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

The problem was money.

The general contractor the city had hired to manage the whole project, a company from Albuquerque, had declared bankruptcy over the weekend. They’d already been paid two hundred thousand dollars of the grant.

The money was gone.

Their liability insurance was in dispute. Their bond was in court. Their lawyer wasn’t answering his phone.

“Here’s where we are,” the project manager said. “There’s two hundred and twenty thousand dollars left. There’s eleven weeks left. If the chapel isn’t finished by the feast day, the city has to pay back the whole four hundred and twenty. We don’t have it. Nobody has it.”

He looked at us.

“So I need one of you to take over as general contractor. Or I need both of you to work together and do it without one.”

Margaret looked at me.

I looked at her.

“I’ll take the stone,” I said. “She takes the glass. We split the money for the roof and the floor.”

“We can’t afford a roofer,” she said.

“I’ve done roofs.”

“We can’t afford a floor man.”

“I’ve done floors.”

She stared at me.

“Is there anything you haven’t done?”

“Stained glass,” I said.

For the first time, she almost smiled.

That afternoon, we sat on the front steps of the chapel with a notebook and a calculator. Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Eleven weeks. Two people.

“We need to cut something,” she said.

“No.”

“Gabriel. The numbers don’t work.”

“Then we work for less.”

She looked at me sideways.

“You’d cut your own fee? For a church?”

“My grandmother was baptized here,” I said. “So was my mother. So was I. My father’s funeral was here. I’m not doing this for the fee.”

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she crossed out her own fee in the notebook.

And wrote next to it, very small: *Me neither.*