The One Who Waited novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: The Arch
The crew wouldn't let me into the back half of the shop.
They hung a black theater curtain across it on Saturday morning and taped a sign to it in marker.
BRIDE KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU MERRY. THE DOG IS ALLOWED.
Behind the curtain I heard saws, and a sander, and the painter singing, and once the old man from the table saw yelling, "Who glued the angel to the column upside down?"
I baked.
After service every night I came back to the loft at midnight and turned on Luke's oven.
Brown butter blondies on Monday. Apple hand pies on Tuesday, with my grandmother's crust.
On Wednesday, the chocolate olive-oil cake, two of them, because the welder had eaten half the first one standing up.
Every morning at seven the crew came in and found a tray on the workbench with a dish towel over it.
By Friday somebody had built a shelf for the trays and lettered a sign over it in real gold leaf, left over from a show.
MERRY'S.
On Saturday night, a week before the wedding, I came home late and the shop lights were still on.
Luke was alone in the paint shop at the far end, in a T-shirt, rolling a gray base coat onto a tall flat.
The radio was playing something old and slow.
I leaned in the doorway and watched him for a while before he noticed.
There was gray paint on his forearm and a streak of it in his hair.
"You have paint in your hair," I said.
He turned.
"You have flour on your face."
"Where?"
"Everywhere."
I crossed the floor to him.
The paint shop smelled like latex and turpentine and wet canvas. Flats leaned against the wall in a row behind him, taller than both of us, painted like a sky at sunset.
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