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

We worked sixteen hours a day.

I rebuilt the east wall stone by stone. She took out the eleven windows one at a time, cleaned three hundred years of smoke off every piece of glass, replaced the cracked ones with glass she cut and painted by hand.

She was still bossy. I was still stubborn.

But somewhere in the fifth week, it stopped being a war.

She’d hand me my water bottle before I asked for it. I’d move the scaffolding at eleven o’clock without being told, so the morning light could pour through her windows. She learned to mix lime mortar. I learned the difference between cobalt blue and ultramarine.

She told me about her divorce. A surgeon in San Francisco who’d decided, at fifty, that he wanted a younger life. The settlement had gone through a mediator, and she’d come out of it with her studio, her tools and a feeling that she’d been politely erased.

I told her about my wife, Teresa, who’d left me ten years ago because she said I loved stone more than people.

“Did you?” Margaret asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“And now?”

I didn’t answer.

On a Thursday night in September, two weeks before the feast day, I was alone in the chapel, finishing the mortar on the last stones of the east wall by work light.

Margaret came in at ten o’clock. She’d been at the hotel. She looked different. Pale.

“Gabriel,” she said. “The insurance company called. The bankrupt contractor’s insurer. They’ve decided to cover the loss. All of it. The two hundred thousand.”

“That’s good news.”

“There’s a condition.”

“Of course there is.”

“They’re sending their own inspector next week. If any of the work done since the contractor left doesn’t meet code and historic standards,” she said, “they won’t pay. And the city will blame whoever signed off on it.”

“Who signed off on it?”

She held up a piece of paper.

“I did,” she said. “Last week. Both our names. I forged yours.”