Fixing Lia

by Jamie Bennett

  “Well, you don’t have to do a lot of demo,” Connor said, staring around the inside. Over the years, it had sat abandoned, and the house had been stripped of just about everything. Every door, appliance, fixture, radiator—everything that had made it a home and not an empty shell, those things were gone. Missing chunks of plaster dotted the walls, which in fact had so many holes they didn’t function very well as room dividers. Every window had been broken; there was water damage to the floors; I had been working pretty hard on a serious vermin infestation, squirrels and mice, mostly. Also, raccoons and rats. And other ones.

  “I cleaned out a ton of garbage and broken stuff from inside here. A lot of drug stuff. Then I had to work on the front yard, because there was a lot of trash there too and it was very overgrown. It took a long time for me to do all that,” I explained. It had been hard with no truck and no dumpster to haul everything away, but I couldn’t afford the rental fees. “Now I want to really focus on making it livable, the quicker the better. Today I’m going to work on the pipes because something is leaking and making a puddle in the back yard, and Jared has to be able to play there. It’s been frozen for most of the winter but it’s going to thaw soon. I brought wood to prop up the entrance to the basement so that I can get down there. I haven’t been yet.”

  “Ok,” he said. He continued to look around, walking from one corner of the living room to the other to peer at the walls, the windows, the floor. He tested carefully before he took each step.

  “It’s all safe,” I assured him. “Next thing I’ll do is repair the windows, fix the porch, and paint the outside. I’m buying glass and paint soon.” After I got my next job, so I could pay for it. “If I can up the curb appeal, the neighbors will be a lot happier. They keep leaving me nasty notes about how scary it looks and how I’m ruining our block. Also, I think people will stop breaking in here if it doesn’t look so abandoned. I’ve had to kick a bunch of them out.”

  “You have yourself,” he clarified. “You came here and found people.”

  “Yeah, me.” Who else would it have been? “Here’s the kitchen. You can see where the stove was, and the sink.” Wind blew in through the broken window and the holes in the outer walls. “Balls. Someone took down the boards again. It’s easy to climb in here because of the back porch. Isn’t that nice?” I meant, how nice that Jared and I would have a back porch, but Connor was examining the window frame carefully. “I’ll show you the bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs. There are a few pieces of tile left and I want to match it.” I walked to the stairs and started to go up but he stopped me, taking my arm and gently tugging me back down. I pulled away from his grip.

  “These stairs aren’t safe. You shouldn’t use them. Look.” He grabbed one of the treads and yanked on it, and a gap formed between the staircase and the wall.

  “Why did you do that?” I demanded furiously. “You’re breaking my stairs!” I pushed on them, trying to put them back where they were, but the obvious crack in the plaster remained.

  “Lia, they’re already broken,” Connor told me. “Let’s look outside. I want to see the water problem you mentioned.”

  He didn’t say much as we walked around the side of the house but he stopped along the way. He bent and looked at the foundation, and pulled up one of the lower pieces of siding to peer underneath it. He did speak when he saw the puddle in the back yard. “Jesus Christ. Where is all this water coming from?” It was a pretty big puddle.

  “I think the basement. I said I haven’t gone down there yet.” Truthfully, I had been afraid to go. I thought that the framing around the door might collapse, trapping me, and also that there might have been things living in the flood of water that I was pretty sure covered most of the floor.

  “I’ll take a look,” Connor said briefly, frowning at the half-frozen puddle. Ok, it was kind of pond-sized. “Lia, this place needs major work. For one thing, the foundation is crumbling.” He nudged the bottom of the house with his foot.

  “Yeah, I saw a few spots—”

  “No, I mean without even going into the basement, I can see you’re going to need a new foundation. The ledger board is rotten, too. Look.” He bent again and pulled out a piece of wood which crumbled in his fingers. “The siding is in terrible shape. You might be able to salvage a few boards, but it’s doubtful. I’m pretty concerned about what’s underneath it, from what I could see of the interior walls and the ledger.”

  “Ok, I’ll fix that.”

  “How do you plan to do that? Do you understand what I’m telling you? You’re talking about putting glass in the windows, but the frames are rotting. You want to paint the porch, but it’s falling off the house. I bet if I hung on it with just my weight, it would come down.”

  I turned to walk back toward the street. Obviously, Connor was not going to be part of this remodeling effort. “I need to go work. Bye.”

  “You can’t seriously think that you’ll do all this yourself,” he said, and I stopped.

  “Why not? You did to that house in Brush Park.”

  Connor stared. “Do you remember that? That I was redoing that house?”

  “Kind of. I guess,” I said. Every word, and I had notes. “You may have mentioned it to me a few times.”

  “I think I talked about it all the time.” He looked off into the distance for a second or two. “That was a gorgeous place, or it would have been. My family sold it while I was in rehab,” he explained.

  “Rehab for what? Cigarettes?”

  “No.” He smiled a little. “But I did quit. Being in a hospital situation for a while kind of forced the issue.”

  I found myself overwhelmingly glad and feeling like a burden had been lifted. Really? I had unknowingly been stewing about Connor Hayes smoking for all these years? Why would I care what he did to his body? I realized I was smiling at him, very happily, and turned away. “It’s a bad habit,” I said. “Expensive.”

  “Yeah, that’s one good thing that came out of it all.” He hesitated. “Lia, I did a lot myself, yes, but I also had a crew for the house in Brush Park. Roofers, framers, plumbers—”

  “Well, I have me.” I started walking briskly back to the front of the house.

  “Ok.” I heard him follow me. “Ok. Show me the way to the basement.”

  “You’re still going down there?” I stopped and turned back to him in surprise.

  “I said I would, didn’t I? Show me the way.”

  While he ventured downstairs, I worked on re-covering the kitchen window with plywood, trying to make it an impassable entrance to my house. Some of the worst days were when I came in to find people already inside, because a few of them were pretty scary. I also listened to the quiet noises coming up from the basement. When Connor came up himself, he looked a lot dirtier, and he frowned.

  “That’s not where the water was coming from,” he started. “It’s not exactly dry down there, but it’s not flooded, either.”

  “That’s good.”

  He shook his head. “No, there’s nothing good in your basement. The tree on the east side has grown into the wall and it’s crumbling.” And he kept going, telling me all the other things I’d need to repair, not just in the basement, but throughout the whole house. Things I hadn’t even considered, like all the pipes running underground. The pipes running everywhere, as it turned out. He pointed to the kitchen wall. “A lot of these holes are from people stealing the pipes to scrap the metal. You’ll have to replumb everything. I could see where the furnace used to be in the basement, but it was probably taken years ago. You’ll need all new HVAC. And the wiring…” I started to feel so overwhelmed that I got hot, despite the cold temperature outside. And inside.

  “Ok, yes,” I finally said, cutting him off mid-sentence as he discussed the roof. “I’ll get to that.”

  “Really? You’re going to do the roof, by yourself?”

  “I was up there yesterday and the day before, putting tarps over the holes.” I had gone up and down the ladder a thous
and times, then hidden it under the pile of rubble that had been the garage. I was going to get to rebuilding that, too.

  “Don’t go on the roof!” Connor ordered me sharply. “Don’t do that, I mean it. You could fall straight through.”

  I resolutely ignored him and checked one of my vermin traps, which was full again.

  “Do you hear what I’m saying?” Connor asked patiently. “Have you listened to any of it?”

  “Jared and I are going to be fine here. It’s a lot to do but I’m persistent and I’m not afraid of hard work.” And I was about to cry, listening to him, so he had to stop. “I’ll get him a bike or a skateboard, and he can have friends over. He’ll have his own room and I’ll let him do whatever he wants to it, like whatever paint, or posters. We’ll hang out on the front porch and talk…” I trailed off and then stopped myself from going deeper into this fantasy of our future, but Connor was nodding at me.

  “That sounds very nice,” he said.

  “Yeah.” It sure did.

  “How did you become his guardian?”

  I shrugged.

  “What happened to your uncle?” he asked.

  “Nothing. He’s good.”

  “Where’s your brother today?” Connor persisted.

  I didn’t respond at all.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said, finally sounding annoyed.

  That made me speak. “Jared is around,” I answered vaguely, and held in the sigh. “I don’t know exactly. He ran out this morning and I couldn’t catch him.”

  “He’s running around the city by himself?” Connor sounded astonished, and that made me feel worse about it. “You said he’s only eleven?”

  “Yeah, but I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably at a friend’s house, but I don’t know too many of them because they’re from his old school.”

  “Why did he change schools?”

  “He moved.” It was much too complicated to explain. “What do you think I should do about the water in the back yard?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I need to think about this.” He looked at me. “Are you cold? You look a little blue.”

  “It’s not too bad in here,” I lied. It was like sitting in a refrigerator, but with mice.

  “Maybe we could start a fire with what’s left of the garage,” Connor suggested.

  “Are you kidding?”

  Now he laughed. “Do you have a materials list and a budget, a timeline for each job?” I shook my head. “I don’t want to stay here any longer, so I was thinking we could go to my office to sit in the heat and figure this out.” He cocked his head. “What do you think?”

  “Well—” I heard one of the rodent traps snap. “Sure. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.” And despite what he said about all the problems, he was already into helping me. This was going to work.

  I walked outside and saw some people gathered on the porch of the house across the street, watching. They often came out and did that me, looking at my car and what I was carrying in and out. I stared back at them.

  “Are they your neighbors?” Connor asked.

  I shrugged. “I guess so.” I had never gone beyond the staring contests with them.

  “Hello!” he called, and waved his arm. “Pretty cold out, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a nasty day!” one of the women answered him. She pointed at my house. “Are you remodeling there or are you tearing it down?”

  “We’re going to make it just as nice as all the other houses on this street. Don’t worry!” he answered her with his smile. She smiled back at him, as did most of the other people on the porch. He just had that thing about him, that thing that seemed to make other people at ease and trusting. I remembered smiling at him seven years before, and I hadn’t done much of that since.

  But I was happy now, too. He had said “we” were going to make it as nice as the other houses. Unless he was a liar, which I had to be mindful of, he was planning to do more than just assist with the planning. Connor walked me to my car and as I followed him downtown, I thought about what he might be able to do for me. Sharing contacts, buying materials, carrying things, fixing stuff that was beyond me, maybe giving me money, too. I would have to see what I could get without him thinking I was going to be good for other things, like blowjobs and screwing. Men all thought in the same way, their minds moving linearly to their crotches.

  I called Jared as I drove, on his cell and on our landline in the apartment. Keeping that phone on was an extra expense, but I felt like having a landline made me seem more stable and secure, that I lived somewhere permanently enough that I had a listed number in my name. Those little details were important in making yourself the kind of person who looked great on paper.

  But Jared didn’t answer any of my calls to any line. I looked at the sky; it wasn’t close to getting dark yet, and he usually came home right as the sun was going in, so he had a little time. But the longer he was gone, the more nervous I got.

  “Follow me into the garage,” Connor had told me, so I drove into the underground parking when we got to his office downtown, a beautiful old building in the heart of the city.

  “What is this place? What do you do here?” I asked when he walked over to my car.

  “Real estate development,” he said.

  “Like, you remodel old houses?”

  “No, I don’t do that anymore. Now I work for Whitaker Enterprises doing big commercial projects all over the country. New buildings, not old. I started here after the accident.”

  “When you got shot,” I clarified. He pushed the button for the elevator.

  “I got used to saying it that way because it makes my mother very upset to hear those words,” he explained. “But yes, I got shot, and no, it wasn’t an accident.”

  The elevator we rode in was wood-paneled and even the garage had been pretty nice, and it was just for parking. So this Whitaker Enterprises seemed very upscale, but Connor had loved the work he was doing before. “Why did you give up your business?” I asked.

  “By the time I was out of the hospital, out of rehab—”

  “Was it for drugs?”

  Connor smiled. “No, physical rehabilitation. It took a long time for me to walk.”

  It felt like someone had hit me in the gut, just like I had done to him earlier. “But…why? Didn’t the doctors fix your leg at the hospital?”

  “I’m sure they did the best they could but it was a bad injury. Anyway, by the time I was ready, my parents had sold the Brush Park house, the guys who worked for me had been forced to find new jobs. I had to rethink what I was doing.” We got off the elevator and walked through a fancy lobby. “My parents pushed me some to have a more stable income. A more stable life.”

  “Like not going to a party store in a bad neighborhood at ten o’clock at night where you might get shot again.”

  “Exactly like that,” he agreed.

  Then they probably wouldn’t like him coming to my apartment to visit with me.

  “They shipped off my truck, moved me out of the apartment I had rented and back in with them.” He was quiet for a moment. “A lot of things changed for me after that night.”

  Both our lives had gone in different directions. I nodded as we walked down the quiet hallway, past the glass walls of fancy, empty offices. There was no going back to what had been before, that was one thing I was sure about.

  “This is nice,” I said, when he opened the door and showed me into his own office. It was big and on the corner of the building, which made me think he was important at this place. It made me think of money.

  “Thanks,” he said briefly. “Have a seat. Let’s start with your budget.”

  That was easy, because I had practically no savings, having spent so much on court costs for Jared and materials for the house. My previous salary had only scraped us by with rent and food and all the other things that made us not homeless. I said I was broke, then I had to explain that I’d been fired from Atelier Anson.

  He w
as shocked and angry. “Because of spilling the drinks?”

  I just shrugged. “It happens. I’m up for another job at a casino, which should be good tips,” I told him.

  Connor nodded slightly then kept going with the questions about paying for the renovation. I wasn’t embarrassed of being poor, but what he was asking did make me squirm a little because I could tell that he thought I was stupid. I was stupid for taking on a project that I didn’t have the skills and the money for, but whatever, as Jared would say. Maybe I was poor and stupid, but I was doing it anyway.

  I finally put a stop to the interrogation. “How long would you say this project will take? Like, just an estimate,” I said.

  He drummed his pencil on the pad of paper he had been scribbling on. “That’s really hard to say, Lia,” he answered eventually. “I can’t really set a timeline for this based on what you’ve told me. Before you do anything else, you have to tackle the major problems that you’re not prepared to take on and that you don’t have the money to fix, like the foundation, the roof, the electrical, the plumbing. You have to shore up the structure so it’s safe for you to be inside. There’s no point in patching the plaster if the walls are going to fall down.” He stopped for a moment, reading his notes, before looking me in the eyes. “I don’t think you can do this. I’m sorry, but I don’t. It would be a huge undertaking for someone with resources and experience. Maybe you could sell—”

  “I’m not selling my house.” I stood. “I’ll show myself out. Bye.”

  “Lia, why are you always…ok. I’ll walk you down to the car.” He grabbed his coat and we went quietly to the garage.

  I dredged up some manners as he opened my door for me. “Thank you,” I said, and shut it.

  Connor opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he raised his hand and waved.

  I drove with my fingers tight around the steering wheel. I told myself that I was upset because of what he had told me, that my house wasn’t worth fixing and that I might as well quit, and also that I was an idiot for even trying, an idiot and a failure. It had been what he had meant, even if he hadn’t spat it right out.