“My shoes? Why?”
“Because there’s nothing like increasing your heart rate for a bit to pull you out of anydoldrums. You’ll need that if you want to sleep tonight, so we’re going to race around the grass.”
She raises an eyebrow. “We are?”
“Yep. You’ve got thirty seconds to meet me back out here.”
She gives me an amused look for a couple of beats, and then she hops up and hurries inside. So I do the same. I race to my bedroom, slip on my shoes, then grab a folded blanket from my closet and race back out to my patio. I find Charlie sitting there with both shoes on, tying one of them. When she finishes, she nods at my blanket as she stands. “Do you plan to use that as a cape?”
“Only if it looks like I need to tap into some superpowers to help me win the race.” We each head down our own stairs, and I drop the folded blanket onto the grass. “Okay, we go to that corner, along that side, turn left just before the playground, down the far side, and the first person to get back to the blanket wins.”
Charlie nods. “Ready? Go!”
We start running, and Charlie is playfully acting like she’s trying to push me out of bounds or something, and I’m playing right back. By the time we reach the halfway point at the back left corner, though, Charlie starts full-on sprinting. She pulls away quickly, and I start sprinting, too, in order to keep pace. We reach the blanket at nearly the same time.We’re both panting, and Charlie is laughing, so I start laughing, too.
“Wow, that really does work!” she says, grinning and panting and laughing practically simultaneously.
I spread the blanket on the grass, and we both flop onto it as we catch our breath. Before long, we’re both staring up at the clear night sky, and I wish I could reach out and turn off every townhome’s back light so we can see the stars better.
As much as I keep telling myself that I only like Charlie as a neighbor, I know I’m lying to myself. I like her as much more than that, and I don’t want to lie here, looking at the sky with my neighbor. I want to lie here next to the woman I am hopelessly falling for.
We are looking up at the stars when Charlie asks, “So, what made you choose to be an architectural restoration specialist?”
Well, I can’t say it was because I wanted to start falling for someone, but I know I can’t because I’m already under contract to move to another state before long. I don’t tell her that, though.
I’m lying on my back, elbows out, fingers linked behind my neck. There’s a rock under the blanket that’s digging into my back, but I don’t want to move because our legs are touching, and Charlie hasn’t pulled away. “My dad is a carpenter. He’s really good. His workshop is in the backyard, and I spent a lot of time in there with him, learning everythingI could.
“That might have led me slightly toward my career, but what really did was a building in my town that’s kind of a gathering hall and reception center. It’s been around since the early nineteen hundreds and used to be a courthouse. When I was ten, a historical restoration specialist and his team came in. He needed a skilled carpenter, and he asked my dad.
“I spent every day there after school and every second I could during the summers, watching it happen. I was mesmerized. The restoration specialist’s name was Hudson, and he never seemed to be bothered by a little kid shadowing him everywhere he went. I think he saw that I was interested in a lot more than the regular construction stuff that most boys are interested in—power tools, tractors, stuff like that.
“So he told me what he was doing, why he was doing it a specific way, what his thought process was, everything. He also talked a lot about how important it was to care about the past, to honor history because it was what helped us understand the present, and about how we were all standing on the shoulders of the people who came before us.
“Seeing that building restored, and learning everything I did along the way from both Hudson and my dad, was transformative to me. I loved everything about seeing it go from old and damaged to restored and beautiful. It was proof that broken things could be made whole again.
“But it was my grandpa who sealed the deal for me. When he saw how interested I was in restoration, he brought me here.”
“To Cipher Springs?”
I nod. “To The Shadowridge, specifically. My grandpa had grown up in Cloakwood, but he came here to watch a musical at The Shadowridge—My Fair Lady—and that’s when he met my grandma. She played the lead, and my grandpa said that when she sang ‘I Could Have Danced All Night,’ he was entranced. He stayed after so he could meet her, and the rest is history.”
“That is so sweet!”
I nod. “While we were looking at The Shadowridge, my grandpa said, ‘She’s run-down now, but I’d love to see her shine again.’ I was only ten at the time, but I told him that I was going to be a restoration specialist when I grew up, just like Hudson was, and that I was going to restore The Shadowridge for him. I’ve never stopped wanting that ever since, so choosing my college major was a no-brainer.
“I worked in construction part-time through college. In college, I got an internship with a historical restoration specialist. A lot of what he was doing at the time of my internship was securing funding, which is arguably the hardest part. I learned so much from him. Right after college, I started working full-time for a restoration company,and did for a couple of years until I was ready to go out on my own.”
The whole time I’m telling the story, Charlie has her head turned to me, looking like she’s soaking every bit of my story in. I’ve probably been talking way too much. It’s just not often that I find someone who is as interested as she seems to be.
“Those two parts of your job sound like they require very different skill sets,” Charlie says, the breeze catching her hair and blowing a few strands away from her face. “Well, it sounds like there are a lot more than two parts of it, but I mean everything related to working on the building versus everything that happens outside of the building, like getting permissions and funding.”
I chuckle. They definitely require different skill sets. And there are parts that I like more than others. “Yeah, there are a lot of meetings with planning commissions, historical preservation societies, and code enforcement. Plus, grant applications. Sometimes presentations or speeches made to city councils, a development board, sometimes the public, at galas for private donors, things like that.”
“Wow. I would totally fail at that part.”
“What are you talking about? You would charm everyone! They’d be eating out of your hand.”
She shakes her head. “No, I wouldn’t, because I’d be freaking out about being in the spotlight. I’d neveractually make it to the point of talking to them because I’d be in the bathroom either throwing up or passing out from hyperventilating.”
