Chapter Eighty: What We Carry Forward
December came in with the particular self possession of a month that knows it is the end of something and the beginning of something else and does not feel the need to be dramatic about either.
The partnership agreement between Bennett Hardware, the Cole Remediation Fund, and Howard Weston's neighborhood investment trust was signed on a Wednesday afternoon in the back office of the hardware store, the small room where Claire had sat on a crate eating lunch as a child and where her father had taken difficult phone calls for thirty years.
It was not a complicated document. The lawyers had made it complicated and then Claire had asked them to explain it to her the way they would explain it to her father, and then she had asked them to reduce it to its
