Part 5 — Paper Rainbows
Maya didn’t raise her voice. “Pastor,” she said again, showing the push alert. “Maple Street Church. ‘Glass heard breaking.’”
Pastor Hannah didn’t flinch or drop the small pane of salvaged glass she was cradling at June’s doorway. She met Cal’s eyes, then Ray’s. “I’m not leaving this doorway,” she said quietly. “Not while the light is working.”
“I’ll go,” Ray said. He was already shrugging into his coat. “Alvin, with me?”
Alvin wiped his hands on his jeans, nodded once, and jogged after Ray through the soft, stubborn rain.
Cal looked back at June. The makeshift rainbow shivered along the wall as the theater tech feathered the gel boards against another gust. June’s fingers were still open to the color like a child waiting for a bird to land. “We’re here,” he told her. “We’re not going anywhere.”
—
Maple Street had the wet shine small towns get when they’ve just reminded themselves they’re made of brick and weather. Ray parked at the curb and walked. The sound of rain on his hood made its own private room.
The big stained-glass window—the one June called the rainbow castle—looked whole from the street. Up close, a corner the size of a dinner plate in the lower left had been knocked out. Colored shards lay on the sill like candy wrapped in rain. A damp sheet of copier paper had been taped to the door with blue painter’s tape. The words were printed in a font too neat for anger and too blunt for kindness:
DON’T BRING LEATHER HERE.
Alvin peeled back an edge of tape with two fingers. “Printer ink,” he said, as if that detail mattered, and somehow it did. He slid the paper into an offering envelope because that’s what was handy, and because it felt right that a mean sentence should be carried in something that usually held money for the light bill.
Ray crouched and looked at the break. “Thrown, not kicked,” he said. “Small object. Wrong angle for a rock from the street.”
“There’s glass inside?” Alvin asked.
“Maybe a few pieces,” Ray said. He didn’t go in yet. He took a photo for the report he didn’t want to file. He took another for the glazier, because triage is still care. He dialed the non-emergency line, spoke calmly, asked for a patrol car to swing by, and requested a board-up. “No alarm,” he added. “No escalation. Just… fix the hole before the next wind.”
The officer from the slow-rolling cruiser earlier arrived, took a look, took a statement, took the envelope with the note like evidence, then handed Ray back the blue tape. “You’ll want to cover it until maintenance comes,” he said. “Wind will make a mess.”
Ray pressed the tape down over a sheet of cardboard someone had left by the recycling bin. It wasn’t pretty. It was enough.
He texted two pictures to the group thread: the taped corner and a close-up of the neat, dull letters. To Cal directly, he added: We’ll fix it. Don’t come. Stay with her.
—
Back at the duplex, the hallway’s color thinned, then pooled again, then thinned. June drifted and woke and drifted. The oxygen line whispered. The generator hummed like a big cat sleeping.
Maya’s screen buzzed with Ray’s images. Her fingers hovered over reply and then didn’t. Some alarms deserve silence, even in a newsroom made of phones. She looked up at the gel boards and the men holding them steady against weather, at Pastor Hannah steadying the small pane like a note on a flute, at Cal with both hands open.
“News?” Cal asked, not looking away from June.
Maya showed him the corner of the window—taped, not ruined—the paper note with its tidy harm. Cal’s mouth went a harder line for three seconds and then softened again, like wet clay pressed and then released.
“We’ll fix it,” he said, echoing Ray without knowing. “Later.”
“Later,” Maya agreed.
Evelyn checked the monitors and then ignored them long enough to see a person instead of numbers. “She’s comfortable,” the nurse said. “That matters.”
“Everything matters,” Cal said, and he wasn’t arguing.
The theater tech played the light like an instrument no one usually got to hear. He tipped a panel, tucked a green over a yellow, and the room sweetened. “We’re catching every inch the sky lets us borrow,” he said. “We’ll make do with do.”
The toddlers on the porch had been given crayons and a flattened cereal box to color. One drew a circle of stick figures holding hands around a rectangle with cross-hatched windows. Another scribbled in fierce blocks of color and announced, “It’s loud blue.” Their mother shushed them out of habit and then smiled because there was nothing to hush.
Afternoon leaned toward evening. The rain learned patience and settled into it. The breathing of the house became the breathing of the people in it.
June stirred. “Dad?”
“I’m here.”
She squinted with the serious face small children get when something important is happening inside their heads. “Can you make the big rainbow? The kind that goes across the street?”
Cal swallowed, felt the swallow all the way down to his hands. “I promised,” he said. “We’re going to.”
June nodded once, as if they had just concluded a lawful deal. Her lashes lowered. The bar of gold from the misshapen sun on the pane landed across her fingers like a ribbon and stayed there.
Minutes lengthened and softened. Maya felt them like a tide. She didn’t take out her phone. She would later, and she would type something spare and true. But just then, she let quiet be the only witness.
When it happened, it was the way Evelyn had said it might, and the way anyone who has loved someone through a long afternoon knows: with no drama, no music cue, no heroics you can see from the sidewalk. June’s breath loosened, like a knot being untied by a patient mother. Her face settled into a piece of sleep you don’t get accused of waking from. Cal’s hand was around her hand because it had been for a long time already. The CO detector blinked its small, faithful green. Outside, rain drew straight lines.
Evelyn watched the numbers behave, then stop mattering. She put her hand on Cal’s shoulder and didn’t rush the sentence she had to say. “It’s time,” she murmured.
Cal closed his eyes, once. When he opened them, they were not emptier. They were full of something precise and unmeasured. He kissed the top of June’s head the way he had when she first fit in the crook of his arm. “Thank you,” he said, to his daughter. To the room. To the unseen air.
Pastor Hannah, who had stood so still her forearms ached, set the small pane on the dresser and bowed her head without an audience. She didn’t reach for liturgy. She didn’t need to. She said, “Mercy hold her,” and let the words stand upright by themselves.
Outside, someone in the alley understood without being told. Helmets were lifted and set carefully in a line along the mudroom wall like a row of sleeping turtles. Alvin turned the generator off and then on again, the way you do when you are checking a friend is still there. Ray let the tarp fall back into place and stepped away, giving the eave back to the house.
Maya stepped into the kitchen and wrote one sentence on her phone, then deleted it, then wrote another. She came back to the doorway and asked Cal with her eyes. He nodded once. She posted:
June rode through her rainbow at home this afternoon. She was warm and held. We’ll honor her with light you can walk through.
The comment section bloomed, then steadied as if the town itself had put a hand on its own mouth.
Evelyn moved with the quiet choreography of after. She made a call. She folded something, smoothed something, wrote a time she would remember without reading it. She asked Cal if he wanted more people or fewer. He said, “Just who’s here,” and then, after a breath, “and Pastor, and Maya for a minute more.” He did not add and the men, because he knew they would become whatever the room needed—furniture, wall, weatherbreak.
A little later, when the house had learned its new sound, Cal went to the small desk where June kept her crayons and stickers. The top drawer stuck the way it always did; he jiggled it the way you do when you know a drawer’s personality. Inside was a folded paper with a purple sun drawn in the corner, a green line of grass across the bottom, and letters that were large and earnest and sometimes backward:
MAKE A RAINBOW FOR THE WHOLE TOWN.
DON’T LET ANYBODY STAND IN THE RAIN.
Cal sat with it on his knee. He smoothed the crease and then left it, the fold still visible like a road you might walk again. He didn’t cry the way people expect in movies. His face did a human thing that doesn’t look like a story until later.
He stood, found Pastor Hannah, and handed her the page. “She wrote it some other day,” he said. “Before I knew how to listen.”
The pastor read, breathed the words like weather. “Then we have our instructions,” she said. “Plain as daylight.”
Ray’s text from the church buzzed the table: the photo of the bandaged corner, the note in the offering envelope, a line that read: Minor damage. We’ll make it right. Also—fundraiser is showing ‘temporary hold for verification.’ I’ll call who I can call in the morning. And the petition cleared 1,000. Hearing Monday, 7 p.m.
Maya looked at the drawing in the pastor’s hands and then at Ray’s message and then at Cal. The two things—the child’s order and the town’s argument—met in her chest and sparked.
“We’ll start with the window,” she said, not asking. “And the ride. And the ledger tonight so nobody can say we hid anything.”
Alvin knocked his boots free of mud and came in just far enough to hand Cal a Ziploc bag. Inside were four small shards of glass—red, blue, yellow, and a clear piece with a smear of lead. “From the sill before the board-up,” he said, apologetic and proud. “Figured we shouldn’t waste a rainbow.”
Cal turned the bag over in his palm. The shards clicked softly against each other like a sentence he didn’t know how to read yet. He put the bag next to June’s drawing and the tiny helmet Pastor had brought back from the church before the rain had gotten serious. Three artifacts on a dresser: a plan, a wound, a promise.
Outside, the rain’s steadiness made the alley look like a page you could write on if you had the right pen. The circle of bikes broke formation, one by one, like a respectful recessional at a quiet wedding. No one revved. No one needed to be told.
Pastor Hannah wrapped the small pane back in the towel and tucked it under her arm. “We’ll need more glass,” she said. “And more hands. And a way to show our work before the hearing.”
“Bottles,” Alvin said, thinking out loud. “Colored ones. We can tumble them, cut them, lead them. The old way. Folks’ll bring what they’ve got under their sinks.”
Ray nodded once, the decision settling on him like a coat that fit better than he expected. “I’ll get the permit for scaffolding,” he said. “And I’ll stand at the microphone Monday.” He didn’t add and I’ll bring my own story, but his mouth softened in a way that said he might.
Cal picked up June’s drawing and slid it carefully into the inside pocket of his jacket, where important papers and small mercies go. He took the tiny helmet by its strap and looped it over his wrist the way you might carry a lantern you’re not willing to set down.
He looked at the board covered hole in the church photo on Maya’s screen, and at the real wall in the bedroom where the last of the color was fading into comfortable gray. He breathed once and found enough air.
He opened the group thread and typed, slowly:
Tomorrow we start fixing the window. Bring colors. Bring receipts. Bring anyone who ever stood in the rain.
Part 6 — Two Worlds in One Aisle
The morning of the service smelled like wet grass and hot coffee. Maple Street was closed at the curb by two orange sawhorses and a polite sign that said Memorial Today — Please Walk Quietly. People did.
Inside the sanctuary, light took its time arriving, then poured through what remained of the big window and the dozen smaller ones, painting the pews in careful squares. At the front, on a table draped in white, sat a framed photo of June with a grin that didn’t ask permission, a mason jar of wildflowers, and her tiny rainbow-stickered helmet like a lantern at rest.
Leather and linen didn’t sit apart; they ran together like two colors that finally learned to blend. Men who looked built to lift engines slid in next to grandmothers with hymnbooks. A teen in black nail polish held the door for an usher with a tremor. The choir wore simple sashes in candy-colors, not because anyone told them to, but because someone left a basket of them by the robing room and it felt right.
Cal stood near the front, tie crooked, jacket too formal for his wrists. People touched his shoulder and moved along. Some tried words. Most didn’t. He learned the grammar of those touches: a palm that said I’ve buried, a squeeze that meant I’ve borrowed breath before too, a brush of fingertips that only asked may I share a bit of your weight?
When Pastor Hannah stepped into the pulpit, she didn’t clear her throat. She told a small story about a girl who had named a building better than the sign out front had, and about a father who asked the town to be brave enough to show up in quiet ways. She did not make promises she couldn’t keep. She asked the room to breathe together for the time it took a ray of light to cross the floor.
Maya spoke next because Cal had asked her to. She didn’t play the long clip. She read from a notecard: June called us the rainbow people and asked us to make one big enough for everyone. We’re going to try. Her voice shook until it didn’t.
A neighbor with a voice made of roadwork and lullabies sang “This Little Light of Mine” and didn’t do anything smart to it. The congregation—some expert, some shy—found the melody and held it like a rope.
Ray did not plan to speak. He felt public words the way some people feel tight collars. But when Pastor Hannah lifted a hand toward him, he stood anyway and walked to the side of the altar where the microphone waited with patient wires.
“I file permits for a living,” he began, and the room smiled because it was an honest, unromantic sentence. “I like rules because rules keep people from getting hurt. But I also watched a town hold doors and steady umbrellas and tape down cords so a small girl could have more air and more color. I saw us choose to be boring in all the right ways so we could be brave in the ones that count.”
He looked at the window with the taped lower corner. “We’ll fix what’s cracked. We’ll write our names on the ledger and the sign-up sheets and, yes, on the permits. And Monday night, when folks ask for silence where mercy needs sound, I’ll be at the mic with my tie crooked. You can sit behind me if you’d like. It makes a room feel honest.”
Nobody clapped. They breathed and nodded and the feeling moved through them anyway.
Then it was Cal’s turn without a pulpit. He held the helmet on its strap like it might bolt and he would be ready. “June asked me for a big rainbow,” he said. “Not just for her. For all of us. So we’re going to make one—out of glass, and also out of us. If you’ve got colored bottles in a bin under your sink, we’ll take them. If you’ve ever cut glass or never have, we’ll teach you. If all you can carry is a cup of cocoa, bring that. If all you can offer is quiet, that counts as lifting.”
He paused and the pause wasn’t empty. “Thank you for doing the boring parts with me. They’re heavy too.”
At the end, the line to the front didn’t move like lines do when people are eager to leave; it flowed like two streams figuring out how to be one river. Men in leather set their helmets, one by one, along the rail. Grease-stained palms and hands with wedding bands and tiny scarred knuckles and smooth prayer-soft fingers touched the small helmet and then the table as if to say I see, I see. Someone started spelling J U N E with helmets, and without a committee, the row arranged itself into four letters.
In the hall, long tables appeared under aluminum trays and slow-cookers and foil-covered casseroles. Name tags sprouted even though everyone mostly knew each other already. A kid with a buzz cut and a kid with curls took turns doling out ladles of mac and cheese and the kind of baked beans that could quiet a room.
At a side table, Alvin had set up a cardboard box with a hand-lettered sign: Colored Glass Drop-Off. Bottles clinked softly as they arrived—blue from someone’s fancy store-bought water, green from last year’s holiday décor, a weird deep red that might have been a souvenir no one remembered buying. An older man brought a shoebox filled with marbles he said his sister would be mad about until he told her why; then she’d bring the rest.
On the opposite wall, Maya and the retired teacher posted two things: VOLUNTEER SIGN-UP with time slots and tasks (washing bottles, tumbling shards, cutting, leading, snacks, cleanup), and OPEN LEDGER with columns for funds pledged, funds received, expenses posted, receipts attached. The ink wasn’t even dry before the first few lines filled: a hardware store owner comping safety gloves; a local diner donating coffee for three Saturdays; a high school art club promising Saturdays and patience.
A representative from the fundraiser platform called Pastor Hannah on the church phone, which only rang for weddings and wrong numbers. The woman on the other end was polite and sounded like she drank black tea. “Routine verification,” she said. “We’ll release as soon as we can.” Hannah asked what “as soon” meant. The answer was only a phrase made of policy and good intentions. When she hung up, she wrote the conversation on the ledger in tidy letters. Funds held; verification pending. She felt better seeing the words become ink. Ink keeps promises honest.
Out on the lawn, someone had arranged a haphazard “gallery” of the town’s first stained-glass experiments: a trivially leaded square here, a clumsy star there. Kids pointed and gave names to the shapes like you do with unfamiliar clouds. “That one’s a cat in a boat,” a small voice declared. No one argued with the authority of imagination.
In a corner pew, two women exchanged numbers—one had a minivan and a reliable calendar for pick-ups; the other had two good hands and a free Thursday afternoon. At a folding table, three men who’d met fifteen minutes earlier argued amicably about the best way to soak labels off bottles; a fourth arrived with a bucket and said, “Hot water, a little baking soda. Be boring.” They all laughed and wrote it down like knowledge.
Through it all, Cal moved like a person learning how to be seen without bracing. A woman pressed a smooth river stone into his palm. “For your pocket,” she said. “It’s helped me before.” He didn’t say he didn’t believe in such things. He believed in the feeling of the stone and the sincerity of its delivery, and that was belief enough.
When the service gave way to the long, soft hours after, a small procession walked to the church yard. Not everyone. Just a ribbon of people who needed a place to stand still. There was a space under a maple where sunlight—on good days—came down like a slow applause. Today the light stitched itself through clouds and made a gentle path anyway. Someone read a poem that wasn’t about angels or engines but might as well have been, because it was about hands. Cal set the helmet under the maple, then picked it back up. He had not learned yet how to leave it. He didn’t hurry himself.
Late afternoon, the kids who’d been drawing inside took their pictures out to the steps and taped them in a friendly, chaotic stripe: crooked arches heavy with color, people holding hands, a dog that looked like a potato with ears, a house with windows full of squares. Above it all, someone had written in careful block letters: NO ONE STANDS IN THE RAIN ALONE.
Local reporters came with soft shoes and no flash. A national crew called to ask permission and was told yes and also please don’t turn this into a story about noise; it’s about neighbors. The phone line to the church office rang with three more routine verifications, two invitations to argue on TV (politely declined), and one offer from a stained-glass artist two counties over: Got scrap. Got lead came. Got time. Put me to work.
As golden hour flirted with the edges of cloud, the sanctuary looked briefly like it had a pulse. Color, even in its wounded corner, managed to behave like hope.
That’s when the maintenance man, sheepish in his town-issued polo, carried a roll of bright tape and a stiff envelope to Pastor Hannah. “From the building department,” he said, apology pre-loaded into his eyebrows. “I was told to post it, Pastor. You know I don’t write these.”
She read quickly. TEMPORARY STOP-WORK ORDER in officious font, citing safety concerns and lack of scaffolding permit for any repairs to the window until Monday’s hearing. It allowed interior worship as usual and exterior gatherings under posted occupancy—but no ladders, no panes lifted, no boards removed.
“Thank you for telling me yourself,” she told the maintenance man, because being mad at messengers is lazy. She watched him tape one copy near the side entrance and hand her the other for records. The tape made a sound like a zipper closing.
Maya photographed the notice, then turned the phone so Cal and Ray could see. Cal’s jaw worked once, then went still. Ray took the paper, read it top to bottom, then again, lips thinning. “It’s the safe call,” he said. “And it’s also a slow one. Monday, seven p.m. We’ll be ready.”
“Then we use the wait,” Pastor Hannah said, voice like a handrail. “We cut glass on tables. We wash bottles. We teach kids to sand edges. We publish fifty receipts. We practice being the rainbow before we hang it.”
She walked to the bulletin board next to the stop-work notice and pinned June’s drawing from a color copy Maya had made: MAKE A RAINBOW FOR THE WHOLE TOWN. DON’T LET ANYBODY STAND IN THE RAIN. She smoothed the corners like you do a sheet on a bed someone is coming home to.
As the building emptied into evening, the ledger’s first page filled and the second began. The sign-up sheet grew new columns for things no one thought to ask for at the start: safety goggles, dish tubs, duct tape, band-aids, playlists for steady hands. The colored glass box needed a second, then a third. The toddlers petitioned for a job and were given exactly the right one: unwrap paper towels, hand them to grown-ups with wet bottles.
Cal stood under the taped corner and watched the last light of the day think about staying a little longer. He felt for the river stone in his pocket, then for the helmet strap around his wrist. He didn’t talk to the window. He didn’t need to. He stood there until the room went from gold to gray and found it was still a room he could stand in.
His phone buzzed in his jacket: a calendar reminder for a meeting that now meant more than he could have known a week ago. Town Hearing — Noise Buffer — Monday 7:00 p.m.
Under it, a new alert from the fundraiser platform blinked to life: Funds remain on hold pending additional review. It added a line about “unprecedented activity.” It suggested patience.
Maya read the same alert and lifted her chin a degree. “We’ll publish the ledger tonight anyway,” she said. “If the money takes the scenic route, we won’t.”
Ray slipped the stop-work copy into his folder like a paper he intended to argue with. “Bring your colors tomorrow,” he said, looking at Cal, at Pastor Hannah, at anyone within earshot. “Bring your boring. Monday we’ll make our case. Until then, we practice.”
The church lights clicked off row by row, leaving the corner where the notice hung in the circle of a hallway fixture. In that small pool of light, June’s copied drawing glowed like it had its own backlight.
Outside, the night pulled itself up over Maple Street. In the quiet, the town could hear its own promise—unflashy, unremarkable, the kind you can fold and put in a pocket and take out again when it’s time to do the next right thing.
