"Forty-five days," Mrs. Dunning said.
"I gave you the most I could, Hazel."
"How much does a roof cost, Lonnie?"
He told her what the engineer from Hutchinson had estimated when he looked at it in the spring. Thirty-eight thousand dollars. Maybe more, once they opened it up.
Danny was standing in the doorway of the office with his mop. He saw Mrs. Dunning's face not change at all, and he understood for the first time that that was a thing a face could do when the news was bad enough.
"And Lonnie," she said, "I don't suppose you'd know how the city commission came to put the Sunflower block on its agenda for August nineteenth. As a blight designation. Under the urban renewal plan."
The fire marshal looked at his cap.
"I just inspect buildings, Hazel," he said.
* * *
That night, after the last show, after the mop, Danny climbed to the booth and found Ansel sitting on his stool in the dark, the projectors cooling and ticking like car engines, and the radio playing low, a ball game from Kansas City. The Royals were down two in the seventh.
"The blight thing," Danny said. "What does it mean?"