Chapter 6 #2
"Mags tells everyone I'm the one to call. That's different from sending me people."
"Is it?"
"She doesn't get a commission," he says. "If that's what you're asking."
I'm not sure what I was asking, exactly. But something about the answer lands right—the dry way he says it, the lack of defensiveness. The slight amusement underneath it.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay," he says.
A small silence. Not uncomfortable. I realize I'm standing closer to the counter than I need to be for this conversation and take one step back with no particular urgency.
"The foundation on the back garden wall," I say. "I noticed a section pulling away."
He nods immediately, without surprise. "Northwest corner. About eight feet of it." He caught that on the walk-up then. Before he even knocked. "That's a separate job from the roof, but I can take a look while I'm here if you want. Give you a sense of scope."
"Please."
He's been in the garden for twenty minutes.
I refill my coffee and stand on the back porch and watch him work.
He moves along the wall slowly, occasionally crouching, running a hand along the mortar between stones with the attention of someone reading rather than looking.
He doesn't narrate. He doesn't perform. He just examines the thing with complete focus and makes occasional small sounds of professional assessment that I'm learning to read as a spectrum — a quiet hum means noted, manageable; a slightly longer pause means here, this is where the problem actually is.
The garden is wild around him. The October light is doing its best. He has good hands; I notice distantly — the way a contractor's hands look when they're used for the work, capable and direct and not decorated.
I think, against my better judgment, Jason would have hated it here.
Not the garden specifically. Just — this.
This kind of Saturday morning work, this unhurried competence, this willingness to crouch in damp October grass and run your hand along a garden wall just to understand it.
Jason's relationship with houses was decorative.
What did it look like? What did it signal? Was it the right address?
This man is asking what the wall is made of and whether it's been here long enough to trust. I realize I'm staring and redirect my attention to my coffee.
"Frost heave," he says, coming back up onto the porch. "Probably happened over a couple of winters and nobody addressed it. The good news is that the stones themselves are fine, it's the mortar and the footing. Repairable."
"Everything here is repairable," I say, I thought I meant the garden wall. I think I might mean something else.
He looks at me for a second. Not the quick professional glance — the actual kind, reading the sentence the way he reads everything. "Good bones," he says. "That's most of it."
"Is that a technical term?"
"Completely." He pulls up a new screen on the tablet. "You want me to include the wall repair in the quote, or handle that separately?"
"Include it," I pause. "I'm going to be here for a while. I'd rather deal with everything at once."
He nods, makes a note. Then, without looking up, "Mags mentioned you might be staying through the winter."
"Mags is…thorough," I say.
"She's thorough," he agrees, in the tone of a man who's been on the receiving end of Mags' thoroughness for approximately his entire life. "The cottage will be comfortable through winter. The furnace is old, but it works. You might want a plumber to look at the pipes before the first freeze."
"Can you recommend one?"
"My brother-in-law." He says it without pausing. "He's good. I'll text you his number."
"Your brother-in-law."
"Half the referrals in this town are family," he says. "It's that or drive forty minutes."
I think about the hardware store and the coffee shop and the fact that Mags apparently knows everyone's business before they know it themselves. "Is that—" I start, then stop.
"Is that what?"
"Is that weird? Living in a place where everyone knows everything?"
He considers this with what I'm learning is his standard thoroughness.
He doesn't answer questions reflexively; he actually thinks about them.
"Sometimes," he says. "But mostly it means that when something needs doing, there's always someone who knows someone who can do it.
" He looks at the garden. "And when something goes wrong, you don't have to explain the whole context. People just show up."
I think about Dana in pajamas at 10:47 p.m. with gas station coffee.
"Yeah," I say. "I know what that's like."
He looks at me, not with professional attention, but with the other kind, and I look back at him for just a moment before the practical part of my brain steers the conversation back to the garden wall.
He's packing up to leave when it happens.
He's closing out the tablet, tucking the aluminum gutter piece into his jacket pocket — I have no idea why he's keeping it; it's a piece of broken gutter — and I'm leaning against the kitchen counter with my third coffee of the morning, and he looks at the coffeemaker.
"Is that a 1987 Mr. Coffee?" he asks.
I look at it. "I have no idea."
"It is." He says it with complete certainty. "My grandmother had the same one. She called it Gerald."
I stare at him. "She named her coffeemaker."
"Gerald was reliable," he says. "She said that Gerald was the most dependable man in her life."
I laugh. Not a polite laugh. Not a social laugh.
A real one — surprised out of me, short and genuine, coming out before I could evaluate whether this was the appropriate moment for laughing, which it isn't, it's been six days, I was crying in this kitchen at midnight, and somehow this man has just made me laugh about a coffeemaker named Gerald.
The laugh is gone almost immediately.
And then right behind it, so fast it's almost the same feeling, the guilt.
It lands in my chest like a small, cold stone. How are you laughing right now? Six days. Six days since your marriage ended, and you're standing in your grandmother's kitchen, laughing at a man's joke about a coffeemaker. What is wrong with you?
I look away. Clear my throat. "She had good taste in appliances."
"Gerald is still going strong," he says. "Thirty-seven years." There's a beat, and then he adds, without making it a thing, “It's okay to laugh."
I look at him.
He's not making eye as he zips up his jacket, practical, not forcing the moment. But he said it. Just that. It's okay to laugh. Not you seem sad, or Mags mentioned something, or any of the well-meaning intrusive things people say when they know something's wrong and want you to know that they know.
Just…it's okay.
"I know," I say. Even though I didn't until about ten seconds ago.
He picks up his tablet. "I'll have the full quote to you by Thursday.
Text me if you have questions before then.
" He heads for the front door, then pauses.
"Oh, the window in the second bedroom, the latch is broken.
You'll want that fixed before it gets cold.
I can add it to the scope or show you how to do a temporary fix yourself if you'd rather. "
"Show me, please,” I say immediately.
The almost smile again. "Thought so."
It takes seven minutes.
He shows me where the latch mechanism has separated from the frame, finds a flathead screwdriver in his jacket pocket like this is a thing a person normally carries, and shows the temporary fix with the patient, clear instruction of someone who genuinely doesn't mind explaining things.
He hands me the screwdriver when it's my turn — I notice our fingers don't quite touch but come close enough that I notice — and I do what he showed me. It works.
"There," he says.
I fixed a window latch, and I'm stupidly pleased about it. In the week I've had, this small competence feels disproportionately significant.
"The permanent fix is in the quote," he says. "But that'll hold through winter if you needed it to."
"I won't need it," I say. "I'm getting the work done."
He nods. He's standing close enough that I can see the actual color of his eyes properly, darker blue than I'd registered at the door, the kind of blue that changes quality in different light.
I register this the way I've been registering other things about him today…
in avoidance and not looked at too closely.
Then he leaves, down the front path, into the green truck, a brief professional wave through the window before he pulls away from the curb and drives down Elm Lane.
I close the front door.
I stand in Elise's hallway in my clean jeans and my reasonable hair, holding a flathead screwdriver, and I think about the coffeemaker named Gerald and the way he said it's okay to laugh without turning it into a moment and the unhurried way he looked at the garden wall like it was worth understanding.
I mean to work.
Instead, I find myself looking at the 1987 Mr. Coffee and thinking about how Ethan Mercer carries a flathead screwdriver in his jacket pocket and recommends his brother-in-law for plumbing and named exactly one problem with the cottage without being asked and charged me a fair price and told me it was okay to laugh.
I think about this longer than I expect to.
Then I think stop thinking about this.
Then I think about it for a little longer anyway.