The City of Santa Fe Gave the Same 300-Year-Old Church to Two Restorers. She Did the Glass, I Did the Stone, and We Both Wanted the Other One Fired

“Your scaffolding,” she said, “is in my light.”

That was the first thing Margaret Lindqvist ever said to me.

Not hello. Not her name. Just that, with her hands on her hips, standing in the middle of the Chapel of San Miguel at seven in the morning, looking up at the scaffolding I’d spent two days building.

“Good morning,” I said.

“It’s blocking the east windows. I can’t see the color until eleven.”

“The east wall has a crack you could put your hand in. If I don’t fix it, the windows won’t have a wall to sit in.”

“Then fix it faster.”

I’m Gabriel Ortega. I’m 51. I’ve been a stonemason in New Mexico for twenty-eight years, and I work alone.

The Chapel of San Miguel is three hundred years old. The city had a federal preservation grant to save it, four hundred and twenty thousand dollars, on one condition: finished by the feast of San Miguel, September 29th, or the grant had to be paid back.

Nobody told me they’d hired a second contractor.

Margaret Lindqvist was a stained-glass conservator from San Francisco. Late forties. Curly auburn hair in a blue scarf. A voice that made you want to stand up straighter.

She’d never worked with a stonemason who didn’t do what she said.

By the end of the first week, she had filed a written complaint with the city about my dust.

By the end of the second week, I had filed one about her ladders.

At the beginning of the third week, the city’s project manager called us both into his office.

“You two have a problem,” he said.

“We know,” we both said.

“No,” he said. “A different problem.”