The Cider Sign

The call came in on a Tuesday morning while I was up a ladder in the Co-op depot rewiring a fault in the loading bay lights, and Paul stood at the bottom of it holding his clipboard like it was a shield and clearing his throat until I looked down at him.

"Sandi, got something for you, and I'll be straight up, it's a big one."

I came down the ladder because I know Paul, and Paul doesn't stand under a ladder talking about big ones unless he means it. I'm twenty-eight, been with the co-op six years, and in all that time Paul has never once called a job big unless the whole town was going to hear about it either way.

"What've we got?"

"Cider mill. The old neon sign, the one everybody in Alder Creek looks at every day of their lives. Marilyn Hartley wants it fixed and lit before the anniversary, that's not quite two weeks out now, and she asked for you by name."

I'll admit that got me in the chest a bit. Marilyn Hartley asking for you by name in a town of nine hundred people is not a small thing, because Marilyn has run that mill for forty years and she remembers every electrician who ever touched the place, and most of them she remembers unkindly.

"Why me by name? She's got opinions about who's allowed up a ladder, doesn't she."

"She does, and she overrode the usual rotation to get you. Which tells you the committee is watching this, and I'll be plainer than I usually am, Sandi. The promotion list goes to the board next month, and your name is on it, and a high-profile job delivered clean and on time is the last thing standing between you and the letter with your new rate on it." He tapped the clipboard against his leg a couple of times, like he was keeping a beat for his own nerves. "I know you can do it. I just need the town to know it too."

I said yes before I'd even thought about it, which maybe tells you something about me that I didn't understand until later, but sitting here writing this down I can see it plain as anything. I said yes because Paul asked, and because being grateful is a habit with me, and because the idea that I'd earned something, actually earned it, felt so good I didn't want to look at the price tag too close. He shook my hand at the bottom of the ladder like we'd closed a deal on a car, and I went back up the ladder grinning like a fool, and that concluded the conversation as far as my side of it went.

I told Mario about it that night over dinner, and this is where I have to be honest about the shape of my life, because otherwise none of what comes later makes any sense. Mario and I met three years ago at the town dance, the autumn one, up in the hall with the bad floor, and I'd been sent there to look at a heating fault and stayed for the dancing instead. He's thirty-two, builds pipe organs in the old grain warehouse behind the mill, hands like something off a monument to craftsmanship, and when I rewired his workshop the spring after we met he watched every single thing I did with this hungry attention like I was performing surgery, and I loved it. I loved being looked at like that. Three years on, I still do, and that's the part that took me too long to examine.

"So Marilyn Hartley requested you personally," he said, setting down his fork. "That's real recognition, Sandi. The mill sign, before the hundred and fiftieth. People will see your work every day."

"That's what Paul said, more or less."

"You said yes, obviously."

"Obviously."

He smiled at me across the table, that warm certain smile of his, and said, "Good. You'll do it perfectly, you always do," and even then, even right then, something in me went quiet at the word perfectly, because Mario means things like that as compliments and I take them like contracts. But I let it go, because dinner was good and he was proud of me, and I figured the little cold spot in my stomach was just the beans.

* * *

The mill sits down by the creek road with its water wheel still turning for the tourists, all black timber and stone from 1875, and the sign hangs above the loading door facing the highway, big as a barn door and red as a fire truck. I drove out there Wednesday morning with the van loaded and my nerves sitting somewhere around my tonsils.

Marilyn was waiting on the steps with two cups of tea already poured, which is how Marilyn does business. She's sixty-five and built like a tree stump, and she knew Mario's father back when, and she has never in her life waited for anyone in her own doorway.

"Sandi Beaumont," she said, handing me a cup before I'd even got both feet on the ground. "Good. Come and look at the disgrace."

She walked me around the side of the building without hurrying, because Marilyn doesn't hurry for anyone, and there it was, humming faintly even in daylight, half the tubes dark and the whole thing sagging on its mounts after fifty years of wind off the creek. CIDAR, in letters two foot high, glowing that tired red neon gets when it's dying.

I stood there a long moment with my tea going lukewarm in my hand. "Marilyn. That says CIDAR."

"It does," she said, calm as a Sunday. "It has said CIDAR since 1975, and I'll tell you the story once and then never again, because it's a humiliation I've carried for four decades." She sipped her tea and looked up at the sign the way you look at an old dog that's bitten someone. "My husband's father ordered that sign from a catalogue outfit in Christchurch, sent away the paperwork himself, and misspelled his own town's pride in ink, and by the time anyone noticed the thing was up and paid for and the town had decided it was charming. Charming. Fifty years of tourists taking photographs under a spelling mistake."

"And now you want it fixed."

"For the anniversary, fixed and correct and bright enough to read from the far bend in the highway. CIDER, Sandi. Five letters, one of them wrong. The committee signed off on the budget Tuesday, the transformers are original and terrifying, and I am told you are the best hands in the valley." She turned and looked at me with those flat grey eyes that have outlasted six mayors. "The whole town will be under that sign on the night. I'd take it as a kindness if you treated it like it matters."

"It matters," I said, and I meant it, standing there under fifty years of the wrong word, and something about it got its hooks into me deeper than I expected. A whole town looking up at a mistake that everyone agreed to live with because fixing it was harder than shrugging. I stood there with my tea and thought, not yet, but soon enough, that I knew the feeling.

Marilyn walked me back around front and pointed out the breaker panel, which was a 1960s monster with a wooden cover, and told me access to the roof ladder was through the upstairs storeroom whenever I needed it, and that if I needed anything else I should ask her and not the seasonal kid who'd only lose the key.

"One more thing," she said, as I was loading my last armful of gear back into the van. "Mario tells me you're doing this one solo. He offered to advise."

I stopped with my hand on the van door. "He offered to what?"

"Advise. He came by yesterday, very concerned the mounting brackets would need an organ builder's eye. I told him the mill has stood since 1875 and the brackets would survive your attention." She smiled without much warmth in it. "It's your name on the work order, girl. Mine's on the cheque. Nobody else's name comes into it unless you say so."

I drove back to the depot with the windows down and a lot going on in my head, most of it not fit for printing. Mario had been to the mill about my job, my job, before I'd even set foot on the site, and hadn't mentioned a word of it over dinner, just smiled and said I'd do it perfectly like he was handing me permission to. I sat in the depot car park for a good ten minutes after I should have gone in, and what I felt wasn't anger, not exactly, it was more like the moment on a job when you find the wiring in a wall doesn't match the drawing, and you realize everything after this is you making it up as you go.

Paul caught me at the door with the job sheet. "Everything all right out there?"

"Sign's a disaster," I said. "Best kind of job."

"That's the spirit. Sandi," and he hesitated, and Paul doesn't hesitate, "one thing. If Hartley says jump, you ask how high, but you don't let anyone else's hands on your work. Not even friendly ones. That's all."

I said I understood, and the worst part is I did.

I didn't say anything at dinner that night, which was cowardly of me, but I kept turning it over while Mario talked about a chest of pipes that had arrived from Wellington and how the voicing would take him through till Christmas, and it was only when he asked for the last of the tomato chutney that I heard myself start. "You went to see Marilyn yesterday."

He reached for the chutney without looking up. "Mm. Yesterday, yes. Wanted a look at those brackets before you got into it."

"A look at the brackets."

"That's all, a look." He spread the chutney on his bread like a man with no worries in the world. "The mounts are sagging worse than I thought, actually. I told her so."

"You told her the sagging was worse than you thought. On my job. Before I'd seen it."

Now he did look up, and he had the decency to put the knife down at least. "Sandi, it wasn't about you, it was about the building. I know that building. I've been in that storeroom a hundred times moving pipe crates, I know what those joists can carry and what they can't."

"So you know the joists and I know the electrics, and you went and told her about the joists without telling me you were going."

"I was going to tell you."

"Were you. When."

He did that thing with his shoulders, the one where he gathers himself like I've interrupted him mid-bar. "This is exactly what I mean about you and this job. You're taking it personally when it's just trade talk. Marilyn needed to know the structural situation, and frankly, Sandi, if you're going to pull those old tubes and put in new runs, I'd think again. That sign is a period piece. Nineteen sixties transformers, original glass. You should restore it, not replace it. Any fool can hang new tubing, it takes real craft to bring the old stuff back."

I put my fork down, very carefully, because I could feel my own hand wanting to do something stupid with it. "Any fool."

"You know what I mean."

"I don't think I do. Say it again, the any fool part."

"Sandi." He sighed at me, he actually sighed, like I was a stubborn client who wouldn't accept the obvious. "I've watched you work for three years. You're careful, you're quick, you're good with your hands. But restoring glass is a specialist's business, and you've never done neon restoration, so the sensible thing, the thing I'd advise..."

"There it is," I said. "The thing you'd advise. You went behind my back to the client and advised her, and now you're advising me, and you don't hear how it sounds, not one bit of it."

"It sounds like someone who cares about that sign."

"It sounds like someone who doesn't trust the woman he lives with to read a job sheet." I stood up and carried my plate to the sink, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "Six years at the Co-op, Mario. Six years, and Paul has never once stood over my shoulder telling me which wire to cut. The one person who's supposed to be in my corner is down at the mill telling Marilyn the mounting brackets need an organ builder's eye."

"That's not fair."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

I washed up while he sat there, and he tried twice to start something and I kept the water running, and eventually he went out to the workshop and I heard the bandsaw going, which is his way of finishing an argument, because you can't talk over a bandsaw and he knows it.

* * *

He came to the mill Thursday morning while I was flat on my back under the breaker panel with a torch in my teeth, and I heard his boots on the concrete before I heard his voice. "Sandi. Can we talk?"

I slid out and sat up, and there he was with two coffees from the bakery, which is his other way of finishing arguments, hold the bandsaw, deploy the coffees. Marilyn was somewhere in the back offices doing the anniversary books, which I knew, and he probably knew, and I took the coffee anyway because my throat was dry. "Talk, then."

"Last night was badly said. I've been up half the night thinking about it. I shouldn't have gone to Marilyn without telling you, that's true, I can see it now, and I'm sorry."

"Okay. Thank you."

"But," he said, and my heart did a slow drop, because there's always a but with Mario, always one more thing you'd advise, "the restoration point still stands. I've had a look at the glass, that A in particular, and I think with a careful hand you could bring the original tubes back. It would be better work. More honest work. I could walk you through the..."

"No!"

He blinked. "No?"

"No, you can't walk me through it. It's not your job to walk me through it. I quoted the committee on replacement runs and new transformers, Marilyn signed off Tuesday, and the work starts when I say it starts." I stood up and brushed the dust off my knees. "You want to help, you can carry this panel cover down to my van, but that's the extent of the consulting, and if you say the word restore one more time I'm going to put you on the ladder and let you meet the wasps."

"That's not..." He looked at the coffee in his hand like it had betrayed him. "You're being stubborn about this."

"Maybe I am. Maybe stubborn is what the job needs." I turned back to the panel, and I heard him stand there a moment, and then his boots went off across the concrete faster than they'd come, and the van door slammed, and the mill was quiet except for the