Chapter 4: The Red Set

Dot Maclaren came out of the private elevator at six in the morning.

She had a pastry bag in one hand and a cardboard tube under her arm.

She was sixty-one and built like a fire hydrant.

She had run the building site of Hartigan Tower for three years in an orange hard-hat cap.

"There she is," Dot said, and hugged me so hard my feet left the floor.

"I saw the roof on my phone and I threw up a little. Then I cheered."

"Dot, it's six."

"It's six somewhere. Eat this."

It was a cheese Danish.

I ate it standing in Leighton's kitchen in a borrowed white shirt, with my hair a wreck and my thighs still sore.

Dot looked at the shirt.

Dot looked at Leighton, who stood at the end of the long room in yesterday's trousers, watching her.

"Mrs. Maclaren," he said.

"Dot."

"Dot. Say something else, please. I'm told you carry things."

"He's a funny one," Dot said to me, not quietly.

"He's all right," I said.

My face went hot, and Dot's eyebrows climbed her forehead.

She pulled the cap off her head and set the cardboard tube on the island.

"Red set," she said. "Fourteen hundred field sheets, every one signed M.E. in your handwriting."

"I took them home the day they fired the crew. Nobody asked."

I put my hand on the tube.

I had drawn those sheets at our kitchen table, over two winters, and had not seen them since.