“I never smelled any gas leak,” he said.
“Your wife didn’t either. I’m guessing you don’t visit your basement much.” I picked up my bag and started for the stairs.
“Do you often find gas leaks in houses you’re working in?”
“It happens.”
“Good way to get a little extra money out of the customer, I imagine.”
I stopped on the bottom step. “The customer’s already paid me,” I said. I drew the check out of my breast pocket and unfolded it so he could see. “Richard and Helene Lancaster. I’ve met Helene, so you must be Richard. Mind if I call you dick?”
If I hadn’t had the Scotch, maybe I wouldn’t have said it. His face worked a little, but nothing came of it. He’d probably heard the crack a million times growing up, which made me feel not great.
“I checked out the gas leak as much for my sake as for yours,” I said, attempting to move on. “I used to know a contractor who did sloppy work and blew up an apartment building. He’s in jail now. Plumbing’s a riskier job than you’d think—”
“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly. He shifted in his dress shoes, uncomfortable. “We had another plumber here only last month about that same drain, and when it clogged again I thought maybe he hadn’t done it right — you know, hoping for more work. I was still thinking of that when I said...” He stopped, embarrassed.
“Skip it,” I said. “But he fixed it fine. The clog this time was a necklace.”
He let out a huff of exasperation. “Helene should really be more careful.”
And that was the point where I should have remembered something Charlotte used to tell me. That I have a smart mouth. Because if I hadn’t said what I said next, maybe things would have been different. But I did say it. I stood on the bottom step, and because I am barely 5'2" and he was a nearly a foot taller, our eyes were almost level.
“Your wife said the necklace wasn’t hers.”
He frowned again. “Well, who else would it belong to?”
The words were barely out of his mouth when a kind of wrinkle passed over his face. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was like a wrinkle on a bedspread that you smooth out with your hand until you come to the edge of the mattress and it disappears. It happened so fast it almost didn’t happen: half a second later, his face was perfect again. A freshly made bed, everything tucked in just so. With no expression at all.
He looked away first. “Helene says a great many things,” he said.
“I’ve heard some of them,” I answered.
And the bed came unmade, just like that. His right eye started twitching and his mouth started to open and then closed up into a tight line instead. His eyes flew up to the door at the top of the stairs behind me and across to the furnace and back to me and I just stood there, not moving and not sure what I was waiting for. Her, maybe.
“You like her?” he asked me.
I hesitated.
“Because lots of people do. Or should I say, she likes a lot of people.”
Maybe it was a game they played, each of them telling a stranger about the other’s infidelities. But I’d had enough. I hoisted up my tool bag and started up the stairs.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me pay you for your extra work on the gas pipe.”
“Forget it,” I replied over my shoulder. “It only took a minute.”
“No,” he said forcefully, “we’re grateful you found the leak. I’d like to pay you.”
“No need,” I replied again, and before he could stop me, I was up the basement stairs and through a kitchen that was empty except for two half-drunk glasses of Scotch, and past a couple of living rooms or sitting rooms or whatever they were, and out the front door and gone. I was a little creeped out, to tell you the truth.
I had lunch at Sababa and was walking back to my van when I spotted Cal Watkins on the other side of Whitney. He wasn’t wearing his plumbing clothes, which was unusual for a workday, and he was carrying a bouquet of pink roses wrapped in cellophane, also unusual. I called out to him and he crossed over to my side.
“Nicky Big, what’s up?”
“I’m freaked out from a job I just did. But look at you, fancy-dress man.” Cal had on a pair of very new-looking blue jeans and a gray blazer. “You buy those flowers for me?”
“Meri’s playing in her school concert. Are you busy? You should come with me — it’s right there at ECA.” He gestured toward a churchy-looking brick building at the end of Audubon Street. “You can tell me about your freak-out on the way.”
“Are you kidding? Look at me, Cal. I’m filthy and I smell bad.”
He sniffed in my direction. “I don’t smell anything. Come on, Nicky. Meri’s really good, and I’m by myself — Wanda couldn’t get off work.”
“All right, then.” I’ve known Cal since plumbing school, almost ten years. I was the only woman in the class and he was the only black man, and after a few weeks of no one speaking to either of us, we began speaking to each other. He’s older than me by a lot, and became a plumber after he got out of the Army, an experience he refuses to discuss. Like me, Cal works by himself, and we take turns calling on each other for favors.
We sat on the hard seats in the high school auditorium and I told Cal what had happened at the Lancasters’. By the end he was shaking his head.
“Nicky, Nicky, Nicky. Where do you find these people? The guy was trying to bribe you.”
“What? When?”
“At the end, when he offered to pay you extra. Since when do rich people do that? It was so you wouldn’t say anything about his girlfriends.”
“I don’t think so. His wife said she’s been telling people for years and no one believes her.”
The lights went down then, and a handful of teenagers walked onto the stage. I don’t know anything about classical music. Cal had to remind me that the instrument Meri was playing was called a cello. But the way she played it made her the only person in the auditorium. The music seemed to be coming out of her body as much as out of the instrument. It made me stop thinking about everything that was swimming around in my head and just listen, as if nothing was happening anywhere except this girl and her music. It got to me.
When the lights came on we went over to her, and watching Cal hug his daughter I realized that “beaming with pride” is not just an expression. Light seemed to be radiating out of his dark eyes, his high cheekbones, his split-open grin.
“Meri, you remember Miss Nicky? She helped me put in our boiler last summer.”
“Your playing was amazing,” I said.
She thanked me politely, ducking her head down toward the roses, hiding a smile that was just like her dad’s.
“I’m coming back tomorrow night to hear her again at the evening concert,” Cal said. Wanda and me will both be here.”
I left them then, excusing myself to go home and take a shower.
The next day was easier work. No drain cleaning, no dead mice, no accusations of infidelity. I had a couple of faucet installations in Fair Haven, got lunch at El Coquí, and then drove over to Prospect Street to investigate a complaint about noisy pipes for a sweet old lady named Mrs. Berger. It was while I was in her basement that Richard Lancaster called.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I still smell gas.”
“From the furnace?”
“I don’t know where it’s coming from. Right now I’m standing in the living room.”
No plumber likes a callback. Especially not a callback about a gas leak. And especially not from a customer you don’t like. I could have told him to contact the gas company, but on the off chance I’d made some dumb mistake, I wanted to get back there myself and correct it.