Crew has a thing where he confuses having witnessed something with having understood it.
This is important context for what happened Saturday morning, when he announced, with the confidence of a man who has personally inspected load-bearing walls, that he knew exactly where the new Fredericksburg City Hall was and that we should absolutely detour there on our way to the wineries because he wanted to "see how it turned out."
"It's not open yet," I said. I had read the whole press release. I had, in fact, read it twice, because it mentioned the grand opening was Monday, April 27th, and we were standing in our kitchen on Saturday, April 25th, a date that is measurably not Monday.
"It's basically open," Crew said. "They're done. It's just a formality."
I want to pause here and acknowledge that "it's just a formality" is a sentence that has never, in the history of human civilization, preceded a good outcome.
We drove past it on the way out of town. Crew slowed down with the reverence of a man approaching a sacred site. There were cones. There were temporary signs. There was a very clear banner that said something about April 27th and an official ribbon-cutting, which I read aloud at normal volume while Crew said "hm" in a tone suggesting he found the ribbon-cutting banner to be a fun suggestion rather than a scheduling constraint.
"We could probably just walk around the outside," he said.
"We're going to the wineries," I said.
"Right, but while we're here."
We were not still there. We were moving, because I had kept my hand near the door handle in a way that communicated forward momentum. The wineries, plural, were waiting. It was already 73 degrees and climbing, the kind of Hill Country morning that felt like a gift but had an expiration date — I'd checked the forecast and there were storms penciled in for early evening, which meant our window was real and finite and not to be spent examining the exterior of a municipal building that would be officially accessible to us in forty-eight hours.
Crew spent the drive to the first winery explaining what he imagined the interior layout probably looked like. He had never been inside the old City Hall. He had driven past the new one once, briefly, just now. He spoke with the fluency of a man who has done a full walkthrough.
At the winery, he picked up a Restaurant Week flyer and studied it with genuine intensity. "We should do this," he said, meaning the prix fixe dinner, meaning May 4th, meaning a reservation he had no intention of making himself but would be enthusiastically supportive of me making.
"Okay," I said. "I'll look into it."
"Already on it," he said, setting the flyer down.
By early afternoon it was pushing 87 degrees and the clouds had started to stack up in that specific Hill Country way that means the sky is planning something. Crew looked up at them while we were sharing a cheese plate on someone's limestone patio and said, authoritatively, "those are just decorative."
I did not respond to this.
At 5:47 PM, there was thunder.
"Hm," Crew said, looking at the sky the same way he'd looked at the City Hall cones — like it was presenting information he found interesting but not necessarily binding.
We made it back to the car before the rain started. Barely. He held his jacket over my head for approximately twelve seconds before getting distracted by his phone, which was showing him a Coachella highlight reel he'd already watched twice this week, and then we were both just wet.
"Next time we'll plan better," he said, wringing out a sleeve.
I didn't say anything. I was already looking up Restaurant Week menus. The reservation window opened Monday.
Crew leaned over to look at my screen. "Ooh," he said. "Good idea."