Blake Pitch's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Blake Pitch read the email twice and set his phone face-down on the kitchen counter. A regional paper had a reporter on the east side of Marshwood. She was filing Friday. The headline draft used the word forgotten. If it ran before his event, every promise he was about to make would sound like a cover-up. He had been mayor of Marshwood four years. He was forty-four, a former soldier, and he used to drive the long way around the east side so he wouldn't see the potholes. That stopped after a councilman buried a child killed at one of those intersections. Now Blake wanted the town, and the state, and anyone reading a paper, to call Marshwood a safe haven. He had two days. Lovelie came in from the porch with the twins asleep against her shoulders. Her floral dress was creased from carrying them. She had spent the morning on the east side again and come back with a list of names in her phone. "They'll talk to a camera," she said. "If you fix something first. Not after." "Friday," Blake said. "Then fix something by Thursday." He called the public works director from the car. He called a paving crew he had used for a school lot. He called the councilman who had lost the child and asked him to stand at a podium with him. Then he drove to the little league field on the east side, the one a booster club had restored last spring. Crisp baselines. Fresh paint on the dugouts. A backstop that didn't sag. It was the one clean thing out there, and he hated using it, and he used it. By Wednesday night, a contractor sat at his kitchen table with a repair contract. Six intersections. New signals at two. Sidewalks on the block where the boy had died. The contractor initialed each page. Blake signed at the bottom. Lovelie watched from the doorway and did not smile. "You're paying for it how?" she asked. "Reserve fund. I'll answer for it later." "You will." Thursday morning, Blake stood at home plate with the councilman beside him and the signed contract in his hand. Lovelie had brought three east-side residents she trusted. A grandmother. A shop owner. The mother of the boy from the intersection. They spoke first. He spoke second, and shorter than he wanted to. He held up the contract and named the start date. Cameras ran. The regional reporter stood in the third row and wrote fast. Her story ran Friday morning. The headline used the word overdue, not forgotten. It quoted the grandmother. It quoted the mother. It quoted him last. Blake read it in the car and exhaled once. Then his phone rang. It was the city finance officer, and her voice was tight. The reserve fund he had just committed was already promised somewhere else.