by Avery Kirk
“One of the guys working in the house—it was a remodel—well, he nicked the gas line somehow. I had no idea. I’d gotten there before everyone else. So, the other crews forgot I was there. So, they didn’t know to get me out, and I didn’t smell the leak because of the fireball candy. I had headphones on and didn’t hear all the commotion.
“Then the cavalry came, and Kevin was with them. The owners of the house had one of those stickers on the door to save their cat in case of a fire. They went through the whole house looking for the cat. There I was, pouring poly on the bar with my headphones on and a big Atomic Fireball bulge in my cheek. I had no idea.”
Harry nodded with a smile.
“Yeah, so I had already felt like I was going to puke—from the gas, I guess. I was getting ready to take off my mask. When I looked up, I saw a couple of guys wearing full face masks who were pretty surprised to see me down there. Big cat, right?” I laughed weakly with a half-smile, glancing at Harry.
“So they kind of whisked me upstairs and over to the end of the street on the other side of the caution tape. They called me an ambulance. All I did was puke in there and get a big headache. I was fine. But they made me go to the hospital. Kevin called my grampa for me to tell him I’d been taken to the hospital, while I was in the background getting sick. Nice, right? Hopefully this isn’t too much detail for you. I’m sorry about that.” I thought of my mother, whose eyes would water whenever someone mentioned getting sick.
Harry smiled and closed his eyes halfway while shaking his head very gently to let me know that my mentioning that I’d puked didn’t bother him at all.
“OK, good. So I fell asleep at the hospital when they gave me oxygen, and Kevin actually stayed the whole time.” I smiled, feeling surprised again as if it had just happened. “Oh, and they saved the cat too,” I said. Harry brought his hands together in a large movement and made a wispy sound for his laugh.
“It took my grampa a while to come to where I was. He was up north. I woke up and called him and told him I was completely fine and told him that he didn’t need to come back. But he still insisted on coming home.”
Harry nodded as if to say, ‘I would’ve done the same thing.’
“I was starving when I woke up, so Kevin went down and got me a sandwich from the cafeteria. A Monte Cristo, if you can believe it. You have to be a little nuts to eat that kind of hospital food, but I did, and it was a really good sandwich, actually. He waited with me until my grampa got there. He introduced himself to my grampa and handed him his phone number on his business card.
“The next day, Kevin came to the house I was working on—you know—where the gas leak was, to check on me and we just kind of hit it off. He had a girlfriend—I figured that out pretty fast. He was just a regular nice guy. I can say that now, because I know, but back then I was waiting for—you know—the other shoe to drop, or whatever that expression is.
“It’s been about three years since I first met him, and he’s just a true-blue, nice person. Just when you lose faith and think they don’t exist, you know?”
Harry smiled broadly. I was comforted by the tiny wink lines on the sides of his eyes that crinkled up when he smiled. His face was very textured and interesting to look at. He had mellow brown eyes with a noticeable black ring around the brown part. His eyes looked huge with his thick lenses. He had crazy, untamed, gray eyebrows that peeked out above his glasses.
I looked away quickly because I’ve been told that I have a tendency to stare at people. I’m conscious of it for their sake.
The dimple girl was back with Harry’s lunch. She pulled out a straw from the pocket of her scrubs. His lunch smelled heavily of rosemary.
“Please don’t leave,” she said as I stood up. Dimples flared on the P.
“Oh, it’s fine. I’m sure I’ll be back,” I said as I made my way to the doorway.
Harry clapped quickly and quietly to get my attention. I turned to face him. He held his pointer finger in the air to tell me to wait as he scribbled hurriedly on a scrap of paper, and then he held it facing me. It read ‘Any time, OK?’
I smiled. “Deal.”
My phone rang just then. It was Kevin.
“Hey,” I said as I made my way down the hallway.
“Hey, are you up for a movie?
“Um, sure. I just have to run home and change. Well, wait. What movie?”
Kevin and I had an understanding about movies, but I still got worried every now and then. He was dating someone right now so that usually meant when I got asked to go, she didn’t want to. I hated war movies and Kevin liked them. They were just too much for me to deal with. I would fixate on a single, terrible image.
That kind of thing was haunting to me, and I wouldn’t put myself through it. So he never asked me to go to movies like that. But he liked war movies because he said he appreciated the honor the characters showed. Neither of us cared for romantic comedies a ton or horror movies at all. Everything else was in.
“It’s that one we saw the preview for when we saw Second Degree of Damage. The one with the guy with the huge arms—remember? A Violent Tendency.
“Ohhhh. OK. Sure, I’m in. I just walked to the store so I’ll head home. Should I meet you at your house?” I hated lying to him. Although I was better at it on the phone than in person.
“Nah, the theater is closer to yours. I’ll pick you up. Good?” he responded.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I’ll be home in 20,” I said.
I hung up with Kevin and decided to stop at the convenience store on the way home. I grabbed us each a Slurpee and headed to my grampa’s house.
As I walked up the drive, I noticed Murray’s truck behind mine. His truck was fire engine red and had wood panels on the tailgate. The front grill was chrome, and so were the stacks in front of the driver’s and passenger’s doors. He had a chrome silhouette of a woman on the front grill. Murray was leaning on the front bumper while my grampa sat on the edge of the deck; both were having a beer.
Murray was a trim man whose pants were always huge on him. He almost always wore jeans and a baseball hat, but today he wore khakis—no hat. He must have been heading out somewhere with his wife. He had a bit of a hunched posture, and he was incredibly strong and hardworking—always had a clean shave. He said beards were too itchy. His salt-and-pepper hair was messy and a little too long.
His pants legs were constantly stuck in his socks. It used to drive me crazy. I learned over the last few years that Murray didn’t care in the least and wasn’t about to fix it. He would say that I should be happy that he remembered to wear pants. So now if his pants were stuck in his socks and it was bugging me, I’d just lean over and tug on his pants to fix it myself. He hardly noticed. Always had bigger things on his mind, he would say. He was like a second grampa to me, and he was also my employer.
“Well, hello, Miss Mel. Thirsty?” he asked, nodding at my two Slurpees.
“Hey, Murray. Hi, Gramps. Nah, one is for Kevin. He’s heading over. We’re gonna go see a movie in a little bit.” I looked at my grampa. His lips were pushed together, and he was nodding without making eye contact. I got the feeling they had been talking about me.
“His girlfriend doesn’t want to go?” Murray asked, interlacing his fingers and wrinkling his forehead in a fake attempt at a curious expression.
“I guess not. I mean, I don’t care if she comes, but he didn’t say that she was. So, I’m guessing she isn’t.” I didn’t feel like fielding any ‘our generation didn’t have male/female friend’ questions tonight so I kept walking into the house. No, he wasn’t my boyfriend. No, I didn’t secretly want him to be. Yes, I know he’s dating a girl, and yes, she knows about me. I sighed internally. My grampa had stopped asking these questions a while ago, but Murray was more persistent.
“Long as she knows,” Murray said, disapprovingly.
“I’m sure she knows,” I said in a firm tone, closing the screen door behind me a little harder than necessary. I turned to my g
rampa through the screen door. “Grampa, I might grab dinner with him, too, if you’re OK on your own for dinner tonight. I’m not sure what we’re doing, so I don’t want you to wait for me—just in case.” My not being home really didn’t matter because I didn’t cook much, so it wasn’t like he was relying on me for anything other than company.
“No, no, I’m fine. Just give me a holler if you’ll be real late,” he said, still looking down.
“I will,” I answered, a little puzzled at his lack of eye contact.
I heard Murray continue as I walked away from the sliding glass door wall. “Movie and dinner sounds like a date to me.” I ignored him, figuring I was far enough away anyway that he wouldn’t know that I’d heard.
Kevin had very flexible working hours. He was finishing up school to be a mechanical engineer, but I wasn’t sure his heart was in it. He just didn’t get excited about the topic, although it came easily to him. He always seemed to me as if he would’ve made a great doctor. He had a lot of compassion and wasn’t easily annoyed by people.
Kevin had two jobs on top of school. He worked at his Uncle Pete’s bicycle shop and took care of his parents’ rental homes, fixing stuff when the tenants had issues.
Chapter 2: I Tell Kevin
After the movie, we ended up at our favorite Coney Island restaurant. There was no shortage of Coney places in the Metro Detroit area. The dessert presentation carousel next to the cashier reminded me of when I was about five and used to beg my parents for the red Jell-O bowl with whipped cream on top. They almost always let me get it.
We found a booth in the corner and ordered our usuals. I always got a loose burger, which is ground meat with Coney sauce on top, served in a steamed hot dog bun. Kevin got two Coneys with everything. He almost always wore a baseball cap and always took it off at the table. Today’s ball cap was LSU.
“So what’s bugging you? Out with it,” Kevin said as we sat down, his brown hair squashed where the hat had been.
“What.” It was a question, but it sounded more like a statement when it left me.
“Something’s up. So tell me what it is. You didn’t meet someone, did you? Is that it?” he asked, a little mischievousness in his voice.
“No, Lanie. That’s not it. Not at all.” I felt myself avoiding eye contact. Lanie was Kevin’s matchmaker girlfriend. I constantly had to swat away her attempts at blind dates for me. My last couple of boyfriends had been less than perfect experiences. I wasn’t in any giant rush for a three-peat.
“HA HA.” He spoke slowly without humor. “Something with work? That idiot contractor back?” he asked.
I just shook my head.
“What then?” he asked. He waited impatiently, and I found myself not wanting to talk about it at all.
“I’ve just been having strange dreams, and I don’t know what to make of it,” I said finally, the words rushing out of my mouth.
“Oh. But you never remember your dreams,” he said with his mouth full.
“Exactly,” I replied. “Not lately…it’s the exact opposite.”
“What about them is bothering you? Are they scary or something?” he asked.
“No, they’re just…weird.” Our food came in less than five minutes; Coney Island restaurants were known for ultra-fast service.
I started putting mustard all over my half of the fries. I like mustard like crazy and I must have been distracted by the conversation because I put a little too much on, even for my taste.
“Weird how?” he asked, a little more demanding, leaning in a bit.
“Like I’m supposed to be doing something. Like they’re, I don’t know…informative or something. And there are always palm trees. In every dream, I think.”
“Sounds like your subconscious is telling you that you need a vacation,” he joked. “What’s your one to 10? How much are they bothering you?”
“I’d say…a four-and-a-half,” I told him, finally looking up at him and eating the fry I was perfectly coating in chili and mustard. I might have lied. It might have been a six.
“Hmmm…” he said, taking his napkin and setting it on his lap. “Do you want to tell me about them?”
“Actually? Not really,” I said, cheerfully. I was dying for a subject change. “I need a psychiatrist or a psychic or something,” I added, laughing as an attempt to lighten the mood.
“You know, if you ever want to, my mom has a friend. Well, she’s not a friend-friend. But an acquaintance friend. She has a metaphysical store in Ann Arbor. She’s a little…out there. Well, you’d have to be, right? But, I’ve met her a few times. She’s a real nice lady. Just has a very open mind is all.” He was scooting the fries around with his fork.
I stared at him in slight disbelief. He looked up and noticed.
“Oh, come on. You know my mom. Anyway, she just likes to consider every possibility.” Kevin’s mom was a physics professor at the University of Michigan. She was incredibly well respected. She also wrote a Southern cooking cookbook on a whim years ago, he’d told me once, and she had been super successful with it. Kevin had been promising me a copy for about a year now. Because of that, and because of his father’s business, Kevin’s family was good money-wise.
“You know the first law of thermodynamics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So, she considers the idea that it just…you know—changes. Like mediums. Mediums claim they can talk to dead people because the dead person’s energy has just passed over to where we can’t see—but mediums can still see them. It’s like a sensitivity, I guess.” He ate his Coney with a fork and knife as though nothing he was saying bothered him in the least.
“I guess I never believed that. Or thought to…think about it.” At first, I felt slightly turned off at the image in my brain of some weird lady with cymbals on her fingers and layers of lime-green chiffon throwing glitter at me with some strange accent as she tried to speak to my dead family.
“Well, if you do get to that point, or you’re curious or whatever, let me know. My mother asks about you all the time so I know she’d be up for helping you if you want. She’s always trying to untangle the universe. She’s got some dream analysis books, too. I’ll ask her if she can loan you one,” he said.
“Plus, she has some cool stories about when she spoke to my great-grandma through a medium. It’s really cool. I would do it. You wouldn’t believe the details the medium nailed.” He looked over at me, waiting for my response.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I strained to keep an open mind since I had a great deal of respect for Kevin’s mom, and I hadn’t seen her in a few months.
Kevin nodded while he chewed. He would’ve been perfectly fine with any response. Even if I’d told him he was a lunatic, he wouldn’t care.
He spoke up as if he remembered something. “You know, I’m going to my parents’ house on Sunday for dinner. They would be thrilled if I showed up with you. Do you wanna go?” he asked, happy with his big idea.
“Sure, but check with them first. Is Lanie coming?” I asked, hoping for my blood pressure’s sake that she was busy.
“No, she’s on Sunday night. She’s bummed.” Lanie was a nurse in the geriatric unit of a giant hospital in Detroit. Taking care of old people is such a nice thing to do, and it explained her bubbly personality; she was just a little much for me sometimes. But, if Kevin loved her, then I would deal with it. I truly wanted him to be happy.
When Kevin first met Lanie, he insisted that I meet her right away. He said I had to have ‘the talk’ with her. It was a little earlier than he’d wanted me to do it before with other girlfriends. I was hopeful for him since he was so squashy for her.
The talk was what Kevin and I had with each other’s girlfriend/boyfriend when we really liked them and wanted to let her or him know that we were just friends, and that we had never been an item before or anything like that. Always friends, nothing more.
Typically, the conversation was pretty quick, and no one—well, except for the one guy I
dated—ever had any issues with it. That guy was a knob anyway and didn’t make it past the two-month mark.
So, Kevin actually brought Lanie to a house I was working on since it was on the way to where they were heading. I introduced myself. She gave me ‘elevator eyes,’ from top to bottom as I walked up, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying my finish nailer. I might have done the same to her. I don’t remember. Kevin introduced us, and she said, ‘Oh, so you’re Mel.’ Then Kevin took a quick phone call—I’m sure it was fake—and walked away.
‘Yeah. So, just wanted to meet you and let you know that I’m good friends with Kevin, but he’s your guy and not mine, and that part is very clear to me. I have no other agenda or plan or whatever. If I ever do anything to upset you, please let me know right away.’
Lanie was easy. She just smiled and said ‘Oh. OK!’ all cheerfully and went on to ask me about my entire life.
Chapter 3: Nearly Fired
Murray and I had a pretty big job in an old house in Bloomfield. I was Murray’s primary carpenter, but he also had a couple guys he used on an on-call basis. He’d said they didn’t have the attention to detail I had and were just a ‘smidge sloppier,’ so I got the majority of the work if I wanted it.
Bloomfield is a nice area northwest of where we lived by about 25 minutes. The house was a total renovation, and Murray and I were redoing the main floor kitchen and lower level kitchens as well as all the bathroom cabinets. I was working in the main floor kitchen, hanging the ledger for the cabinet installation. One of the guys from the roofing crew was walking through the house.
“Who are you?” he said, an accusatory tone to his voice.
“Carpenter,” I replied in a flat tone as I continued to work.
“Never met a girl carpenter before,” he said, with a pointy and snide sound to his voice.
