The kids hadn’t noticed I was gone. We did our bedtime routine and everyone was asleep before I identified what bothered me most about the night encounter.
It wasn’t the person or the words as much as it was who I became because of them. The kids never suspected I even went outside. But I knew that and a whole lot more. I knew great big scary things. I was planning ways I might have to kill someone if they came too close even one more time. I was telling tall tales, about how safe and happy we were, and sealing them with a false smile. I was pretending I was strong when no one had ever felt as small and weak as I did.
Of course I was doing it to protect them, both from thinking about the crazy man and from the fear the truth would bring. Then again, if they weren’t afraid of him, they might let him get too close. The balance was lost somewhere between feeling safe and being safe.
I was beginning to think there was no such thing as safe anyhow. Nowhere we could hide.
That was enough reason to be a liar, I told myself that night, with the shadows growing deep around my bed and the window frames locked tight around glass that was as laughably easy to break as my courage.
–19–
Rise
I Am My Plumber
On Friday after work, Roman and I went to the Plumbing Warehouse, where a lanky man in a Where’s Waldo? shirt and gauges large enough to shoot marbles through was unfortunate enough to be the one to ask, “May I help you?” He nodded at my clipboard in a patronizing way, squinted at my explanations and looked at something over my left shoulder, and finally suggested, “It would probably be easiest if you send your plumber in to make the order. Or he can even do it over the phone and you can do the pickup.” He smiled and actually patted my shoulder.
I waved my plumbing permit, pointing to my signature on the dotted line. “I am my plumber.” Which I had already told him, but for reasons that were more than obvious—the least of which was Roman stringing Froot Loops onto a strand of my hair—he had missed that part.
“Wayne!” he yelled, waving at someone across the warehouse and stretching his eyes wide in a now-familiar, oh-god-you-have-to-save-me-from-this-crazy-lady expression.
Wayne, it turned out, was a retired-teacher type who wasn’t even mildly impressed that I was building my own house. He corrected me when I used the wrong term: “No, hon, that’s a coupling, got it?” And scribbled all over my checklist. “This part here isn’t important. But you keep a damn close count on these here. Got it?” Finally, he took a deep breath and said, “Look, we aren’t allowed to give you a list of what you should buy, because everything is nonrefundable. You walk out the door with it, you own it. Got it?”
I nodded, hoping that wasn’t the end of the lecture.
“Tell you what I can do though. I can tell you what I would buy if this were my house, and you can nod if that’s what you want to do. Got it?”
I nodded more vigorously, suppressing the urge to hug him.
“You got two showers. I would want those PEX on the inside and stubbed out with copper. Don’t be nodding yet.” He shook a fat, dirty finger at me. “I ain’t finished. I would also want an adapter for each faucet. So here you have five faucets counting kitchen, bath, and garage, and two showers. And then you have three toilets. I would get copper for all them outside the wall, too, and get adapters for each. Is that what you would do?”
I nodded.
He laughed. “Yup. You got it!”
“Oh, and what about exterior water faucets? To water your flowers and such. How many of those you got?”
I chewed the inside of my cheek, trying to remember if we had ever discussed those and pretty sure we hadn’t. “Two,” I said. “I have two of those planned.”
Wayne told me what he would use for those, and I nodded that it was exactly what I would use, too. What a coincidence.
I loaded hula-hoop-size rolls of red and white flexible PEX pipe into the trunk. Red for hot water and white for cold. Then I added brown-paper sacks in three sizes filled with couplings, adapters, plugs, elbows, tees, hundreds of crimp rings, and two sizes of crimping tools, which looked like supersized pliers, and any number of things I no doubt would have to google before I could implement.
That plan I had made with Drew, cold water goes up and hot water comes down, may have been even more ridiculously simplified than I had first imagined.
Wayne clapped me on the back at the register. “You have any problems at all, you just call me. Got it?” He laughed heartily. “I’m just kidding. Good luck with all that. You’ll do fine if you just remember everything I told you.”
I thanked him and walked quickly to the car, trying to call back every single thing he’d told me. Roman crawled around from front to back, playing space mission, or maybe it was face missing, while I made a full page of notes with a somewhat accurate representation of the “plumbing wisdom by Wayne” lecture. I should have recorded it.
If my expression at the warehouse had been anything like Drew’s when I gave him a rundown of the tools, fittings, crimpers, pipe supports, and adapters, I couldn’t imagine how either Wayne or Waldo had kept a straight face.
We started running pipe that weekend. And despite occasional moments of confusion over which part went where, and a few really tight spots where the crimping pliers were nearly impossible to fit in the joists between the floors, the entire plumbing project went surprisingly fast. It wasn’t all that difficult, and it really was just a matter of running white pipe past everything on the way up and red past it again on the way down—more or less. We crimped the copper fittings that extended out of the wall by squeezing them with an enormous pliers-like tool specially designed for pinching the fittings tight, and later when we installed the appliances we would either compression-fit or solder the final pieces together.
Hope followed us with a hammer and a tool belt filled with gray plastic half circles that already had nails threaded through them. “They look a little like hoop earrings,” she said, holding a pair over her earlobes. With two hammer taps she positioned them to hold the pipe in nice straight lines that wouldn’t jerk around when we turned the water on and off. More important, the pipe wouldn’t sag against Sheetrock where a nail could puncture it. The PEX pipe was pretty tough, but not as nail-resistant as copper or even PVC might be. According to Wayne, I’d made a solid decision, though; all the plumbers were using PEX. And it was definitely easier for a beginning plumber, which he seemed to sense I was.
By the next Friday we were completely finished with the water lines, and I called the city inspector to sign off on them so I could hook up a faucet. When he showed up, Pete and Re-Pete were working on the roof. I had to keep pinching myself to believe it was true.