Chapter 25: The Hill

The sign over my father's door had said KINNARD NEON since the year I was born.

He bent every letter himself, in red, with a little blue flame under the K.

The winter he died, the K went dark.

Then the second N.

For eleven years the shop said INNARD NEO to anybody driving up Atwells at night.

I could have fixed it any day.

I never touched it.

It was his glass.

On Monday the tenth of August, five days before the feast, I took it down.

Leni held the bottom of the ladder.

"You're doing it wrong," she said.

"You've never held a ladder in your life."

"I've watched one held. The whole Hill has."

I carried the dead K into the back room and laid it on the bench.

I didn't break his glass.

I cleaned it, and pumped it, and filled it, and found the hairline crack where the electrode met the tube.

The same place as the comet.

The same place glass always goes.

I bent one new inch to splice it, and you'd never know which inch was mine.

That night Leni and I stood on the sidewalk and I plugged it in.

KINNARD NEON.

Red, with the little blue flame.

The bakery lady with the mustache came out in her apron and crossed herself.

Two old men at the café tables across the street lifted their espresso cups at me.

Leni put her arm through mine and didn't say anything at all, which for Leni was a speech.

She'd taken over my counter by Tuesday.

She was a dental hygienist on leave, and she said a shop counter was just a mouth with a cash register.

She answered the phone "Kinnard Neon, what's broken," and told every customer they'd waited too long.

The capos came on Tuesday.

Not together.

One at a time.

The first one came at ten in the morning in a linen jacket.

He bought nothing.

He stood in the middle of my shop and looked at the tubes on the wall and the torch on the bench.

"Your father did the sign at my brother's restaurant," he said. "Nineteen ninety-four. Still lit."

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