Page 72 of The Cul-de-Sac War

* * *

The next day, standing in front of the Barter, he was still ruminating on how she did it.

It was a temperate Sunday afternoon, cars inching along bumper to bumper on Main Street in the post-church rush to get out of ties and dresses and whip up potato salad for Sunday family suppers. Weekenders slowed to take pictures of the iconic Barter building with its charming exterior and medieval-looking flags. Or they gawked at the sprawling estate of the Martha Washington Inn and wondered who was in the mysterious limousines that deposited guests at the lobby.

Chip hadn’t told his mother why he couldn’t attend that afternoon’s supper, opting instead for a vague explanation. “Something’s come up, Mom,” he said. She used her time-honed mothering skills to express disappointment over the phone without saying one word about her disappointment over the phone, and frankly, he wasn’t sure what she was more disappointed by: that her baby boy wasn’t able to make it, or that they would have to go without the cornbread he usually brought.

“Mr. McBride,” Mr. Richardson said, stepping off the Barter’s bottom step toward him.

Chip hopped up from the crosswalk and met him beneath the sign containing the words A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He moved forward to shake Mr. Richardson’s hand but received a hearty slap on his shoulder instead. The administrator turned on his wingtip heels and guided him inside.

It was a pointless maneuver, but Chip ducked his head slightly into his collar to hide his face. If his father wasn’t calling him by the end of the evening, asking why he’d been spending time with Richardson at the Barter, it would be a miracle.

“I want to preserve the basic layout of the lobby here,” Mr. Richardson began, stepping onto the decorative red plush carpet between racks of souvenir candles and T-shirts. “But we’ll update the café area to offer a more accessible array of fudges, wines, and coffees during intermission. As it is, you can see the space gets congested. Anyway,” he said, waving his hands, “black granite, quarter-sawn white oak. I’ve had my eye on a carpet from Brintons for a while—a rich, red broadloom classic, a perfect blend of the Persian and Amerindian motifs—you know how it is. But in here”—he opened a set of double doors with a flourish—“I see everything different. Here is where I envision the magic.”

The doors opened onto Gilliam Stage, the main theatre, which sat under a forty-foot ceiling and was saturated in red: rows of rich red seats with the embroidered crest of the Barter shimmering in golden thread, pallets of red damask along the walls, and more elaborate maroon damask carpeting the aisles. The room was royal and rich and, if Chip were quite honest, utterly not in need of updating. But then, Mr. Richardson wasn’t asking him to be honest.

“Tell me, Mr. McBride, what do you see?”

Mr. Richardson took his fedora off as he gazed up to the two chandeliers dangling from the high ceiling. Chip looked up too.

Ceilings. Okay. This was a bit of a stretch from double-hung windows in ranches or carpet tiles for university gymnasiums, but there were some similarities here. Like, this was a building. And he had worked in a building.

So far so good.

Chip racked his brain for something inspiring. Ceilings. This was a domed ceiling, with two chandeliers . . . Of course, he could suggest a new chandelier.

Maybe a bigger one.

A much bigger one.

With a lot more tiers of those gold, glassy bulbs.

Mr. Richardson shifted his weight to his other foot. “Of course, we could go with some gilded ceiling murals. Those would go nicely with the updated chairs and amber Kashan carpeting for the floors. We’d stick with the crimson color, of course.”

“Of course.” Chip nodded and started to lower his chin but noticed Mr. Richardson still gazing up.

“But then, even with those murals—should we consider a nautical theme?—we’d still have to do something with the center, and I hate the way the Chicago Theatre just peters out with that milky blue. Such a waste of good space.”

“Mmm,” Chip said noncommittally toward the sky. “It would be nice to have a center that really pops.”

“Exactly. Pops. That’s what I envision here. That’s what I want.”

Chip stood next to Mr. Richardson, craning his neck backward, wordlessly staring at the ceiling until his neck started to ache.

“You know,” Mr. Richardson said, hushed and with a touch of giddiness, “I’ve had dreams where I’d walk into the Barter, like it was any old day, and look up to see it had become”—he lowered his voice even further as his eyes darted toward Chip’s—“the Fox Theatre.”

He lowered his neck at last and Chip followed suit. Mr. Richardson’s eyes were watery, either from emotion or because all the fluid from his neck up had been stuck for the past five minutes with nowhere to go. Regardless, they held a childlike shine, as though he had just told Chip his most sacred secret. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

Chip resisted rubbing his neck. The Fox Theatre. It wasn’t even worth trying to scroll through his mental cavities. But now, at least, he had a name. And something to spin. Chip summed up his most enthusiastic yet professional voice. “It certainly would. And I want to dig into that thought deeper. But if you could just excuse me a moment, I need to find the gentlemen’s room.”

He waited for a reply, but Mr. Richardson only looked back up to the ceiling, lost in his own boyhood dreams. “The Fox Theatre,” Mr. Richardson murmured. “Wouldn’t that be marvelous?”

Chip opened the lobby doors and turned down the hall. As he walked, he pulled out his phone and started typing Fox Theatre ceiling.

Chip pushed open the door to the men’s room as the website began to load.

He stopped inside the doors.