He Asked Me Out to Get Back at Her, I Gave Him a Rulebook Instead novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Wall

Linc reached over and turned the phone face down.

The car hummed along the interstate.

Neither of us said anything for a long time.

"Rule nine," I said finally.

"I know." He kept his eyes on the road. "The truth is I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I'm not going to say I do."

"Okay."

"That's it? Okay?"

"It's the truth. I asked for the truth."

His shoulders dropped.

I held the cooler of leftovers on my lap the rest of the way.

On Sunday night the first big storm of the winter came over the hills sideways.

Rain, then sleet, then wind that took the shingles off the chapel.

At five in the morning Jess called me.

"Get dressed. It's the wall."

A twelve-foot section of the east wall, beside the iron gate, had come down in the night.

A hundred and thirty years of frost had been working on it, and the storm finished the job.

Fieldstones lay scattered across the brick path and into my north beds.

I stood in the sleet and looked at the hole.

It was the first thing anyone would see.

"Facilities will say it's unsafe," I said. "They'll put a fence around it and call it a ruin. The vote's in six days."

"So we put it back," Jess said.

"Jess, it's a stone wall."

"I grew up on a farm in Vermont. Half the state is stone walls. You put the big ones on the bottom." She was already pulling on work gloves. "I'll get the truck."

She came back with the greenhouse truck, four of our crew from the morning shifts, and two floodlights on stands she'd borrowed from the theater department without asking.

Linc came ten minutes later.

He didn't say anything.

He just picked up a stone.

We worked Monday from dark to dark.

Then Tuesday, in the sleet, by floodlight.

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