Chapter 1
Chapter 1
After five minutes out front of the house, three minutes of it petting a purring cat who walking under his hand, turning around and coming back to push his head into another stroke, Tommy finally rang the bell. Okay sailor, he told himself. Not enough sleep last night. No jokes this time. Got enough trouble already.
Tommy heard a door close in the distance and clicking down a hallway toward him, the unmistakable sound of high heels. For a moment he wondered if a husband, annoyed about the early intrusion, followed a few feet behind in quieter footwear.
“Who is it?”
“Sorry. You don’t know me ma’am, but you have a broken pipe.”
The door thrust open. “Please don’t call me ma’am.” In heels, she still stood several inches shorter than him, wearing a blue skirt and a crisp white blouse. She had brushed out her long reddish blonde hair, and her perfume cast a magically subtle effect on the whole package. How could he know she hated people calling her ma’am? “I… I didn’t mean any rudeness Ma…” He glanced at her finger. “Miss.”
She turned to look back into the house, swinging her hair along behind her and spilling it over the front of her blouse. “How can you say I have a broken pipe from out here?”
He gestured toward the lawn. “It’s a lot of water. I saw it coming down the street, blocks away.”
“Oh my God!” She stepped out onto the porch, and a small white cat came out with her on her left, a big tabby cat on her right. “Should I call the water company?”
“No. It’s on your side of the meter, so it’s your problem.”
The distressed homeowner looked at her blue and white watch. “Oh my. I’m already late for work.” She put a hand to her cheek and shook her head. “I guess I have to call a plumber. Oh no!”
“I could help you out.”
She stepped back. “That seems awfully generous of you.” The lady’s voice harbored a touch of suspicion.
“I do home repairs.” Tommy pointed at her house. “Less expensive than a plumber.”
“Oh. I see.” She scanned the street. “Where’s your truck?”
He shrugged. “Somewhere. I really don’t know where.” Seeing the puzzled look on her face, he elected to keep talking. “I can turn the water off so you stop losing money. Then I’ll dig a hole and find the leak. If it’s a kind of pipe I can’t fix, I can help you get a good deal from a plumber by making him aware that you know how big the job actually is.
She looked worried. “Really big?”
“Not hardly. If I’ve got it excavated with lots of room, he can see the break in the line and get in to repair it easy. A quick hour’s work with me pulling some weeds or something nearby, keeping him honest.”
“You’ve got a deal.” She held her hand out, and he shook it.
“Tommy Mars, at your service,” he said, feeling a cat rub against his leg.
“I’m Sam. Or you can call me Sammy.” She smiled. “Merlin likes you.”
“I met him first.” He reached down and patted the little Tom’s back. “He told me he had a nice owner.”
“Awe.” Sam crouched down and petted Merlin’s head.
“Uh… one thing. Do you have any tools?”
Sam looked up at him quizzically. Then she laughed and pointed toward the corner of the house. “Meet me in back.” She had a nice sound to her laugh.
Tommy walked up her driveway, turning the corner to the back steps. As in front, Sammy came out her door with two cats, a small long-haired tabby on the white cat side and a big gray short hair on the big tabby cat side.
Tommy almost made a joke about them being the same cats, how she had them change fur to make her look like a cat lady. But he thought twice about making an apparel joke, remembering the time he got kicked out of France. Tommy never considered himself an animal rights activist, but when the model he dated there dragged him to a fashion show, that changed.
In Greenland, on a mapping fly-along with a Navy pilot buddy, quite by accident, they flew over a baby seal harvest. Through powerful digital binoculars, Tommy witnessed a gruesome mass killing that still haunted his darker nights. Hearing the French “oohs” and “ahs,” and seeing the smug pout of the model wearing the fruit of such an atrocity made something inside of him snap. Tommy got a can of utility marking paint from his truck and hurried to sneak up behind that cat-walker as she sashayed back to her dressing room, spraying all the monetary value right out of that obscene fur coat with iridescent red pavement paint. Circling a happy face as a way to paint it just seemed a nice touch.
He wished the disciplinary action had not put a stop to working on the embassy remodel, a once in a lifetime opportunity. Otherwise, Tommy was okay with getting a month in the brig and losing two pay grades. He never complained about servicing portable outhouses in Spain for a year, nor did he regret making his date walk home in heels. Imagine, that cow-frog wrote him an angry letter, calling him out for his lack of sense of the fasheen.
“Uh… Tommy. Tommy!”
“Huh?” He shook his head. “Sorry.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” He gave her his most disarming smile. “Just having a little pipe daydream.” He gestured toward the front of the house.
“Oh. I get it. You’re planning the project out.”
“You could say that.” He pointed at the brass cornered oak case she had just set in front of him. “What’s that?”
“It was my grandad’s.”
Tommy swung the lid of the box open and put the top tray gently down beside it. “You’ve got a little antique museum here,” he chuckled.
“Is that bad?”
“Nah. Tool guys love this stuff. You could get some good money for most of these.” He smiled. “Maybe trade them to a house painter.”
“Ahh… I know it needs it, but I could barely afford to supply the paint.” She frowned. “I’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul for so long, I’m about ready to rip them both off and keep it.”
Tommy laughed. “Are ye not a God-fearing woman?”
“Not at all.” She shook her head. “I figure on God having a sense of humor. He made us in his own image, right?”
“But everybody doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
“Hmm.” She put a finger to her mouth. “This is true.”
Tommy looked off awkwardly. “I was going to ask for a little money for supplies.”
“How much?” Sam started back into the house. “Obviously this will cost me something.”
“Ten or fifteen dollars. Thank you.”
She came back out with a light blue purse over her shoulder and a twenty in her hand. Sam handed it to him, and then she turned and locked her back door. “Do you have some paper?” He gave her a notepad from his backpack pocket, and she wrote two phone numbers in it. “The top number is here. The bottom one’s my work.” She handed the pad back and turned toward the garage. “If you need to, call me,” she said over her shoulder, walking fast. “Gotta go. My boss is going to roast me over the coals.”
Tommy tore the page out. Ordinarily he would have plucked out the paper strip left in the binder. Instead he just appreciated the pretty penmanship before he put the page away in his wallet with the twenty. “Do you have a shovel?” he asked, stepping up to the window of her gold Lexus as she backed out of the garage.
“Right there.” Sam pointed at a distant dark corner inside the garage. “I’ll leave that door open. There might be other stuff you need in there.” Where she pointed, a pair of green eyes glinted. Sammy smiled sweetly. “Thank you so much.”
“Thank me when I’ve done something.” He waved. “Thank you.” He put his pack on the shelf Sam’s shovel leaned against. Then he petted the calico on the next shelf down.
Turning off the valve by the sidewalk took the combined efforts of a hammer and a monkey wrench. Tommy did not kill it, but he took care to keep his hands away from the black widow spider who, equally cautious, stepped aside on its stiff, stringy web, retracting into a ball in a corner of the meter box. By the time Tommy broke ground, the morning coldness had warmed into a fine fall day. Heavy shovelfuls of wet dirt came out of the hole, fast and easy, landing on the sidewalk in a long, narrow pile. Three cats sat around the jobsite, supervising from various vantage points. A squirrel across the street moved her head from side to side.
Tommy took a newspaper from Sam’s recycle can and spread it out thick on the bottom of the squared off hole. A wadded sheet of the newspaper wiped the reddish Oklahoma dirt off the pipe – easy to repair plastic pipe. “This lady got lucky today!”
