At the same time, the shop needed work completed that had nothing to do with architectural fantasies. Luis and Maren spent mornings preparing maple cabinet doors and afternoons repairing a set of cedar windows whose owner had waited through two delays already. Annie's school year ended. The pickup developed a new sound on the road into town, a low mechanical complaint that worsened whenever Maren tried to pretend she hadn't heard it. A supply company tightened her payment terms after a late check. None of these things made the redwood less extraordinary, and none of them were made easier by the fact that the redwood was extraordinary.
The worst afternoon came when the Sacramento cabinet company confirmed it had given its postponed order to somebody else. Maren had expected the possibility, but she'd still written the job's deposit into her projected cash flow on the assumption that trust would eventually prevail. The purchasing manager apologized again. He said the work had to proceed and the alternate supplier had been able to assure his supervisor of capacity. Maren hung up and stared at the empty space on her order board where the job had been penciled in.
Luis found her there. "You want me to call them?" he asked.
"They made their decision."
"I can tell them we're working. That the shop isn't going anywhere."
"We are working," she said. "But that doesn't mean they're obligated to take our risk."
He stood beside her, looking at the calendar, and asked whether they were in trouble. She told him they were close enough that she wasn't comfortable making promises she couldn't prove with numbers. His face changed, not with resentment but with concern for the life he'd built around the shop. His wife worked part-time, and they had a child starting high school in the fall. Maren asked him whether he wanted to find steadier work while he still had time. He said he would think about it, and the fact that he didn't immediately refuse frightened her more than she admitted.
That night Annie found the kitchen table covered in failed contacts. Names, phone numbers, dates, unanswered emails, and notes about vendor requirements were arranged across a legal pad like a map of roads that ended at locked gates. Her daughter asked whether anyone had wanted the wood. Maren said a few people did, but not the people who could use it the way she hoped. Annie looked at one of the photographs and asked why someone would want the wood if they couldn't see what it looked like when it was made into something.
Maren began to answer, then stopped. She had been asking architects to imagine a product from an unfinished trunk lying in a weedy yard. She'd expected strangers who worked with impossible deadlines to invest their attention in photographs of char, figure, and wet wood, then construct the finished object in their minds. She was asking them to do the most creative part of her job before she had done it herself. Her daughter had not meant to offer a business strategy. She simply wanted to see a table.