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

I stared at her.

“You forged my signature.”

“You were on the roof,” she said. “The city needed the form by five. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

I started to say something.

Then I started to laugh.

“What?” she said. “What’s funny?”

“Three months ago, you filed a complaint about my dust,” I said. “Now you’re forging my name on federal documents.”

She covered her face with her hands.

“I know. I know. It’s insane.”

“The inspector’s going to look at every stone.”

“I know.”

“And every window.”

“Gabriel, I *know*.”

I put down my trowel. I walked over to her. I took her hands away from her face.

“Then let him look,” I said. “Every stone. Every window. I’ll stand next to you while he does it.”

The inspector came the following Wednesday. A thin, serious man from Denver with a clipboard and a tape measure. He spent nine hours in the Chapel of San Miguel. He tested the mortar. He measured the walls. He looked at every piece of glass in every one of the eleven windows with a magnifying loupe.

At six o’clock, he put his clipboard down.

“In twenty years,” he said, “I’ve never signed off on a historic restoration with no notes.”

He signed.

On September 29th, the feast of San Miguel, four hundred people filled the chapel for Mass. Morning light came through the east windows, and the whole old adobe church lit up blue and red and gold, like the inside of a jewel.

Margaret and I stood at the back. Covered in dust. In our work clothes. There hadn’t been time to change.

During the final blessing, she leaned over and whispered, “You know, legally, my signature is now on your wall.”

“And mine,” I whispered back, “is on your windows.”

She looked up at me in the colored light.

“So what do we do about that?”

I took her hand. The one with a cut on the thumb from the cobalt glass, and a little lime mortar under the nails.

“I’ve got a job in Taos next spring,” I said. “An old church. Eleven windows.”

She squeezed my hand.

“Is the scaffolding,” she asked, “going to be in my light?”

“Only until eleven,” I said.