Finn decided we were going to Red Hen for lunch, which was a reasonable idea that he then made unreasonable by treating it like a logistics operation requiring advance reconnaissance.
He had looked at Berlin Street the night before — "just to check," he said, which is a thing he says before doing something elaborate — and discovered the road closure. Sewer main replacement. The whole stretch, gone since late June, not coming back until August. A normal person would have noted this and moved on. Finn screenshotted the city's newsflash page, zoomed in on the infrastructure timeline, and announced at breakfast that he had "mapped us a route."
I asked if we needed a route. We were walking. It's Montpelier. The whole downtown is roughly the size of a confident sneeze.
He said the closure created what he called "a cascading pedestrian pressure point" and that his route avoided it.
I want to be clear that it was sixty-three degrees and sunny, one of those Vermont mornings where the air is still cold in the shade and warm the second you step into the light, and we could have just walked toward the smell of bread and arrived. That was the whole plan available to us. But Finn had a different plan, which he was now describing using the phrase "optimal throughput."
We went his way. His way involved a block of active paving — flaggers, an enormous machine that smelled like ambition and asphalt — and a brief stretch where we had to single-file past a construction trailer. Finn walked through all of this with total serenity, like he had predicted it, which he had not.
"This is a lot of construction," I said.
"Summer paving mode," he said. "The city warned about this."
He said "summer paving mode" like it was a weather system he had personally tracked.
When we got to Red Hen it was crowded in the best way, the kind of crowded that means a place is real and people already know about it, bread smell everywhere, the cases full of good things. Finn studied the sandwich options for so long that the person behind us shifted their weight twice. He asked the counter person one clarifying question about the bread situation. It was not a complicated question but it was a Finn question, meaning it had a subordinate clause.
We got our food and found a spot and the sun came in through the window at a good angle and everything was genuinely, straightforwardly nice.
Finn ate about four bites and then said he thought we should go find the river concerts afterward.
I said sure.
He pulled out his phone. I assumed he was looking up the Montpelier Alive calendar, which would have been a normal thing to do. Instead he was cross-referencing the paving schedule with the concert location to determine whether the route from Red Hen to Juana's Garden had, quote, "infrastructure risk."
I looked at him. He looked at his phone. Outside the window, a very normal amount of summer was happening — people walking, sun getting warmer, a couple navigating around an orange cone with zero crisis.
"Finn," I said.
"There might be lane closures on the way back," he said. "I-89's also doing final paving. Not that we're going on the highway. But still."
"We're walking along the river," I said. "To listen to free music."
He nodded seriously. "I know. I just want to have options."
He did not have options. He had a sandwich and a phone and a very pleasant day that was requiring no optimization whatsoever, which I think was genuinely difficult for him to process.
We walked to the river. The music was good. The water was doing its regular water thing. The air had warmed up fully by then, that specific Vermont summer warmth that feels earned because it was cold an hour ago.
Finn stood there listening and eventually, gradually, let his phone go into his pocket.
For about twenty minutes he just existed in the afternoon without routing it.
Then, on the walk back, he noticed a road sign and said: "See, this is exactly what I was worried about."
The sign said ROAD WORK AHEAD and we walked past it in eleven seconds.
"Great call," I said.
"Thank you," he said, completely sincerely.
I love him. He is a lot.