Held By the Stubborn Mountain Man (Silver Ridge Blue Collar Men #3)

1. Maple

one

Maple

Water is pooling on the floor I refinished last week and I'm holding a towel against a pipe and wondering if I've completely ruined my life.

Not the pipe situation specifically. The pipe situation is just tonight's entry in what has been a very long autumn of evidence that I am in over my head.

The floor is the part that's making me breathe through my nose in short, careful counts.

I spent eleven days on those floors — chemical stripper, hand sanding around every baseboard, two coats of oil-based finish that I had to keep the windows cracked for even in October cold.

The finish is three weeks cured and now there's water spreading across it in a dark, widening stain and somewhere in the walls the house is making a sound I've never heard before, a deep knocking-hiss that I'm choosing not to think too hard about.

The thermostat says minus five outside. First real freeze of the season.

I find the emergency number for Brennan & Sons Plumbing & HVAC on the back page of a Silver Ridge business directory I've been using as a doorstop since I moved in. The directory is from four years ago.

He answers on the second ring.

"Brennan."

Just the name. Flat and awake, no trace of sleep in it, like eleven PM is a perfectly ordinary time to receive calls.

"Hi, I'm so sorry to call this late, I have a situation at — it's the old Victorian on Sycamore, the Ruth Brooks property, I'm her great-niece and I'm — there's water coming through the wall in three places and I can hear something in the pipes and the temperature tonight is—"

"How old is the house."

"1908."

"Get towels on the floor. Keep it off the hardwood if you can."

I look at the spreading stain. Too late for that, but I move to the linen cupboard anyway.

"I'll be twenty minutes," he says. And he hangs up.

I watch the minutes on my phone while I press towels against the baseboards and listen to the house groan around me and try not to look at the floor.

The knock at the front door is businesslike, two solid raps, and when I open it the porch light shows me a large man. He's wearing coveralls with Brennan & Sons across the back and a dark green ball cap and he's carrying a toolbag that he sets down immediately so his hands are free to assess.

His eyes move across the room quickly, tracking the water path, the wet baseboards, the towel pressed to the pipe. He has green eyes. Very steady. A crooked nose that looks like it lost an argument once and moved on.

"Nash," he introduces himself in a gruff voice.

"Maple." I feel so small beside him and have to arch my neck to look him in the eye.

He grunts at this and is already moving past me toward the pipe. He crouches down, examines it, looks up at the wall above it. Pulls a small flashlight from his breast pocket and shines it along the baseboard. He doesn't touch anything yet, just looks.

"Where's your water main?"

"Basement. I'll show you."

He follows me through the kitchen, down the narrow stairs.

The basement is original stone foundation, still with the coal chute Great-aunt Ruth used to send me down as a child on a dare.

He finds the main in thirty seconds, which takes me thirty seconds of watching because I've been down here eight times trying to find it.

He looks at the shut-off valve, reaches into his bag, applies something I can't see, and the valve turns with a sound of protest but it turns.

Upstairs, the hissing in the walls stops.

We both hear it. The house goes quiet.

He straightens up and looks at me in the blue-white light of his flashlight. "Okay," he says. "Now I can look at what we've got."

What we've got turns out to be three separate failures: a section of galvanized pipe in the front parlour wall that has finally succumbed to a century of mineral buildup and winter pressure, a joint in the hallway that has opened at the fitting, and a third place in the wall between the parlour and the library that he finds by sound alone — some quality of the knock the pipe makes behind the plaster when he raps his knuckles along the wall.

He does this in silence for ten minutes while I stand in the hallway and watch him listen.

He is, I discover over the next twenty minutes, a man who goes entirely quiet when his hands are on a problem. He explains what he did after he's done it, simply and precisely, four things managed at once — holding, wrapping, assessing, listening — without any visible stress.

At twelve-thirty I go to the kitchen and put the kettle on, glancing out the window, I see three dogs in the back of his truck.

“You have dogs?” I put tea on the newel post of the stairs and he takes it without comment when he comes back up.

“Yeah,” he says.

“It’s cold, shouldn’t they come in?”

He shrugs his massive shoulders. “They’ll be ok. They know to be patient.”

Around one-fifteen, the scratching at the front door begins. Something small and persistent. Apparently not too patient.

He sets down his tea. "Sorry," he says, and goes to the door.

Three dogs come in. A large Lab mix who moves with the dignity of a dog who has learned that being good gets you access to more places.

An ancient beagle, small and slow, who immediately finds the driest section of parlour floor and folds herself down onto it.

And a terrier, wire-haired, restless, who comes through the door and stops, and then looks at me with the expression of an animal running a rapid assessment and arriving at a verdict.

The terrier trots directly to me and sits on my foot.

"That's Rivet," Nash says. He looks at her, then at me. "She doesn't usually do that."

"I have biscuits," I say. I pull out a somewhat crumbled shortbread from the tupperware on my table. "Can she have this?"

He watches me hold it out to Rivet. "She can."

The Lab mix, meanwhile, has found the stairs and put his head in my lap.

"Wrench," Nash says.

"Hello, Wrench." I scratch the big dog's ears and he makes a sound of profound satisfaction. "And the beagle?"

"Penny. She's deaf. She won't come to you unless she's in the mood."

Penny opens one eye from her spot on the floor, assesses me, and closes it again.

It is now nearly two in the morning. Nash has managed the immediate crisis: emergency patches on all three sites, solid enough to restore water pressure carefully for the night, nothing that will give way before he can get back to do the real work.

We end up in the kitchen with more tea. He sits at the table and opens his notebook and shows me the scope: three pipe sections need replacing, not just patching.

The work is a week minimum. He goes through each item with the same flat precision — materials, access points, drying time for plaster repair.

When he's done he looks up at me. I've gone still, running the math.

"I’m sure you know, but this is going to be expensive.”

I look at him. He looks back, steady and unapologetic.

"Can we talk about the scope in the morning?" I ask, suddenly feeling very tired, "When I have all my project files in front of me?"

"I'll be back at seven," he says.

He stands. He calls Wrench, who peels himself off my leg with visible reluctance. He picks up Penny, who doesn't object, and tucks her under one arm. Rivet follows him to the door and then turns back and looks at me.

"Rivet. Come."

She goes. But she looks back twice.

I stand in the doorway of the house my great-aunt Ruth left me, in my rubber boots and my plaid pajama shirt and my hair half-escaped from its pins, and I watch the truck's taillights disappear.

The house is quiet. The pipes are still.

I look down at the floor of the front parlour. The water stain has already started to lighten at the edges as it dries.

I go find the mop.