On a Sunday morning in November, Beckett and I drove out to Fairmount Cemetery.
In the dented truck. He was back in flannel. The watch was back in its box at home, waiting for the next time the situation calls for it.
My grandmother’s grave is near an old oak tree, close to a little stone chapel built in 1890. She picked the spot herself, years ago. She said she liked the brickwork on the chapel.
I knelt down in the cold grass and brushed some leaves off her headstone.
Eleanor Whitmore. Beloved mother and grandmother. She built things that lasted.
“Grandma,” I said out loud. “I got it back. All of it.”
Beckett stood a few steps behind me with his hands in his jacket pockets. Giving me room.
“I almost let it go,” I told her. “Four times. I kept telling myself stories so I wouldn’t have to believe what Mom was doing. You’d have seen it on the first day.”
The wind moved through the oak tree.
“I’m going to do something good with it,” I said. “Something you’d like. I just don’t know what yet.”
When I stood up, Beckett handed me a folded piece of paper.
“What’s this?”
“Open it.”
It was a property listing. A three-story brick building on Larimer Street. Built in 1891. Empty for eleven years. Boarded windows. Condemned upper floors.
The same architect who built the chapel next to my grandmother’s grave had designed it.
“It’s on the city’s endangered list,” Beckett said. “Developers want to tear it down for condos. The asking price is more than you have. But it’s not more than you and the city’s historic preservation fund have together. If somebody with the right credentials applied for the grant.”
I stared at the paper.
“You’re saying I should buy it.”
“I’m saying you’re the best restoration specialist I’ve ever argued with in a basement,” he said. “And your grandmother left you forty-eight thousand dollars and a lifetime of Saturday drives looking at old buildings.”
He shrugged.
“Seems like a down payment on something to me.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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