descending size order, Frankie. Like organ pipes." I hear it as it leaves my mouth. "Okay. Fine. I hear it."

"Mm-hmm." She wipes the wand with the smugness of a woman batting a thousand. "And the coffee he made you was terrible, but you drank all of it."

"It was strong. Roofing tar. My esophagus has a complaint on file."

"But you drank all of it."

"It would have been rude⁠—"

"You," she says, pointing at me with a full carafe, an occupational threat display, "took the fish."

"What?"

"You told me Sunday the cord was like the Godfather sending fish. Then you plugged your whole ghost porch into the fish. Now you're in the fish's garage every night this week, and your cat has a bed there." She lets the carafe rest. Leans in. Drops fifteen years of best friendship on me at close range. "Lila. Honey. Nobody in this story thinks you hate the fish."

"He's the competition. In three weeks one of us takes the money and the other one is very publicly not the Merriweather who mattered." It comes out with more edges than I planned, and Frankie's face does its quiet shift, and I loop back, because I can hear that the joke and the wound just came out of the same drawer. "I don't hate him. I've decided it's worse than that. He's exactly the kind of person Bee would have⁠—"

I stop. Frankie waits. She learned waiting from somewhere terrible, probably Dottie.