Rooftop Reservation

The rigging took me two weeks and it was perfect. Forty feet of string lights over the rooftop garden at Adderley General, every anchor point checked twice, the sound system hidden in the greenhouse so nobody would trip over a cable. I'm Jaime, I'm thirty-four, and I rig events for a living, so when something goes wrong at an event I take it personal.

That night it went wrong at me specifically.

"Listen to me," I said to Barrett. "They confirmed my table. Three weeks ago. Email confirmation and everything. Then some wing of the hospital that doesn't even exist on the website got priority and suddenly I'm standing there like a paying customer who forgot to book."

Barrett handed me his glass of warm prosecco and didn't say anything yet. He's thirty-six, he makes furniture for a living, and he has this habit of waiting me out until I run out of words. Usually works too.

"I rigged their lights," I went on. "I rigged their sound. I climbed up there in the wind last Tuesday and zip-tied that one droopy strand by the parapet while Matthew held the ladder and talked about train gauges. And then the events coordinator looks at her clipboard and says oops, sorry, we're full."

"Lizzy," Barrett said.

"Lizzy. Yes. She looked genuinely sorry, which somehow made it worse. And then she said the kitchen might have leftovers if we want to eat standing up in a corner like staff." I drained the prosecco. It had gone flat twenty minutes ago. "I don't eat standing up in corners, Barrett. I eat at tables I was promised."

"So let's not eat in a corner," he said. He nodded past the raised flowerbeds, toward the far end of the terrace where the model railway ran along the parapet. "Let's eat out there. Nobody's using the garden. It's your garden tonight, sort of. You built the ceiling."

I looked up at the string lights. They really did look good. Warm little bulbs in two long swags, and the greenhouse glass catching the glow, and the whole city humming eleven floors below us. Most of the party guests had gone home. The band was packing up in the stairwell and their sound came up through the roof door all tinny and far away.

"It is a nice ceiling," I admitted.

"There she is," Barrett said. "There's my girl with her perspective back."

"Don't push it. I'm still mad."

"Good. Mad looks good on you tonight."

The garden at that end had a long teak bench and a couple of folding chairs the grounds crew left out, and a patch of flagstone between the flowerbeds where someone had put a bistro table nobody ever used. It wasn't a reservation at a restaurant. It was better in a dumb way, because I'd hung every light above it.

That's when Lizzy came through the roof door carrying two foil trays and a bottle of wine by its neck.

"Oh thank god, you're still here," she said. "I've been hunting for you. Jaime, I am so sorry about the table. That was not my doing, I should note. The foundation board bumped a whole section and I had no say, I just had to be the one holding the clipboard when you wanted to fight about it."

"I didn't want to fight about it."

"You absolutely did. You had the face on."

Barrett laughed and I swatted him. Lizzy is twenty-nine, she runs events for the hospital, and we've worked together two years, so she knows exactly which of my faces means what. She set the trays down on the bistro table and held up the bottle.

"This is from the good case in the back, not the case they were pouring. So consider that an apology with a cork in it."

"What is it?" Barrett asked.

"Something French. Martin picked it, and Martin knows wine better than he knows people, so it's decent." She looked at the trays. "We've got about forty chicken skewers nobody ate, some rice thing, and a whole uncut cheesecake. The kitchen was going to bin it. I said absolutely not, I know two people who are about to have a very bad evening, let me feed them."

"We were already having a bad evening," I said. "You just confirmed it."

"Well now I've upgraded it. Come on. Eat in the garden, by the trains. Matthew will be up in a bit anyway, he does his final loop checks after every event, and honestly he's been dying to show someone the new extension all week."

"He showed me the extension a few days ago," I said. "While holding my ladder."

"Then he can show it again with wine. He explained it to me for an hour once and I understood maybe a third, but he's so happy about it you can't mind."

So that's how we ended up carrying trays and chairs out past the flowerbeds to the flagstone by the parapet. The railway ran along the wall on a wooden shelf about knee height, with little stations and a tunnel through a planted rockery, and the string lights above it were mine too, which meant even the trains looked good.

Matthew appeared through the roof door right as we sat down, carrying a small toolbox for no reason anyone ever determined. He's thirty-three, he keeps the grounds and fixes everything around the hospital, and he stopped dead when he saw us set up in his territory.

"Oh," he said. "You're eating here."

"Is that allowed?" Barrett asked.

"Well, no one's ever asked before. People don't usually eat next to the railway. Crumbs and grease and all that." He came over and crouched by the shelf, protective, then seemed to decide we weren't monsters. "Actually, the night run would be good with this. The lights along the embankment come on at eight and we're just in time to see it."

"It's just past eight," Lizzy said.

Matthew checked his watch, then reached under the shelf and threw a switch somewhere. Down the length of the parapet, tiny lamps blinked on along the track bed, and a small engine with two lit carriages came around the rockery tunnel and hissed along toward the far corner.

"Okay," I said. "That's actually lovely."

"Right?" Matthew said. "Everyone thinks model railways are, I don't know, sad. But look at it. It's a working system. Points, signals, gradients. I spent the whole winter on the gradients."

"You did mention train gauges," I said. "Twice. While holding my ladder."

"You said the ladder was fine."

"The ladder was fine. The gradient talk was extra."

Lizzy poured wine into four plastic cups she'd definitely taken from the party without asking, and handed them around. "To Jaime's lights," she said. "Which are the only reason this roof looks like anywhere worth being tonight."

"To the lights," Barrett said, and clinked his cup against mine.

I looked up at my swags again, then down the lit track where the little train was making its loop, and I'll admit the evening was starting to turn around. The air had gone soft, that spring thing where it's cold in shadow and warm wherever a light is. Lizzy sat close on the bench and Matthew dragged a folding chair right up to the railway the way a kid would at a cinema, except he's thirty-three and it was somehow not sad at all, just happy.

"So," Lizzy said, picking up a skewer. "Since the table's dead and the wine's good and nobody official is left on this roof. How do two professionals and a groundskeeper and a furniture maker entertain themselves on a Thursday?"

"Careful," I told her. "That's the kind of question that gets answers."

She grinned at me over her cup. "I counted on it, actually."

We ate, and the wine was indeed decent, and at some point Lizzy looked over at my gear bag, which I'd left slouched against the bench leg because I never fully leave a job until I'm off the roof.

"That thing's been sat there all night," she said. "What's even in it?"

"Work stuff. Ropes, carabiners, slings, tensioners. The boring anatomy of a light show."

"It's not boring," Matthew said, not looking away from the train. "Rigging is just big model railways with consequences."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said about my job," I told him.

"Show us something," Lizzy said. "You've been sat there all smug about your forty feet of lights. Demonstrate. Entertain the table that doesn't exist."

So I got the bag and pulled out a length of rope, mostly to shut her up, and knelt by the railway shelf where there was a handy steel bracket holding one of the signal posts. I ran a loop around it, showed them the turn, and cinched it down into a proper tie-off, the kind I'd used on the parapet anchors two weeks running.

"This is a round turn and two half hitches," I said. "Boring name, does everything. The trick is tension. See how the load sits flat? You take the slack out in stages, never all at once. Yank it and the whole thing jumps. Ease it and it locks."

Matthew leaned in close, studying the knot like it was one of his signals. "So the rope holds because of friction, not the knot itself?"

"Friction does most of the work. The knot just stops the friction from giving up."

"That's genuinely clever," he said.

"I know," I said, and Lizzy laughed at how fast I said it.

"Tension, though." Lizzy was looking at me with that expression she gets, half innocent and not innocent at all. "That's an interesting word for you to be throwing around, Jaime."

"It's a technical word."

"Uh huh. Ease it and it locks. Is that a professional philosophy or a personal one?"

"It's a Thursday philosophy," I said, and she cackled and made Barrett refill her cup.

Barrett had come around the bench to watch over my shoulder, which he does, patient as anything, and he touched the tail of the rope where it hung loose. "Could you show me that? The easing part. I've never seen anyone actually do it slow."

So I did, talking him through it, his hands near mine on the rope, and I felt him get it, the little shift from pull to settle. He makes furniture, so his hands are already good hands, but rope is a different grammar and he picked it up quicker than most.

"Right, that's enough competence porn," Lizzy announced. "Somebody do something foolish."

It was Matthew, of all people, who started it. He pointed along the shelf to a straight stretch of track with no points on it. "You could walk the sleepers," he said, half to himself. "If you were careful. People used to balance on rails all the time. Railwaymen did it."

"On your railway?" I said. "Those are your gradients, Matthew. I'm not going to damage a winter of gradient work."

"The shelf would take it. It's bolted. It's the sleepers I'd worry about, and they're screwed down." He looked at me with sudden mischief, which I'd never seen on him, quiet Matthew with his toolbox for no reason. "Unless you'd fall off."

Oh, he shouldn't have said that. I'm thirty-four years old and I stood up so fast the bench rocked.

"One foot in front of the other, heel to toe, arms out, full length of the straight," he said. "Fall off and you buy the next round."

"And if I make it?"

"Then I buy it and I never doubted you."

I walked it. It's not hard if you've spent your life on beams and trusses, heel to toe with the city eleven floors down and my own lights glowing along the track, and I made it to the end and turned around on the last sleeper just to be smug. "Pay up," I said.

"Show-off," Lizzy said. "My turn." She was wobblier than me, laughing at herself, arms out like a plane, and she wavered over the rockery tunnel and grabbed my arm for exactly one second