Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (26 page)

What happened next was interesting. The men noticed the music, but more, they noticed the box Stan had built to house his music. “Great idea,” John said, coming over to inspect the unit.

“Yeah. It keeps the boom box from getting banged up with all the moving, especially when it’s in the back of my truck—which isn’t always real well organized.” Stan smiled.

Peter came over, touched the handle of the box. “We ought to make one of these,” he said to John.

“Pretty basic building,” Stan offered. “Is the music okay?”

“It’s great,” John said before he returned to the deck.

In the days that follow, Stan is indoors and out, joking and laughing with every member of the crew. Everybody likes him. They respect his work, but they also like his easy manner, the way he connects personally with every guy on the job. He is welcomed into the fold. I think the guys are doing their best to welcome the plumbing crew, too, but they are keeping to themselves so far.

“Who’s their boss?” Ed asked me yesterday, referring to the two apprentice plumbers who have been installing almond baseboard in the cottage all week.

“A guy named Kevin. He came recommended by a friend.” The friend is Katrina, who vouched for Kevin’s honesty. He had done some work around Katrina’s house, had started his own business after working for several years for the company that gave me the original estimate, the one I hoped to cut in half.

“Haven’t,” John said, when I asked if he’d heard of the plumber. “But that’s a good thing.”

Stan said much the same thing. “Plumbers,” the same downward inflection John had used, the word itself almost a sigh. Stan smiled. “I know one good one, but he’s all the way in Sandwich and he’s way booked up. I haven’t heard anything bad about this guy. Can’t hurt to call.”

Kevin arrived a few days after my call in a lime green van decorated with pipes on an overhead rack. He moved quickly as I walked him through the house and cottage, and he asked the right questions. Did I know where the gas line came in, where the water hookup was? This seemed promising, as did his attire: a T-shirt and jeans. The other guy did the estimate in a white shirt and tie, dress slacks. Mr. Dress Slacks had done lots of measuring for baseboard heat, but showed no curiosity about where the heat might come from, or where it was now, and he barely glanced at the cottage bathroom, assuming (incorrectly) that I would want all new fixtures, all new plumbing. I showed Kevin the little back hall where the furnace and the hot water heater reside, asked about moving the furnace to the new basement. I showed him the cottage bathroom and the hot water heater in the cottage kitchen and asked about moving that as well.

He looked critically at the hot water heater in the cottage. “Doubt this even works,” he said.

“People were living in this place just a few months ago. I’m sure they had hot water.”

“It’s old,” he said. “It isn’t worth moving. The thing to do is get a new one, bigger, put it downstairs. Get rid of both of the ones you have.” I wondered how much money he would make on a big new hot water heater.

“I was thinking I’d keep one on each side.” I’d thought about this, inspired by the hot water arrangement at the place I stay in Paris, where there are separate water heaters in the kitchen and in the bathroom. During a plumbing crisis two trips ago, I was able to take hot baths even when the heat wasn’t working, and when there was not a drop of hot water in the kitchen. This struck me as a very practical arrangement.

“No point. You only need one. One good-sized unit.”

“The one on the house side is new, still on warranty.”

“Yeah, but it’s way too small. Fifty-gallon. You need a bigger tank for two bathrooms so you don’t run out of hot water. Don’t know why they even gave you that one new,” he said, enjoying the chance to deprecate his former employer. “I never put in a unit that small. Or hardly ever. Maybe for some old lady living alone.” He paused.

I looked at him. Kevin is tallish and very thin. His dark hair is cut close to his head. He has a sprinkling of freckles, barely there, across his
Family Circus
nose. He looks fifteen. Maybe seventeen. I felt like an old lady next to him. Or at the very least, I felt on the verge of becoming an old lady, an old lady who lives alone and only needs a fifty-gallon tank. “Price it both ways,” I said. “Same with the furnace. Give me an estimate for leaving it in place and plumbing everything over here, and an estimate for moving it to the cottage basement, plumbing everything over there. And tell me if it would be cheaper to just heat the cottage separately on a completely separate boiler.”

We moved back to the little closet again, where he studied the boiler. He approved of it, said it would handle the increased load no problem. “No reason to make a separate system unless you plan to rent it out separately or something. That would add a few thousand to the price. Best thing is to use this, and move it over there. It isn’t that big a deal to move. You’d be without heat, probably for a day. That’s all.”

His outlook intrigued me. It was the opposite of the feedback I got from the well-dressed estimator, who seemed to think moving the boiler was indeed a big, expensive deal. I asked a couple of questions, which Kevin didn’t really answer. I noticed that he didn’t look at me straight on when he spoke, that his eyes were always cast slightly to the side—shyness? He also rushed me, lacking the patience of Ed or John or Stan, or their ability to imagine I may know what I am doing. I got the sense that even if he hadn’t classified me as a fifty-gallon old-lady customer, he had labeled me as “lady.” “Oh—you don’t need to know that,” he said in answer to one question I asked after he told me to call the gas company. “It’s just terminology.”

Oh, but I do need to know, I wanted to say to him. All the words are mine to learn. But I let it pass. I remembered Hayden’s skepticism when we began working together. I figured it would be another case of having to prove my worth as a consultant on my own project.

If I had my doubts about the child-plumber (Katrina swears he’s in his thirties), I felt good about his estimate, which was much lower than the first quote. When I had followed up with the owner, he almost admitted it was padded. “It’s that crawl space,” he said. “You never know what we’ll run into under there. We gotta plan for that.” He wasn’t willing to shave anything off the quote, and what’s more, he wanted half up front.

The biggest problem with plumbers, according to John, is that they just don’t show up. I knew the original company was reliable, would show up as scheduled, but I wasn’t sure how much that was worth. I called Kevin and said it was a go. A few days later, he came by and I gave him a check for $1,500 for materials. He hadn’t asked for any cash up front, but I figured it might get things rolling. I felt pretty good when, a few days after that, Kevin appeared with two assistants. They unloaded a lot of almond-colored baseboard from his van and stacked it up in the basement. Then Kevin disappeared, and has not been heard from since.

In his place, there are two men who show up at odd hours and stay for indeterminate lengths of time before they disappear as they arrived, unannounced and unexplained. In the past couple of days, I have taken to following them around and asking them what they are doing. Today, I also ask one of the guys when I can expect to see them tomorrow.

“It all depends on Kevin.” That, I have learned, is a standard response to many of the questions I have asked. “He’s the boss.” Somehow this is of little comfort to me. The next day, I call the boss, inquire when he might stop by to check on the work of his assistants.

“Lyle’s okay.” That is Kevin’s response when I tell him I’m not feeling very confident in the crew. I would agree that Lyle is the more competent of the two men, and he is certainly more verbal. I note that Kevin supplies not even this half-hearted defense of the unnamed guy with the glazed expression who follows Lyle around on his mysterious errands, a man I like even less because he had the chutzpah to light a cigarette when he was working in my basement.

“When can I expect to see you?” I ask Kevin. “I’d really like to have you check what’s going on here.”

“Soon. Got a lot of no-heat calls. This early cold snap. Everyone’s turning on their heat. You know?” It doesn’t occur to me to tell him that I have no heat in the cottage either; now that everything is opened up, it is damn cold in the house. I’m wearing four layers of clothing as I speak to him on the phone. “They’re fine with the baseboards. Don’t worry.”

He cedes nothing to me on the phone, and I hang up frustrated. I curse myself for giving him money up front. Now I’m stuck with him and his motley crew at least until my $1,500 runs out.

The day after I finally speak to Kevin, Okay-Lyle shows up with a new sidekick. Smaller and neater, he projects an air of—what?—not exactly confidence. Determination? After watching him for half a morning, I know what it is—compulsion. Or am I jumping to conclusions based on the latex surgical gloves he never removes? Like his predecessor, he leaves the talking to Lyle, and I can’t help but notice Lyle is doing more of it recently. He makes little jokes and grins at me. I notice, too, that he looks at me for several seconds longer than necessary in every interaction, and I feel acutely and uncomfortably aware of my gender in his presence.

“New Jeff,” Stan says to me after they have left for the day. The plumbing surrogates have been dubbed Mutt and Jeff by the rest of the guys, who do not approve of their lack of supervision.

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess he’s an improvement. He can solder.” The new guy had spent most of his day in the hole between house and cottage. John had left one plywood four-by-four section of the hallway floor unattached so that the plumbing and electrical connections could be made there.

“The gloves are a little weird, though,” Stan says. We laugh, and I feel grateful for Stan’s easy presence.

“You know, I don’t know about Lyle, either. I think he means well, and he seems to know what he’s doing, but—uh—it’s the way he looks at me sometimes.”

“What are you saying?” Stan’s tone is serious now.

“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. But I feel vulnerable having these guys in the house, uncomfortable in a way that I haven’t felt with anyone else on the project.”

“Okay,” Stan says.

It’s just one word, but I hear reassurance in it. And I am not disappointed. On Monday morning, Howard pulls me aside. “They never get here until ten or ten-thirty at the earliest. So I’m gonna take out this shower stall right now, and dump it out front. When they get here, I’ll tell them you and your boyfriend pulled it out over the weekend, and they need to take it away.”

And just like that I have a boyfriend. He lives in Boston and he comes down on weekends and some weeknights. And just like that Stan starts arriving with the late shift and staying until the plumbing crew departs. And now when Lyle makes his little jokes, I feel stronger. I learn a little about his life, which includes an ex of unclear marital status, a school-age son, and an abiding interest in playing pool. Bolstered by Stan and Howard, I realize that Lyle is a nice enough guy, and probably lonely and unable to express himself well around women.

Lyle outlasts his neatly gloved partner, and for many days, he is the lone representative of the plumbing team. I grow used to him, and he grows used to my questions, which he answers more directly now, without referring me to his disappeared supervisor. As he moves from installing the baseboards to replumbing the cottage bathroom, I realize Lyle’s okay, just like his boss told me he was. But it isn’t simple to befriend a man who looks at you a certain way. I feel guilty, gender-bound, and confused. I try to be not only nice, but also kind to the almost-plumber. Still, I place the counter between us when he comes into the kitchen to say so long for the day.*

*
“HOW MANY MEN TODAY?”
Katrina asks me.

“Nine,” I say proudly, ignoring her double entendre. We have reached the peak of activity: six builders, one electrician, two plumbers all at work on the project. I love the progress and the process, the questions, the conversations, the decisions. My bookstore-making background has primed me for this house-marrying project. As I work with my clients in California and Maine to create their spaces, I contemplate the compromises I don’t need to make on my own project. I am the design team. I am the owner. I have freedom, and direct access to the contractors I have hired. I don’t often have that on my work projects. On some assignments—the bookstore in Maine, for example—I do have a sense of collaboration, but even in that case, I am collaborating with other conceptualizers. Here, I can huddle with Ed or John or Stan—or recently, Lyle—and come to a decision that works, both in concept and in building reality. How can I not enjoy myself?

I assess our progress. The deck is nearly complete, wrapping all the way around the cottage, enclosed with mahogany verticals beneath a wide flat mahogany rail. Soon John will be moving inside to work on the ceiling for the hallway. “Do you have time to talk about it now?” he asks me when I run into him on the final stretch of deck. We move inside, and with my hands, I sketch what I want to do with the ceiling in the hallway. I want to follow the beautiful rooflines that John has made. On the house side, I want to follow the plane of the once-exterior wall, extending it upward in a straight line to the new roof. That’s no problem. My vision for the cottage side of the hallway is more complex.

“I want it open on this side,” I try to explain. “Jutting into the old cottage roof.”

“How far in?” He climbs up the ladder.

I locate the wall based on the new roof’s rafters.

“We’ll have to cut into the old roof beams.”

“Is that a problem?”

John doesn’t say anything. He’s thinking. “So you want a knee wall right here?”

Knee wall. I like that expression. “Yeah, maybe with doors to get into that attic?”

He smiles at me. We are both beginning to understand that in conversations like this, we add layers of complication as we go. “Doors.”

Ed has come up behind us. “Two doors on either side. That would look nice. Good access too, as long as you have a ladder.”