Part 9 — Draw the Rest
At eight sharp, the mill fence wore a new sign—RUÍZ’S red IMMINENT HAZARD—and a second one someone had Sharpied under it in block letters: WE’RE FIXING THIS WHERE EVERYONE CAN SEE.
They’d cut the power overnight. The place had the quiet of a deer that finally lay down. The privacy cloth fluttered fake leaves. Real leaves dripped.
June wheeled me to the gate because she knows the difference between permission and forgiveness and how often you end up needing both. My brace made me look like a promise I intended to keep. Hawk had a stack of crowbars. Ray showed with a cooler and a cordless speaker and a handful of prayers that don’t embarrass people. Nora wore jeans and a law school hoodie, which is how you tell a lawyer plans to be useful instead of charming.
Ruíz was already there, sleeves up, city-issued polo with his name over the heart like a vow. He pointed with his pencil, and four volunteers—retired electrician, drywall kid, the custodian from church, and a high-school senior who’d spent the night reading code on YouTube—snapped chalk lines and started surgical demolition, not demolition demolition. Open a bay. Photograph. Bag debris. Label. Move three feet. Repeat. It was messy in the way honesty is: loud at first, then precise.
Maya pulled up with Lena in the passenger seat and Ms. Kelley behind them like a tail light that wanted to be a brake light. Lena had color again. Fever sweated out. The chalk was back in her pocket because she’d put it there herself. She hopped out, took in the open wall, the neat trash pile, the careful hands.
“Bigger,” she said to me, reminding me of my homework like a teacher who’d decided I deserved to pass if I tried.
“We’re ready,” I said.
Ruíz nodded at a bare span of cinderblock that faced the street. “Public art,” he said dry. “Sanctioned by code. Knock yourself out.”
The first mark matters. I palmed the red pick because superstition is just memory with a rhythm; then I pressed the fat chalk against the gray and drew the first line of a star. Lena laid her fingers on my wrist and steadied the second. I made the third. She made the fourth—a short, sure stroke—handing the chalk back without commentary. I finished the last. It wasn’t pretty. It was ours.
Maya snapped a photo and didn’t post it anywhere because not everything is for sale.
We turned back to the real work.
Ruíz’s crew found sins in layers—twist caps that had no business twisting, runs through holes that weren’t bored so much as bullied, tape where the label said no, a junction box whose cover had been stapled on. He documented like a man taking testimony from a building that lied poorly.
“Legacy contractor cut corners,” he said, translating damage into policy. “Sub-sub wrote the invoice. Whoever signed off never took off a plate. We’ll fix it and send them the bill.”
“Make the bill public,” Nora said. “And the name.”
“You’ll have it when I do,” he said. It sounded like a promise he’d enjoy keeping.
At ten, a handful of high-schoolers arrived with brooms and attention. At eleven, two moms showed with sandwiches and the kind of gossip that gets work done. At noon, the librarian came with folding tables and three Sharpies and an idea.
“Sign the wall,” she said to the growing crowd. “If you live here, sign it. If you work here, sign it. If you ever wanted this town to do the right thing faster than the wrong thing, sign it.”
By two, the cinderblock under the star was crowded with names and little notes: for my kid, for Mr. Ruiz, for the bus, for the boy with the recorder, for the girl with the map. A carpenter traced his hand. A teacher wrote her classroom number. Alvarez wrote his badge number small in the bottom corner like a secret.
Camera crews came and for once did not ruin the weather. They asked questions that weren’t knives. The eagle hoodie parked across the street and filmed through his windshield like a man afraid to be the main character on the wrong day.
Ruíz called a halt at three. “We’ve opened enough to know the story,” he said. “We close up safe for rain. Tomorrow we start the rebuild. Thirty to open, sixty to fix, I meant it when I said it. Afternoon inspection is posted publicly. Every photo goes online tonight.”
He glanced at me. “You give a speech now, Ortiz?”
I hate speeches more than I hate forms, but a wall full of names is a democracy that asks for a sentence or two.
“I don’t have a speech,” I said, loud enough for the corners. “I have debt. To a kid who hums better than most people talk. To a boy who left me a job to finish. To a town that forgot how to listen fast and is learning. Draw your stars. Sign your names. Show up tomorrow. We’re going to call this place Star Commons until someone with a gold pen makes it official.”
They laughed, clapped the way you clap when an idea lands square. Hawk painted STAR COMMONS on a scrap of plywood like he’d been waiting his whole life to paint a sign that was true.
A woman from the parks board elbowed through in a visor that meant she’d already fought three petty wars today. “This isn’t a park,” she said, reflexive.
“It is until it isn’t,” Ray said, smiling without teeth. “Then it’ll be something better.”
Maya put a hand on my elbow. “Lena wants to show you something.”
She led us around the back of the warehouse where the ground sloped to the river, to a concrete pillar under the old loading dock. The same fading treble clef from Ray’s photo hid in the shadow line, half obliterated by moss. Lena knelt and rubbed away lichen with her palm like a kid revealing a penny on a tabletop trick. Under the clef, faint and stubborn, a scratched outline of a star. Noah’s line. Not perfect. Not meant to be.
I put my hand against the pillar where his hand had been and learned a new measure of size.
“He was small,” I said.
“He still isn’t,” Maya said.
By late afternoon, the storm smell was gone, replaced by heat and the cheap-sweet perfume of permanent marker. Families came through on foot after work. A man in a wheelchair traced a star with his wheels and left two faint rubber lines that looked like part of the drawing. The feed store guy brought a bale of straw because he didn’t know what else to bring and wanted to have brought something.
Ruíz took a call under the oak in the lot and came back with a face that said he’d lost an argument with a man who never learned to lose. “Manager’s office doesn’t like the name,” he said.
“Of course they don’t,” Nora said. “We’re keeping it.”
He cracked a smile he didn’t have time for. “You’re trouble.”
“Only to people who need it,” she said.
At five-thirty, Ms. Kelley got a call of her own, voice going flat in the way you do when your job badge enters the chat. She stepped away, listened without interrupting, came back with the kind of news that makes towns feel smaller.
“State office caught the livestreams,” she said to Maya. “A supervisor who’s never been here wants a formal home visit tomorrow at ten. They used a phrase I don’t like: ‘exploitive environment.’” She breathed, forced the air to stay. “I’m on your side. I’ll be there. I’m texting our best pediatric social worker to join. It’ll be okay. But we need the house calm. No circus. No cameras. No visitors who think they’re helping by being loud.”
Maya’s jaw moved like she was chewing something too tough to swallow. “We didn’t invite the circus,” she said.
“I know,” Ms. Kelley said. “We can still choose how we walk past it.”
Lena didn’t look worried. She’d run out of worry earlier in the week and was budgeting carefully. She tapped her wrist where the watch would be and then drew a small house in the dust with a square for a door and a star above it, then held up three fingers. I counted with her without understanding until she held the fingers like a show: tomorrow.
“Tomorrow at ten,” Maya said, resenting the clarity.
“Tonight we rest,” June said, not as a suggestion. “And we hydrate, and we feed the kid food with edges, and we do not read the internet.”
The sky dimmed to the color of a bruise that finally admits it hurts. People drifted home. A dozen stayed to stack trash bags and wind extension cords like rosaries. The last name went up on the wall under the star in a shaky hand that made the letters into a blessing: for anyone who thought nobody would listen.
We tarped the openings. We taped a laminated notice to the fence: WORK HALTED AT DUSK — RESUMES 8 A.M. — PUBLIC WELCOME. Someone set a mason jar on the sawhorse with a lid slit for dollars and a note: coffee for the crew. By the time we turned to go, it had forty-seven dollars and a Canadian quarter.
The eagle hoodie idled long enough to clip two more minutes of nothing and drive away with a scowl. He’d post anyway. People like him sell “truth” the way you sell carnival maps: none of the rides look the same when you get there.
At the hospital, I signed myself out AMA against the nurse’s eye roll and with June’s signature under mine like an airbag. “You step wrong and I will immobilize you with a look,” she said.
“I’d pay to see that,” Hawk said.
“You already have,” she said.
I went home for the first time since the ditch. My house smelled like a place that hadn’t been cooked in for too long. I set the red pick on the counter where keys used to live and laughed once at my own reflection in the microwave door. Then I packed a bag with work gloves and a clean shirt and the Polaroid of Noah under the oak because I wanted him there in a pocket that didn’t get washed by mistake.
At nine, Ray texted a photo of the wall in dusk light—STAR COMMONS in Hawk’s hand, the big chalk star, names stacked like bricks under it. He sent a second picture of the river looking civilized and a third of Lena’s small star drawn knee-high by the door of the warehouse office, where no one had noticed her sneak it.
Then my screen filled with radar—green, yellow, a thin red seam sliding in from the west. LINE OF STORMS AFTER MIDNIGHT, the weather app said with the optimism of a gambler.
I heard it before I saw it—the front’s long, low complaint. Another night, another test, but not the catastrophe kind; the nagging one that steals hours and leaves you grumpy and alive.
Maya texted: House clean. Cookies out. I hate that I cleaned for them.
You cleaned for you, I wrote. And for Lena.
She taped the star you drew onto the fridge, Maya sent back. Says we need one near the door.
Tomorrow, I wrote. Bigger.
At ten-thirty, my phone buzzed with a number I knew only by attitude. HighwayTruth: a DM screenshot from a burner, a collage of close-ups of my face, the wall, the recorder, the star, ringed and captioned STAGED. A line under it: 7 a.m. I drop the truth. Enjoy your fifteen minutes.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t feed him. I saved the message and sent it to Nora, who replied with a snake emoji and the words we like discovery.
Sleep came late and shallow, a motel-bed kind of sleep where the AC kicks on and your whole body thinks it’s a truck starting. The rain tapped the roof. The town tapped back in its sleep like a person who learned to dream around noise.
At 5:47 a.m., a county push alert rattled the nightstand: STORMS 6–9 A.M. HEAVY AT TIMES. AVOID LOW AREAS. It felt routine now, which is how you get in trouble.
At 6:10, Ruíz texted still on at 8 with a thumbs-up emoji that didn’t look natural on his phone.
At 7:01, Ms. Kelley: Reminder—home visit at 10. I’ll be early. No one else comes.
At 7:12—because some numbers are needy—my screen lit with a live badge and the eagle hoodie’s face from the driver’s seat, eyes glittering. He’d parked in front of Maya’s house just far enough away to be legal and close enough to be poison. His caption burned white: COUNTDOWN TO EXPOSING THE STAR SCAM.
I grabbed my keys and the pick and made a bad choice about stairs. June would have opinions later. I didn’t care.
The rain came down manageable. The kind that makes you late, not the kind that changes maps. I drove with the left side of my body and tried not to teach my right side new phrases for pain.
When I turned onto Lena’s street, the patrol car was already there, blue lights pulsing conversation instead of emergency. Ms. Kelley’s sedan idled behind it. Maya stood on her porch arms crossed, face pale and set. Lena stood in the window holding the chalk like a white flag she had no intention of waving.
The man in the hoodie was talking to his phone in a voice pitched to harm without being a crime. “They’ll say I’m harassing them,” he said, eyes on his own face. “I’m asking questions. Where did the map come from? Who wrote the notes? Who profits?”
He turned the camera to the porch and back to himself to drink the drama. His comments rolled fast: hearts, skulls, knives, doves. He hadn’t seen me yet. He hadn’t seen Alvarez step out of the cruiser either.
Then my phone buzzed with something else: a text from Ruíz, short and urgent. Water in the subfloor at the mill office. Not flood—pipe. Clean. Fresh. A second ping stacked on it from the drywall kid: Also found a third box under the front steps. Smaller. Sealed. A third from Ray: Bring the girl if you can—no, scratch that. Don’t. Bring the star you drew.
Across the street, the eagle hoodie smiled into his feed. “Seven o’clock,” he said. “I promised a drop. Here it is.”
He tapped his screen and the video pinned to the top of his profile changed to a montage of us from bad angles with a voiceover full of certainty and holes.
The patrol car’s lights painted the rain the color of trouble. The house visit was in three hours. The mill needed hands in one. The storm would have opinions.
I stepped out of my truck into a morning that could split either way and felt the red pick warm in my fist like an ember that still had work to do.
The world was asking for who we meant to be at exactly the same time in exactly two places.
And we had to draw the rest.
Part 10 — Finish the Star
At 7:16 a.m., the man in the eagle hoodie finds out a patrol car can be both polite and immovable. Alvarez stands in the rain, palms at waist height, voice calm enough to make the internet yawn.
“You’re on a public street,” he says. “You’re also engaged in targeted harassment. Move along or I’ll cite you under the ordinance with the boring name.”
The man tilts his phone to catch the badge. “Threatening a journalist,” he narrates to his feed.
“Advocating a nap,” Alvarez says, and points him half a block away to a rectangle of legal he can sulk in. He goes. He narrates that he chose it.
Inside the window, Lena watches him turn small. She presses her palm to the glass, then draws a little fog star and wipes it away with the heel of her hand. Not today.
We split in two because the morning does. Maya stays for the ten o’clock home visit with Ms. Kelley and her best pediatric social worker. I go where wires hum and walls remember. As I step off the porch, Lena reaches through the doorway and puts the red pick in my hand. Four words, rasped from the healing: “Draw the rest. Promise.”
“Promise,” I say.
At STAR COMMONS—the name has stuck, even if the manager’s office won’t love it—the fence is open and Ruiz is already a silhouette against the white of a cut-open wall. The rain is polite, nothing like the old tantrum. Tarp flaps. The cinderblock star glows absurdly bright for chalk.
“Subfloor water,” Ruiz says as we wheel in. “Fresh. Someone opened a valve and walked away. Sloppy attempt to muddle yesterday’s photos.” He holds up his phone. “They muddled nothing. Time stamps are a religion with me.”
Drywall Kid jogs over, cheeks pink with work. “We found a third box,” he says, eyes trying not to sparkle and failing. “Under the office steps. Smaller. You open?”
Nora joins, hair in a bun that says let’s indict something. Ray arrives with coffee and a look that could bless or bury, depending on what comes out of the box.
The metal tin is damp but not rusted through. Tape peels with a small surrendering sound. Inside: three things, modest and loud.
First, a folded map of the office drawn in a child’s markers—two squares for rooms, dots for outlets, little stars near three boxes in a line. The stars sit exactly where Lena tapped yesterday.
Second, a brittle carbon copy of a red-tag notice from 2019—IMMEDIATE REPAIR REQUIRED: NONCOMPLIANT WIRING—signed by an inspector who retired two months later. Attached by a paperclip is a stamped “REVIEWED” from the town manager’s office and a handwritten note: Cosmetic patch approved. Budget cycle tight. Revisit Q3. The revisit never happened.
Third, a Polaroid: Noah under the old loading dock, chalk line on the pillar, his palm up as if measuring the space for a future. In the corner, in my handwriting, the date from that summer and two words: Take notice.
Something in my ribs lets go and aches in a way that isn’t pain.
Ruiz exhales through his teeth. “Well,” he says, more weary than shocked. He turns to the camera he wears like a badge now. “For the record: prior red-tag; administrative override; no corrective permit on file. We will correct that today. Names will go on paper. Paper will go online.”
Nora’s smile belongs to a woman who enjoys emails with the subject FOIA. “Make me copies,” she says. “I want the paper trail to have blisters.”
Hawk paints NOTICE POSTED in big block letters on the sawhorse sign for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t learned to read PDF.
Ray sets the Polaroid on the office desk and puts a palm above it like a benediction that doesn’t ask permission. “Small voices,” he says to nobody and everybody, “keep receipts.”
“Let’s work,” Ruiz says, as if the word is a prayer too.
We do. Volunteers move like a practiced crew now—cut, bag, label. June shows with a portable cot and three boxes of Gatorade because hydration is a sermon she refuses to stop preaching. The librarian arrives with a rolling cart of sharpies and a sign-in sheet that reads WHO’S HERE TODAY? and the spaces fill with names large and tiny.
At 9:42, the eagle hoodie posts his “exposé,” a slick edit of stolen angles and confident wrongness. It trends for thirty minutes. It dies when Ruiz’s office uploads the red-tag, the override, the new hazard report, and a twelve-photo carousel of the wiring sins. In the comments under the “exposé,” you can feel people feel foolish and then angry. Some delete. Some double down. A few apologize, which is rarer than thunderstorms in December.
At 9:57, I step away to the edge of the parking lot because my phone buzzes with a name I want to hear: Maya.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer at first. I hear papers; I hear a voice that is all pillow corners and social work; I hear Ms. Kelley saying calm, specific things like a bridge hum. Then Maya laughs, a dry little bubble popping, the kind that comes out after you’ve held your breath too long.
“They drank my burnt coffee,” she says. “They asked about school. About screens. About why there’s chalk dust in the dishwasher. She answered two questions with nods. She said two sentences out loud.”
“What’d she say?”
Maya’s voice goes soft. “She told Ms. Kelley, ‘No interviews,’ and she told the social worker, ‘He doesn’t get to come in,’ and nodded at the street.”
Alvarez’s cruiser idles there still, blue light off, engine on—presence without drama.
“They closed it,” Maya says, breath out. “Case note reads, ‘Supportive environment. No evidence of exploitation. Provide resources, not punishment.’ Ms. Kelley wrote ‘proud’ with an exclamation point like an aunt. They’re gone. We’re okay.”
I lean on the fence and let that word do what it needs to. Okay can be a miracle.
“Come if you want,” I say. “There’s a star that needs finishing.”
“We’re coming,” she says. “She wants her chalk.”
They arrive at eleven, hair damp, faces lighter. Lena walks with that careful-new energy, the kind you have when your body has remembered how to be a body. She doesn’t run toward the wall. She looks at it like it’s a friend she wants to read before hugging.
Ruiz brings her the child-safe version of a hard hat—a white plastic dome that makes her grin against her will. Ms. Kelley stands at the edge of the lot, arms crossed, posture less badge, more backbone. She’s off-duty again; she’s still here.
“Bigger,” Lena says to me, not a demand now, just a plan.
We face the cinderblock together. The first star we drew at eight holds. Under it, a blank expanse the size of a promise.
“Five lines,” she says, barely audible, words rationed and precise.
I nod. “Five lines.”
I make the first; my hand wobbles; hers steadies. She makes the second; I make the third. She starts the fourth, the short quick stroke that has become her signature; I press in to stretch it across the gap she leaves on purpose. We finish the fifth together, our hands overlapping chalk, red dust in our nails, a star that’s not perfect because it shouldn’t be.
Around us, the town murmurs approval not with applause but with the shift of feet that says we mean to stay.
Ray lifts the little speaker and, for the first time in four years, I don’t mind the sound of my boy’s cheap guitar spilling into a day with cameras. The rhythm is still imperfect. The chord changes still come half a second late. It is holy as tap water.
“Say something,” June whispers, because she knows the difference between a speech and a line that pins a day to the wall.
I don’t like speeches. I like bolts torqued to spec. So I give them a bolt.
“We’re naming what almost broke us,” I say. “We’re fixing it where everyone can see. We’re listening to the smallest voice in the room, because she had the beat right when the rest of us were off.”
I hold up the red pick. “A boy left me a job to finish,” I say. “A girl told me to draw the rest. We’ll keep going until the stars line the whole wall, or until the inspector tells us to stop because there’s finally nothing left to fix.”
A chuckle ripples. Ruiz lifts his pencil in a mock oath. “I’ll retire before that,” he says. “But not this year.”
Nora steps to the plywood where Hawk painted STAR COMMONS and slaps a paper on it with a piece of blue tape. “Petition to rename the parcel,” she announces. “We need a hundred signatures. We have two hundred. We’ll take more.”
Parents push pens into one another’s hands. The librarian films badly on purpose for the town archive instead of the algorithm. The feed store guy brings lemonade as penance for whatever small selfishness he committed last week. Alvarez writes, carefully, For the kids, then draws a tiny badge and blushes when someone claps.
Across the street, the eagle hoodie leans out his window to film a last disapproving shot and catches himself in the reflection of the office glass—one man in a car, looking at himself looking at us. He drives away before his live can decide what to do with that.
Around one, the clouds tear like paper and blue falls through. We break for sandwiches. Lena leans against the warm cinderblock under her star and eats a triangle of peanut butter like she invented triangles. She looks at the wall, then at me, then at the pillar under the dock where Noah’s scratched clef fights moss and memory.
“Play?” she asks, flicking the pick with her thumb.
“I’m rust,” I warn.
She pats the crate like a throne. I sit anyway. My shoulder protests less than it did yesterday; pain learns humility when usefulness shows up. I lay the pad of the red pick against strings that haven’t been tuned since a summer that’s trying to forgive me. The first chord lands crooked. The second finds itself. The third and fourth remember. I hum because humming is the language she taught me to trust.
She doesn’t sing. She doesn’t have to. She taps the rhythm on the wall with two fingers, steady as a metronome, the same beat she put in my chest on the asphalt, the same beat that carried a bus over a bad morning.
People don’t clap. They still. If you’ve ever watched a town decide to be quiet for the right reason, you know it feels like weather turning.
When the song ends, she takes the pick back without ceremony and pushes it into my pocket again, as if to say: you get to keep it because you’re going to need it tomorrow.
“Tomorrow,” she says, and then, with a half-smile I haven’t earned, “bigger.”
Ruiz clears his throat into the mic he hates. “Schedule is posted,” he says. “Procurement is boring and public. Volunteer list is on the table. Next inspection at four. See something? Say something. Don’t wait for the meeting if the wire’s hot.”
We stack sawhorses. We sweep. We tape the day’s photos on the fence for anyone walking a dog at dusk. The librarian tucks the red-tag copy into a sleeve like a birth certificate. The retired electrician promises to bring his grandson tomorrow and show him why conduit bends like a question mark.
Maya gathers Lena’s chalk, counts the stubs the way you count candles after a party—one fewer than yesterday, which is how you know the day happened.
On the way to the cars, Lena stops at the wall and draws one more star knee-high, small as a breath. She leaves the fourth line short on purpose and looks at the nearest kid in a Spider-Man T-shirt.
“Your turn,” she tells him.
He blinks, then reaches for the chalk like it might bite and draws the last stroke. It’s crooked. It’s perfect.
He grins at her like she just told him a secret about how the world works. She has.
The town exhales. The river passes, uninterested in our revelations. The sky does what skies do when they’ve run out of drama for the day.
Ms. Kelley says goodbye like a neighbor, not a caseworker. Alvarez tips two fingers, leaves without siren. Nora stuffs the petition in her tote like a trophy. Hawk slaps the STAR COMMONS sign as if that makes it legal. June hands me a bottle of water and a look that says if I try stairs like that again, she will weld me to a chair.
Ray stands under the oak where letters and boxes and boys make maps and says a prayer nobody feels preached at: “Thank you for small voices, and for the stubborn adults who finally learned to listen.”
Maya bumps my shoulder. “He would have liked today,” she says.
“He did,” I say, and mean it.
On the way out, we pass the first star Lena and I drew together on the blank wall at eight a.m. It’s already scuffed by hands and shoulders and a dog who leaned on it for reasons only dogs know. Good. A clean star on a clean wall in a clean town is a lie.
We leave it messy on purpose.
At dusk, the wall is a field of little red constellations—finished, unfinished, in progress—names under them like footnotes: for my mother, for Ms. June, for Mr. Ruiz, for the bus, for the boy, for the girl. Someone has written, in a child’s hand too big for its line, LISTEN FASTER.
When the last ladder is down and the jar of dollars has turned into a box of receipts taped to coffee, I walk to the corner of the fence where it meets the road, where passerby can see without choosing to stop. I draw one more star on the chain-link, chalk crumbling against metal, nothing for permanence but everything for witness.
Five lines. One town.
We finish what a child started. We promise not to wait so long next time to hear.
And when I put the pick back in my pocket and the night leans in to listen, the hum under my ribs is steady, old and new at once—the sound of a place that finally remembered its beat.
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This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment and inspirational purposes. While it may draw on real-world themes, all characters, names, and events are imagined. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidenta
