Willa
The plumber showed up about half an hour after Sue left.
He looked just like I expected: medium height, medium-brown hair, middle-aged, with skin that showed he probably didn’t believe in sunscreen. I couldn’t tell what color his eyes were because he was wearing those adjustable sunglasses I hate and they were a 1970s yellow on him as he stepped through the doorway.
“I’m Dave. Where’s the leak?” he asked briskly.
“I think it might be in the upstairs sink pipe,” I said, a bit proud of myself for having done the math on this and figured it out.
“What room?” he asked.
“Oh.” He didn’t care what my assessment was. “Over here.” I led him to the corner of the living room from the direction of the kitchen. “See? It’s spread even since this morning when we called.”
“You need mitigation, after I’ve found and fixed the leak,” he announced.
Mitigation? Wasn’t that a legal term? I wasn’t in some sort of trouble, was I? “What do you mean, mitigation?”
“Got to pull down the drywall and put a fan in to dry it out before we can repair it.”
“Take out the drywall?” Suddenly this sounded way more expensive than anything I’d anticipated. “Won’t it just dry?”
He shook his head. “Ruined.” He took out a telescopic metal stick and poked it at the ceiling. I saw dents behind where he’d touched it. “We’ll probably need to replace the whole ceiling,” he said, and I think we both heard the cha-ching of cash registers in our heads.
“There’s no way to patch it?”
He shrugged. “I’ll check it out. Where are the stairs?”
“This way.” I led him around the corner to the steps and started up. “Like I said, I think it started in the bathroom, because that’s directly over that part of the living room. I think.”
“Mm-hmm.” He clunked along up the stairs behind me.
I turned the corner and stepped back, indicating the bathroom. “So. There.”
“Okay.” He went in and started tinkering with the pipes behind the sink. After a moment, he looked at me. “You don’t need to wait here.”
“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry. Right. I’ll just go downstairs and … work. On some things. Work on some things. You can give a shout if you need anything. My name’s Willa.” I was yammering helplessly. “Do you want a water or coffee or beer or something?” Oh, sure, the guy was going to ask for a beer while he was on the job. It was probably insulting even to offer.
But for the first time he actually gave a hint of a smile. It made him look nicer, and my shoulders relaxed fractionally. “I’ll be fine here,” he said. “You don’t need to offer me anything. Lady, you’re like a cat on a hot tin roof. No need to be so nervous.”
“I’m sorry.” Why was I apologizing to this guy? Because that’s the kind of person I am. If you tell me I apologize too much, I will apologize for apologizing too much. It’s a vicious cycle. “You just go ahead and let me know if you need … me to see anything or sign or whatever.”
He gave a nod and turned his attention back to the sink.
I was ridiculous. Honestly, sometimes it was terribly embarrassing being me.
Going down the stairs, I tried an old self-hypnosis trick of feeling more confident and relaxed with every step down. It kind of worked too, until I heard a bang and an expletive coming from upstairs. “Everything all right?” I asked automatically.
“Fine.”
Dubiously I returned to the kitchen, where all of my supplies were. Where to start? I guessed I should begin by cleaning up. Everything needed a clean surface before beginning, didn’t it? Even life needed a clean slate to start again. I’d look at this exercise as beginning my life over.
It turned out it was less of a philosophical meditation and more of a painkiller commercial. The sink, counter, stovetop, all of that was easy to do, but it was a lot harder to get inside the cabinets and under the stove, and so on. I bonked my elbows, knees, and my head half a dozen times. Yet it felt strangely good to be putting elbow grease into a job, to work hard and see results.
I heard Dave the Plumber walking around up and down the stairs, in and out of the house, into the laundry room where the water main was, but I squelched the urge to ask if I could help. He’d made it clear he didn’t need my help, and what could I do anyway? Besides, I didn’t want to help. I was pretty tied up myself.
It was when I had my head under the kitchen sink, hitting the reset button on the disposal, that I heard the voice.
“I think we’re going to need a new dishwasher. This one’s about a hundred years old.”
“What?” I asked, trying to back out gracefully but pulling off more of a Winnie-the-Pooh-stuck-in-the-tree sort of move. “How can I need a new dishwasher? I haven’t even run this one yet!”
There was no one there.
“Hello?”
No answer. I got up and walked around the wall and into the hallway with the laundry room, where I ran smack into Dave the Plumber. “There you are. Why do I need a new dishwasher?”
He ran his hand across his forehead and through his hair before looking at me wearily. “Is this a quiz?”
“What do you mean? You just said I needed a new dishwasher.”
“Lady, I haven’t even seen you for half an hour, I definitely haven’t been chatting with you about your appliances. Are you saying it’s broken and you need me to take a look?”
“No, it’s not broken, that’s exactly my point.”
“You’re telling me that your dishwasher is not broken?”
“That’s right.” I could hear it myself, I was starting to sound like a mental patient.
He shook his head. “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about before I get back to work?”
Panic gripped my chest. Was I losing my mind? “Sorry, no. It’s just … I thought I heard a voice when I was working in the kitchen. Saying—”
“That you need to get a new dishwasher.”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“You’d better look into that, then.”
I looked at him. “It was a really long night.”
He smiled, barely. He may be an ornery guy, a curmudgeon even, but he was nothing if not grounded, and that was what I needed around right now.
“Maybe get yourself a glass of water. Or something stronger. Unless…?”
“No, I haven’t been drinking this morning,” I said in answer to his unasked question.
He shrugged. “No sin in it. Just might make you hear things.”
I can do that all by myself. “I’ll get back to work now.”
“Me too.”
He clomped off back upstairs, and I stood there for a moment glued to the spot, trying to figure out what the hell had happened and what the hell I was going to do about it. When I heard him clanking on pipes, I found the sound reassuring. It was nice to have a man around the house, even if it was a hired crabby plumber.
I found myself thinking that should be the name of his business. The Crabby Plumber. Described him and yet had a lovely ring of beachy whimsy. I chuckled to myself at the thought and returned to the kitchen.
The dishwasher sat there, gleaming stainless steal, conspicuously begging attention. I opened it, as I had earlier, and everything looked normal. I closed it back up. I’d run it when the water was back on.
It was probably fifteen or twenty minutes later that it hit me. The new dishwasher. We’d gotten it when we first bought the place. We’d been pretty cash poor then and had hoped to make do with most of the appliances and plumbing as they were, planning to replace them one by one as money allowed. But the dishwasher had leaked the minute we’d started it.
All these years later it was hard to remember exactly what Ben had said, but I know he said we needed a new dishwasher. I was Mary Sunshine, trying to make everything seem better than it was so he wouldn’t change his mind and think we’d made a mistake in buying this place I’d so desperately wanted.
It was just like him to say we needed a new one because this one was a hundred years old. In fact … I tried to rewind the morning … had that been Ben’s voice I’d heard saying it? In this wildly inconsistent nonsense world I’d found myself in, that would make more sense than the plumber walking through and saying random things like that, then hiding and denying he’d said anything.
One thing was sure: I knew I’d heard it.
* * *
Dave worked until early afternoon, cutting out the ceiling, taking a huge fan off of his truck and directing it toward the dampness, and making noise about water mitigation, which was apparently the process of fixing the damage caused by a flood.
He said there had been several leaks in the pipes upstairs and that it looked like they had frozen at some point during some winter because no one had emptied the faucets when winterizing the house. That was true, it hadn’t even occurred to me. When Ben had died, I knew to make sure the house was locked and secured and that everything was turned off, but the whole process of draining the pipes had eluded me. There would probably be an unpleasant surprise when I went to turn on the hose bibs outside as well. I remembered Ben being fastidious about that.
“I’m going to have to run out and do another job I committed to,” Dave said. “Plus get a few parts, but I can come back tomorrow, if that’s okay with you.”
“Yes! Absolutely! Anything to get the water back on.” Tomorrow suddenly seemed very far away.
He gave a salute and turned to leave.
“Mr. Macmillan?”
He stopped and turned around.
“About earlier, the whole dishwasher thing?” What was I going to say? How was I going to follow up with this? Why on earth had I even brought it up?
He looked at me expectantly. “What about it?”
I floundered. “Well, it looks like the dishwasher is working fine, so I won’t need you to look at it after all.” Lame lame lame. I had tried to mitigate my seeming insanity by increasing it.
He gave a slow nod. “Good.” Then, without further examination of me or the conversation, he turned and left.
“Good,” I echoed in his wake. “I’ve made a hell of an impression. I’m probably going to be charged extra for having an unsound mind and subjecting the poor man to it.” I realized I was speaking out loud, but I didn’t care. “Damn it, Ben, why did you have to do this to me?”
It would have been easy to just collapse into a self-pitying heap of grievances, but I’d done enough of that since I’d gotten here. That wasn’t why I’d come. I’d come to do a job and that’s what I was going to do.
But I couldn’t do it alone. I called Jamie’s number, and this time he answered.
And I was relieved to hear his voice, I really was. Part of me felt so tender toward him, so happy that he was safe, and so eager to see him and try—again—to have a fun time together, to heal our relationship and make it what it had once been and what it undoubtedly still would have been if Ben hadn’t died.
The tenderness wasn’t what came out, though. Instead, I felt a hot stream of angry air fill me and I let him have it, leaving no clue whatsoever of the love I felt for him or the need I had to be with him and have his help and support.
Instead I was just a screaming meemie, and I absolutely hated myself for it.
“Jamie, good god, how many times are you capable of ignoring your own mother?”