Dropping the Ball

16. Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Kaitlyn

Here are things that make me sad: I do not have red hair.

That’s it, really.

It is the one ongoing tragedy in my life, because ever since I read Anne of Green Gables when I was ten, I’ve wanted to be Anne Shirley. We don’t have many things in common, and red hair is the least of it. I’m not an orphan. I don’t have writing chops. I’m not prone to naming the puddles and sidewalks around me things like the Lake of Shining Waters or Dryad’s Bubble. And I’ve been so well-behaved that I was the favorite of adults my entire life.

On the other hand, Anne and I are both clever girls. Neither of us is conventionally pretty. Maybe that’s why I wished to be like her so badly. Her intelligence and stubbornness made her beloved by all the best people. But her openness won her friends easily, and I’ve only learned to open up more recently. Still, I’ve found a few of those “bosom friends,” and Madison is the best of them.

I don’t think there’s a more famous quote in that whole series than Anne’s fervent declaration on Octobers. “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” she said.

And as I walk out of my house on this October first morning in an orange suit to welcome it, I decide Anne and I are the same in this way too. It’s not so much the weather; we’ll be in the low seventies again today, and it’s still green everywhere. But the air is crisp with possibility the way it used to feel to me before school started every fall.

I get into my car and rev the engine, my parents having driven it over after church yesterday.

When I hurried out of my office last Thursday, I was plain old Kaitlyn. Today I return to work as an auntie.

And as the boss, not the boss-in-waiting.

And as the woman who has been carried in the arms of Micah Croft.

The auntie thing is the most important, of course. So why have I thought about the carrying thing just as much?

Because maybe I am as prone to romanticizing as Anne Shirley was.

I slide on my sunglasses and give my reflection a cool once over in the visor mirror. “You were tired. Mistakes were made. Not big mistakes. Now go be the boss.” I flip up the visor, pull out of my garage, and head toward the warehouse.

I moved my meeting with Micah from tomorrow to first thing this Monday morning so I could retake control of the situation. We’ll have a good working relationship now, but boundaries were crossed, and they need resetting. Boundaries like Madison having our architect visit her newborn in the hospital.

Boundaries like me having our architect carry me into my house to sleep.

Boundaries like how much I liked having Micah there for all of it.

Mainly the baby thing though.

Micah’s truck is already in the parking lot along with a white work van with “Herbert Metalworks” painted on the sides. The welders.

I walk in through the warehouse door and pause, taken aback by the change since I was last here. It’s full of stuff, so much, and so many kinds that I can’t process it at first. I spot Micah on the far side of the warehouse in a hard hat, consulting with a woman over some papers, and they both look up when the door closes behind me.

Micah holds up a hand in greeting, and I return the hello before winding my way over. The stacks and piles begin to make visual sense. Stacks of metal bars. Folded piles of black fabric, chest high. Five-gallon buckets of paint. Piles of scrap metal.

There is so much here, and yet . . . it’s hard to imagine it turning into the marigold canopy Micah presented in his sketches, but I remember his dove installation and decide not to doubt him.

“Good morning,” he says when I reach them. “How’s the baby? I’m willing to be taken hostage by any baby photo content.”

“Funny, I happen to have some.” I pull out my phone and open the album that already has three dozen pictures from Harper’s first three days of life. “Don’t think I didn’t see you trying to figure out what to say when Madison asked if this baby is beautiful, but I’m here with the photo evidence that she is, and you better look at this like you’re witnessing beauty incarnate.”

The woman standing with him chuckles, and Micah introduces her. “This is Eva Herbert, a master welder and the best person in Texas for this job. Eva, this is Kaitlyn Armstrong, the boss.”

“Your baby is beautiful,” Eva says.

“My niece, and yes. Learn from her,” I tell Micah. “She didn’t even have to see the pictures.”

“It was a weird angle the first time I saw her,” Micah protests. “I was smitten the second I held her.”

He coos over the pictures for a couple of minutes, and it makes me want to coo over him, but instead, I take my phone back and nod to the pile of rebar nearest us. “Let’s get into it. Talk me through the week.”

“Sure, but I’ll turn Eva loose first.”

I give the welder a professional smile. “Are you ready for this?”

Eva smiles. “Not sure this is the kind of thing you can get ready for. But I’m willing, so that counts for something.”

I tilt my head, shifting to business mode. “Let me rephrase the question. Can you do this, Ms. Herbert?”

Her smile fades, and she gives me a crisp nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. I can’t wait to see it.”

With another polite nod, she excuses herself.

Micah keeps his eyes on me instead of watching after Eva. “How are you doing?”

“Great. Excited to dive into this.”

“Feeling . . . rested?”

Ah, there it is. He’s not smiling, but his eyes dance.

I don’t take the bait. “More than Madison. Harper Ivy Mae sleeps all the time, but not all the time at once, and she’s waking her parents up every two hours to eat. She’s fat and happy. Madison is delirious. But also deliriously happy. Now, how about showing me where you’re going to start?”

Micah gives a small smile now, one that feels like it’s more for himself, but he takes the hint and reaches over to pick up a hard hat resting on a nearby stack of empty pallets. “Safety first, then we’ll walk the floor.”

I settle the blue hard hat on my head and refuse to picture how much I look like a Broncos fan wearing it with my orange suit. I also forgot I match the safety poles. This suit will not be making a return visit to the warehouse.

“The point of installation art is to change the perception of a space,” Micah says, leading me to a corner where we can survey the floor. “Technically, that’s the warehouse. A utilitarian commercial building meant for the specific purpose of storage. This will be a multilayered change. Madison’s decision to use it is the first shift in perception.”

I nod. “By changing its function to an event venue.”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. Think about Halloween costumes. Ever see someone you know well in a Halloween costume and think, wow, this whole time I thought he was a law student, but it turns out he’s really a zombie.”

“Definitely.”

The corner of his mouth kicks up. “Is that a lawyer joke?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’ll try again. If I threw on a Wizard of Oz costume right now, would you think, wow, all this time I thought this was Micah, but he was Dorothy all along.”

“Dorothy, hm? I’m not here to judge your choices, but you really just jumped right to Dorothy. Not the Tin Man? Talk to me about your shoe collection. Do you have sparkly red shoes?”

“Kaitlyn . . .” he says, a note of long-suffering in his voice.

“Fine, no. I would not assume you were Dorothy, even if you pet me and call me Toto.” Oh, whoops. I’ve conjured an image of him running his hand over my hair, gentling me.

Micah doesn’t seem to suffer the same intrusive thought, because he moves on. “When you watched Harry Potter , did you think, ‘That’s Gary Oldman dressed up like Sirius Black,’ or were you just watching Sirius kick butt and take names?”

“The second one.”

“And did you watch Batman and stop and think, ‘Oh, there’s Gary Oldman again as the commissioner’?”

“I haven’t seen Batman .”

“That’s exactly—wait, what?” He looks at me, totally baffled. “Any of them?”

I shake my head. “Superhero movies aren’t my thing.”

“Superhero movies are not your . . .” He stares at me for a couple of seconds. “All right. What is your thing?”

You , I almost say. Ummm . . . That thought jumped way too easily out of nowhere. And we’re talking about movies, not unhealthy impulses. “You know how there are ten Best Picture nominees for the Oscar every year, but everyone has seen five of them and no one has seen the other five? I like the other five.”

He opens and closes his mouth twice, but nothing comes out.

“Don’t act like I’m being a snob while we’re sitting by a highbrow sculpture you’re making to the tune of one billion dollars.”

“Still not returning the fee,” he says, and I grin. “And you’re off by several zeros.”

“Anyway, I get it. Can we get back to Sirius Black and your highbrow art?”

He opens his phone. “Siri, is it inappropriate to call my client a brat?”

I lean toward his phone. “Yes, it is inappropriate to call your client a brat.”

He smiles and sets the phone down again. “All right, so the actor versus role thing isn’t a perfect analogy. But Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise no matter what costume you put on him, while you’re halfway through a Gary Oldman movie before you realize it’s him. That’s the difference between decorating for an event versus changing the perception of a space. It’s not enough to put a cool sculpture in here. It has to interact with all this negative space and turn it into something.”

“How do you start building Gary Oldman?”

“Always with the foundation.” He walks me over to the nearest orange pole. I could not feel dumber standing beside it.

“We’ll start by painting all these black and enclosing them in fluted rebar sheaths. We’ll use full twenty-foot lengths but bend them to curve outward at the top.” His face is so expressive as he literally walks me through the beginning phase, his hands tracing forms and shapes in the air.

This is a Micah I don’t know. This is not a guy who is playing it cool and allowing himself to express emotions only in the cool-to-medium-warm range. This is what passion looks like. For a job, I mean. It’s how Madison looks when she’s talking about her next idea for Threadwork. It’s how I feel about studying the law, and the way it imposes order on chaos. Makes wrongs right.

After he’s explained the work they’ll be tackling over the next week, I stop beside a pile of rebar and sweep my eyes over the space. I can’t make the full connection between where I’m standing now and the concept he showed us, but . . . he’s going to do it. And it fires me up to make sure that I meet that effort.

“This feels like the old days,” I say before I think it through.

Micah gives me a quizzical smile. “How do you mean?”

“Watching everything you’re putting into this, it’s . . . motivating.” It’s a familiar stirring to push myself harder, to match his pace, his intensity.

His face grows serious. “Kaitlyn, I don’t want you to set yourself up for disappointment.” He sets a hand on my shoulder. “You’re never going to be better than me at architecture.”

I can’t keep a straight face. “But if I start now . . .”

He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Kaitlyn. No.”

“Boo, fine. I’ll have to step it up somewhere else. Like making sure I leverage this piece to make as much money for the people it represents as I can.”

He drops his hand and I wish he hadn’t. I want the weight of it back, and that’s when I realize my stomach has been fluttering. This isn’t good. Even though it’s been ten years, I recognize this now. These are specific to a Micah Crush.

Micah doesn’t seem to sense a change in the current between us—also familiar—and keeps the joke going. “But if we’re not working on the same thing, how will we know who won?”

The flutters grow stronger as he smiles, and I shift to gaze toward the center of the warehouse. “This is one of those obnoxious cooperative games where we can only win if everyone wins. I prefer to smoosh you like a bug, but if I can’t do that, I choose to feel happy about what this will do for the people Threadwork supports.”

“Tell me about it,” he says.

I turn to face him. “You don’t know what Threadwork does?”

“I do. I want to hear it from you.”

I consider that. I want to turn the temperature down, and I’d been about to do it by leaving. But talking business might be okay.

I point to my head. “Can I do story time without the silly hat?”

He glances around, then up to the supervisor’s loft. “You can if you move out of the construction zone, which we can do if you want to go up and see the layout I’m suggesting for the deejay.”

“Deal.”

He leads us toward a corner but pauses to look down at my shoes. I’m in heels again.

“Stairs or elevator?” he asks, eyeing them.

They’re only three-inch heels today. “Stairs.”

There are no levels in the warehouse. It’s open from floor to ceiling, but it’s the equivalent of two flights of stairs to get to the loft. He lets us in and dusts off an office chair, a piece that has seen better days, the faux leather peeling and the chrome arms cloudy.

“Please, have a seat.” He waves me toward it, and when I sit, he lifts the hard hat off my head like he’s carefully removing a crown. “Now tell me about Threadwork.”

I will. As soon as the brush of his fingers against my temples stops shorting out my brain circuits. As soon as his eyes, bright with attention, release mine as prisoner. As soon as I truly fight the need to sway toward him and melt into him like I did when he carried me into my house.

This is not like my high school Micah Crush at all.

This is much worse.