Chapter 3
Cal rubbed the back of his neck and riffled through a stack of sticky notes that Carrie, his little-sister-slash-receptionist-slash-bookkeeper-slash-sanity-saver, had left him.
He had been terribly sad for Carrie when her marriage died and she moved back to Greenridge.
She’d been the one person he always thought and hoped had gotten it right, was proof you could break family patterns .
. . It hurt that her pain had been a saving grace for him and his little company.
In a terrible coincidence—or helpful one, depending on how you looked at it—just before Carrie’s marriage imploded, his latest long-term relationship had too.
With Melanie’s departure, the heart went out of him work-wise—and in the rest of life—for a bit.
Carrie had kept him and the business from going under when he’d been too down in the dumps to muster the energy to keep it on track himself.
Ah, he didn’t want his brain to take that old side trail again. He forced his concentration back to Carrie’s notes, written in purple pen.
Two messages were from folks he’d already taken care of. They were repeat customers and had his cell phone, so had contacted him directly after leaving messages with Carrie at the office. He gratefully crumpled the completed ones and threw them into the wastepaper bin.
A guy named Vic had apparently called three times.
Wait—make that four. There was another one from him stuck beneath a request for a quote from a group home manager.
From Carrie’s note, Vic’s issues didn’t sound like a huge emergency.
The house had other bathrooms that were working fine.
Just one of the “guest” bathrooms had a blocked toilet.
Cal rolled his eyes. Poor little rich man.
Then he did a double take at the address Carrie had jotted down.
Vic lived in a sprawling heritage house on 3rd Ave.
that Cal always admired but had never seen the inside of.
With three stories, a big old-fashioned front porch, dormer windows, and lots of gingerbread detailing, it had the kind of character that he always found sorely lacking in modern builds.
He considered the jobs in front of him again.
The group home quote required a walkthrough, and the other callbacks were more time-intensive, too.
Vic’s job probably just needed a snake. Cal would see if it worked to come over now, make it the last job of the weekend, then get back to the other requests first thing Monday.
They wouldn’t be expecting him to reply on a weekend anyway.
Vic had left two phone numbers each time he called—a cell number and a home phone. Cal called the first number on the note. Got a robot saying Vic was unavailable. He hung up without leaving a message and called the home number.
A cranky female voice barked, “Hello?”
“I’m Cal Anderson.”
“Congratulations.”
What the heck? thought Cal. “Um, from Hire a Handyman? I’m returning Vic’s call.”
“Well, it’s about time,” the woman griped. “Vic said you’ve had multiple messages!
Now you call up, no apologies, acting as if you’re replying promptly.”
Anger—and, worse, a familiar sense of inadequacy and shame—pulsed through Cal. The shrill voice continued to drill into him. “It’s a shoddy way to do business if you ask me!”
“I didn’t ask you, ma’am,” Cal said, finding his voice.
For a long time, most of his life really, he took whatever crap people dealt, trying to be kind, wanting to be the bigger person—but also, now that misery had forced him to read up on the subject, subconsciously hoping that if never showed any discontent or voiced any unhappiness, people would like him, would care about him—but it seemed like the reverse was true.
He still never wanted to be a jerk, but he was also done being walked over.
So take that, Mel. Too little, too late, and she wouldn’t care anyway, but still.
Cal pushed hard against the spike of pain that even this smallest intrusion of Melanie into his thoughts caused.
He wanted to feel anger, not sadness. Definitely not loss.
She didn’t deserve it. And back to the matter at hand.
He was starting to understand why Vic had left so many messages.
Poor guy was in danger of being nagged to death by his shrew of a wife.
On the other end of the phone, the grouchy woman continued to splutter about his rudeness, specifically, and the collapse of manners and professionalism in general.
“If it works for you, I can come by right now. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you earlier in the week.” Sorry for old Vic, anyway, Cal added in his head.
“But it’s Saturday afternoon,” the woman whined. “And late afternoon, at that.”
How very observant of the old bat. “Yes, and the upcoming week is busy for me. I can fit you in today, or I’m not sure—”
“It’s fine,” the woman huffed as if terribly inconvenienced.
“Great. I’ll see you shortly. Will Vic be there?”
The woman let out an unpleasant sound. Perhaps it was meant to be a laugh?
“Will Vic be here? That’s a very good question. I’m sure I’ll be the last person to know the answer, though. No one deigns to tell me anything.”
Unable to say what he really thought—that no wonder her family avoided telling her things if this was how she talked to people—Cal repeated that he’d see her shortly and hung up.
Man, he hoped the toilet was just a simple blockage.
He hadn’t even stepped into the place he’d been dying to see, yet here he was, already dying to be done there.