Danny's mother found him at the foot of the booth stairs. She didn't say anything. She just put her arms around him, scrubs and all, and held on, and he let her.
"The rent," he said into her shoulder.
"Not your job," she said. "Besides, Margit Lindahl just asked me if I wanted the apartment over the bakery. Two bedrooms. Two-ninety a month. She says she's been looking for a tenant who doesn't mind getting up at four in the morning to the smell of bread." She pulled back and looked at him. "I told her I'd think about it for about one second."
Ansel was at the top of the stairs, putting the Book of Aisles back in its cabinet. Danny climbed up to him. On the way, on the landing, he stopped by the wall of names, and took a pencil out of his jacket pocket, and found a clear spot just under Walter Greer 1963, and wrote Danny Kowal 1985, small and neat. It looked like nothing. It looked like it had always been there.
* * *
The city commission met on Monday night, August 19, in the council chambers above the fire station, which held sixty people. Four hundred came. Lonnie Ebert, in his capacity as fire marshal, moved the meeting to the Sunflower.
There was not much left to decide by then. The Merritt Ledger had come out Sunday morning with a front-page story under Thomas Kreider's byline—THEATER'S 'KEEPERS' RETURN IN FORCE—and a photograph of the packed auditorium taken from the booth port, with Danny's permission, and not one word about the page from 1960, because Walter Greer had told that story himself, out loud, and it belonged to him. At nine o'clock Monday morning, a lawyer from Wichita had telephoned Mayor Marjorie Bell to inform her that Mid-Continent Partners was withdrawing from the Riverside Square project, citing "an unfavorable community climate." By noon the Downtown Development Authority had a project with no money in it and a president who was not returning calls.
The blight designation for Block 14 failed, four to one. The one was a commissioner named Pfister, who had been to the barbecue, and who said afterward, to anyone who would listen, that he'd only voted that way so the minutes would show somebody had read the staff report.
Royce Hadley did not attend. On the twenty-second of August, County Attorney Ruth Ann Szabo, who had made her year at the Sunflower in 1972 and recused herself from nothing, filed a misdemeanor charge of battery against him on the complaint of Linda Kowal on behalf of her minor son, with the sworn statements of nine witnesses from the July 13 line, one of whom was Officer Gene Pruitt's sister-in-law. Royce pleaded no contest in October. He paid a five-hundred-dollar fine and was ordered to complete forty hours of community service, which the judge, who had not been an usher but whose wife had, suggested he perform for a charitable organization of his choosing in Merritt. Royce chose the Elks. Nobody was surprised.
The thing that people talked about for years, though, wasn't the fine. It was the billboard out by the grain elevators. NOBODY OUTDEALS ROYCE. Sometime in the last week of August, somebody climbed up there at night with a can of white paint and a steady hand and changed one word, so that for eleven days, until the sign company came, it said NOBODY RUNS THIS PLACE. Nobody ever found out who did it. Lupe Herrera, when asked, said she was afraid of heights. Kenny Strand, when asked, said he didn't know anything about it, and grinned so wide under his terrible mustache that his own mother had to look away.