Chapter Two
Pete arrived at seven-thirty, which I knew because the doorbell rang while I was standing in my kitchen in pajama pants and a sweatshirt, drinking coffee out of the one mug I had unpacked.
I considered, briefly, pretending I was not home.
The car was in the driveway, though, and the man had presumably seen it.
I was also the one who had told him to come early.
So I set the coffee down and went to answer my own door in my pajamas like an adult.
Pete looked exactly the way he had sounded on the phone.
Sixties, weathered, with the forearms of a man who had spent forty years working with his hands.
He carried a clipboard under one arm and a steel thermos in the other, and his flannel shirt had been washed enough times to achieve a sort of universal gray.
“Morning. You said early.”
“I did say early. Come in. Ignore the pajamas.”
“Seen worse.”
He stepped inside and did the thing contractors do. Where my eye went to the finish, his went to the work — up to the ceiling, along the walls, down to the floor. He was reading the house.
“Coffee?”
“Got my own.” He raised the thermos. “Show me around. Tell me what you’re thinking, I’ll tell you what it’ll cost you.”
I walked him through. The carpet was coming up in the living room.
The fireplace was getting cleaned. The walls were going a soft white.
He nodded along, tapped the beam in the ceiling, told me it was load-bearing and decorative both — which was lucky, because I had been planning to keep it anyway.
We went into the kitchen, and I told him about the wall between the kitchen and the living room coming out.
This was where he set his thermos on the counter and really looked.
“This the wall you mentioned on the phone?”
“That’s the one.”
He knocked on it. “Load-bearing. We can take it out. You just have to put a beam across the top and carry the load to the sides. Not nothing. Not the worst thing either.” He pulled a pencil from behind his ear and made a note.
“You want it open, we’ll get you open. Costs more than a wall that’s holding up only itself, though. ”
“Most good things do.”
He almost smiled.
He showed me the electrical panel and told me it was older than I was and probably older than him, and that he was not touching a thing in this house until it had been brought up to code.
Electrician came first. He showed me a soft spot in the upstairs bathroom floor that meant the subfloor was gone and the whole thing had to come up.
He laid each thing out flat: this is what’s wrong, this is what it takes to fix it, this is roughly what it’ll run. No drama. I liked him.
We were standing in the upstairs hallway when he stopped and frowned.
“You got a window open up here?”
“I don’t think so.”
He was looking at my bedroom door, propped open with the box of books I had left there the night before. There was a draft. I felt it now that he had mentioned it, a thin current of cool air moving through the hallway.
“It’s that room,” I said. “It runs cold. I slept in there last night and piled on every blanket I owned. The vent’s pushing out warm air, but the room won’t hold it.”
He stepped in. I watched him do exactly what I had done the day before — check the window, hold a hand near the vent, look around for the source.
“Huh.”
“Right? Weirdest thing.”
“Old houses.” He made a note on the clipboard. “Could be a disconnect in the run, air getting in from somewhere it shouldn’t. I’ll look at the registers when we’re up here.” He tucked the pencil back behind his ear. “Wear socks.”
Back downstairs we worked out the schedule over the counter.
Electrician Thursday. Pete and his crew the following Monday — wall first, then the bathroom, then the rest in an order that would make sense once he explained it.
The plastic sheeting helped, he told me, but did not seal anything out completely; living in a reno meant living with dust. He asked what days I might want to not be home.
“I’m always home.”
“In the house? The whole reno?”
“Saves on rent.”
“It’s going to be a mess.”
“I’ve been through worse.” It came out a little weightier than I meant it. Pete did not ask.
He was almost out the door when he stopped, one hand on the frame, and looked back at the house like he was seeing it from a different angle.
“I remember this place,” he said. “From when I was a kid.”
“Yeah?”
“Old lady lived here. Long time. By herself.” He made a small gesture, half a laugh. “Kid stuff. My mom didn’t like us going near it. You know how it is. Every neighborhood’s got the one house.”
“And this was the one house.”
“This was the one house.” He shrugged, and the moment passed. “Anyway. She’s been gone a long time. Good you’re doing something with it.” He tapped the doorframe twice with his knuckles. “Electrician Thursday. See you Monday.”
“Thanks, Pete.”
He went down the long front walk to his truck.
The lot ran deeper than the others on the cul-de-sac, and the driveway with it, so it took him a moment to back out and pull away.
The neighborhood was doing its quiet morning thing.
A sprinkler somewhere. A dog. A car starting two streets over.
Ordinary. Pleasant. The most ordinary street in the world, and my house set back at the end of it.
I went back inside to finish my coffee, which had gone cold on the counter where I had left it.
I dumped it and poured another. The crew did not come until Monday, and I had a week ahead of me and a hundred things I could do alone before then.
The morning light filled the kitchen, and I started the day.