However, after the ad-hock electrical genius disappeared down her driveway with a substantially larger check than he’d earned, they’d discovered that flipping on a light switch in one room did nothing. At first, she thought maybe he’d forgotten to turn the breaker box back on but on her way to check it, found the hall light burning. Undaunted, she started to flip the switch off and found it already in the off position. Assuming he’d installed it upside down, Aggie flipped it on and nothing happened, or so she thought.
“Aunt Aggie, the light just came on in the kitchen, but no one turned it on!” Ellie sounded both indignant and a little frightened.
“What! Turn on the light in there.”
The bathroom light shone brightly. “How is this even possible?” she’d muttered and began a hunt for switch patterns that looked like a stunt out of a reality TV show. Not knowing where to find her pathetic electrician, Aggie poured her frustrations into the absent and oblivious officer.
“If that man was here I’d give him a piece of my mind. What kind of electrician did he recommend anyway? This guy would fail standing in line in kindergarten!”
Aggie’s ranting carried through the open window and across the yard to where Mrs. Dyke weeded around her driveway. Though she couldn’t hear all of what her neighbor said, at the sound of William’s name, she wisely went inside and called the sheriff dispatch to send out Deputy Markenson. When William arrived, the children, sent outside by Aggie, were playing tag in the front yard as she systematically switched each room’s lights on and off, making notes and trying to see if there was any kind of discernible pattern.
William cautiously entered the house after waving hello to the children, calling Aggie’s name. “I’m in here, Mr. Markenson.”
Something in her tone unnerved him. Angry females weren’t his specialty, but when William reached the upstairs landing, his laughter boomed loud enough to be heard across the street. The sight was beyond funny, but Aggie had lost her sense of humor. “If you want to laugh, you go right ahead, but you can pay this incompetent bozo. Do you see this? I can’t figure out if this room’s switches really do turn on the one right behind it or if there is a mix up at the breaker box.”
Not familiar with electrical wiring, he pulled out his cell phone to call the electrician to come fix the error, but, Aggie shook her head. “William, I appreciate you trying to help me, really I do; but I can’t do this.”
The young woman looked ready to collapse with frustration and exhaustion. “If that man shows up at my home, I am liable to say or do something that I shouldn’t. I’ll call Zeke. Somehow, I think he’ll know what to do; he’s always been so good to me and known exactly what to do when I didn’t.” Aggie slumped on the couch downstairs and picked up the phone. The local pizza delivery had already been added to speed dial, and Aggie needed to feed this crew-- fast.
She looked up at the officer standing on her last step and sighed. “William, thank you for trying to help. I know this isn’t your fault, but right now, it feels like it is. I know that’s irrational, but right now I want to be irrational. It makes me feel better.”
Her ridiculous words showed how bothered Aggie really was by the situation, and Mr. Take-Charge Markenson did something that the officer normally wouldn’t do. He excused himself and drove away. Strains of a fierce rendition of “Angry Words” were playing repeatedly in his head as he headed back to the sheriff’s station. Absent mindedly, the man hummed the chorus, filling in the words now and then. “Love one another… thus saith the Savior… mmm…mmm…mmm”
Friday, June 14th
A hammer banged in her dream-filled mind. Still lost in what she thought was a dream, Aggie decided the sound was her heart hammering at some horrible thing the twins escaped from at the last second. She struggled to awaken, but her eyes refused to budge. Finally, one eye peeked open as a second round of bangs pierced her burgeoning consciousness. That wasn’t a hammer or her heart. It was the door.
Stumbling from the dining room, Aggie prayed that it wouldn’t be the Sheriff with legal papers. She’d waited, a constant knot in her stomach, for over a week, to be served with some kind of court documents. While she had little concern that the Stuarts could do anything to change the court order, she did dread the idea of the children being dragged into an ugly custody battle, and selfishly, dreaded the time away from work on the house. They’d been there almost two weeks, and all that was accomplished was adding wonky wiring and a little cleaning.
At the door, toolbox in hand, wearing an old ARMY t-shirt and half worn-out jeans, was a man. His eyes were kind, and the smile on his face was oddly familiar for someone she’d never met. His eyes seemed to laugh at an inside joke as the man introduced himself. “Miss Milliken? I’m Luke, my Uncle Zeke sent me to fix your power.”
Aggie knew she looked as startled and discomfited as she felt, so she gave up the idea of trying to hide it. “Isn’t it a bit early? It can’t be past seven…” Aggie added acting lessons to her list of things to do someday when she had a spare second.
Luke grinned broadly before replying, “Well, actually it’s just after eight. I meant to be here on the dot, but there was a line at the gas station this morning. If you’ll just give me that list you talked about with Uncle Zeke, I’ll get to work on it, and you can go back to bed. From what Uncle Zeke tells me, you need all the rest you can get.” As an afterthought, he added, “Oh, and how is the ankle?”
“Ankle? How’d you know about that?” Aggie was rarely coherent before her first cup of coffee.
He shuffled his feet uncomfortably, making Aggie even more suspicious. “Uncle Zeke told me about it. That must have been pretty stressful.” Luke smiled again as he waited for Aggie to step aside so he could enter and get to work.
Aggie wanted to be angry with him, but at that particular moment, anyone who could fix her electrical nightmare was on par with a knight on a white charger-- or at least a great substitute for a battery charger. She dug the list out of her purse, making a mental note to find her clipboard for these kinds of things, unwrinkled it, and handed it to Luke. As the handyman took it, Aggie noticed how strong his forearms appeared to be.
Luke wasn’t a large man. Average height, weight, and build implied a common, everyday Joe. Luke, however, was remarkably strong for someone his size. Though not classically handsome, he had a firm jaw line and incredible blue eyes that seemed to light up his whole face when he smiled. To the delight of most single females of his acquaintance, he smiled often. Aggie, lost in her sleep and java-deprived stupor, noticed nothing but his forearms, the tool belt around the man’s waist, and a lingering scent of shaving cream once he turned to leave.
As Luke strolled outside to check the breaker box and turn it off, Aggie snatched up her rumpled clothes from the previous day and hurried to the shower. The children were stirring around her, and if she didn’t make a dash for it now, she’d find another day over and another layer of grime on her unwashed body. The piles of laundry in the corner of the room caught her eye on her way up the stairs, so Aggie made another mental note to ask Luke to hook up the washer and dryer while he was here. She could pay him for both things at once, and surely, that wasn’t an expensive or time-consuming job.
Although Zeke had encouraged her to make a list of everything she needed to do and give the Luke the most difficult of the jobs, Aggie hadn’t intended to do it. She was already rethinking her plans. She turned on the shower and stepped into the tub, the water pouring over her body like a torrential rain. She missed a daily shower but just didn’t have time-- That was it. If he’d walk her through the house and help her make lists of what he could and couldn’t do, she’d hire him to do all the coulds. Maybe she could even pay him to hire out the other jobs so that they’d get done right--that is, if he did manage to fix the major gaffe of the last guy.
Just before lunchtime, Aggie decided that it was time for real food-- not thrown together real ingredients like carrot sticks now and then, or an apple when she
realized that their entire menu for a day was out of a can or box, but real meals out of real food. She thought of calling her mother, but the thought of the worry she’d cause stopped her. For two weeks, she’d picked up a bag or two of groceries here and there, but there had been few meals that weren’t thrown together, or borderline junk food. It was better than it had been, at least there were vegetables and fruit on the snack list, but she needed more. If she only knew where Celia Mullins’ menu plan was hiding…
Why she picked this day, when she needed to be home and supervise an electrical repair job that she had no idea how to supervise in the first place, to go to the store, Aggie didn’t know. However, she brushed hair, washed little faces and hands, and ordered all the children into the van. She found Luke unscrewing every wire from every outlet and switch in the house and informed him she had to make a trip to town.
“Do you need anything while I’m there? Bolts, wire, circuits, duct tape? Doesn’t that stuff fix anything?” Her eyes twinkled as she laughed at herself and her silliness.
“I’m good. Happy shopping.”
“Yeah, right,” she muttered as she hurried down the stairs and out to her van. “I’ve got a certifiable nut case working on my electrical. Happy shopping.” Had Luke heard the harrumph that followed, he’d have howled with laughter.
For reasons unfathomable to Aggie, the children were excited about their grocery shopping excursion, and all the way there, they sang silly songs about hunting for food in the store. Aggie couldn’t decide if it was some game Allie had taught her children, or their keen, collective, and wacky imaginations. She would later learn that Allie never took her children grocery shopping with her, and she would soon understand why.
Suffice it to say, three children desperately needed to ride in the front seat of a shopping cart. This meant Aggie, Vannie, and Laird all had to push a cart. Thanks to injury, helpful church members, and a wonderful mother’s helper, Aggie had yet to do a full shopping trip for the family. Today would be her debut into the world of family nutritional procurement. Halfway through her shopping trip, she was livid. How she’d managed to make it through high school and college without a basic understanding of how much food each person needed per day, she didn’t know. Furthermore, how to multiply that by people and days, all while sticking to whatever food guidelines were popular this week, and keeping her sanity, eluded her. She could explain the intricacies of the Battle of Ticonderoga, but she couldn’t predict how much she needed in grains vs. proteins, or how to balance that knowledge with fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, from her observations, the children didn’t eat a consistent amount from day to day anyway. Vannie was helpful, as were Ellie and Laird, but they simply knew some of the foods their mother often bought-- not how she used them once they arrived home, or how she balanced them in the family’s meals.
Feeling like an incompetent fool, but knowing that food was food (even if it didn’t seem to have rhyme or reason), Aggie bought almost an entire cart of meat, half a cart of frozen veggies, and the other half of fresh vegetables for salads and snacking, an entire case of apples, several bags of other fresh fruit, canned soups, lunchmeats, bread, boxed cereals and ten gallons of milk. With all three shopping carts filled, she then filled another one. By the fifth cart, Aggie was getting desperate.
As she tried to keep the little children from climbing from their seats, she realized that other than the fruit, there were no snack foods. She also realized that tuna, peanut butter, and jelly would be helpful and sent the other children in different directions, while trying to keep the twins and Ian occupied and quiet. Only three displays and two jars were demolished in the process, and Aggie thought surely that was good!
Several hundred dollars, two box helpers, and a half an hour later, the food was bagged and stored in the van. The children held bags on their laps, under their seats, and between their feet. All the way home, she tried to compare the large trip with her near daily rushes into stores for basic staples and wondered just how long the food would last. Surely, it’d be a week or two-- maybe even three if she was careful.
Luke jogged out to the van as Aggie drove up the drive. Before Aggie and Vannie could climb from the front seats, he had the twins on the ground with bags of bread in their hands to carry into the house. Smiling, he passed Ian to her and urged her to go rest while he and the children brought in the food. Aggie was amazed at how that one small act of courtesy could mean so much, and, not knowing how to express her gratitude, she gave him a weak but heart-felt smile and said, “Thank you, Luke, I appreciate the help.”
Luke felt her thanks as well as heard them, and it was apparent that they were partially the result of overwork and under-appreciation. He determined, as he loaded his arms with nearly a dozen plastic bags, to make sure he found many opportunities to help her, and especially compliment her, in the coming weeks. Some said Luke’s spiritual gift was service, and his specialty was observation. He was a fixer.
Before long, all the bags of groceries were piled around the living room and kitchen. Every table, counter, and most of the floor was covered with bags upon bags of food. Aggie had the daunting task of quickly putting away the perishables, while trying to come up with some organizational system of knowing what was in there and where to find it again. As he piled meat in an empty laundry basket, Luke commented on the need for a deep freeze, so Aggie snatched a crayon from the floor under the table and began a list of needs. It took some creative rearranging, but all the food was safely stored away forty minutes later. Luke promised to return in the morning with a freezer for the meat that was sitting on shelves in the refrigerator.
“You won’t have time to cook it all before it goes bad.”
Collapsing on the couch, Aggie realized that she had just bought enough food to feed them all and now had no energy with which to make any of it. Tears formed in Aggie’s eyes as she wondered, for what seemed the millionth time, how her sister had ever managed to keep things running so smoothly without wearing out. Ian crawled up to her and lifted his arms to be held. Within seconds of settling in Aggie’s arms, Ian slept soundly. He’d missed his morning nap, causing him to enter a deep sleep quite quickly.
A short while later, Luke came in and sat across from her. “Miss Milliken?”
Aggie interrupted. “It’s Aggie. I am going to call you Luke. Partly, because I don’t even know your last name, but mostly because I am hoping that you’ll consider me a friend.”
Luke started over using her first name. He told her that the children were making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and having chips with them. “I brought a jug of juice with me to bribe the kids into liking me, so they are guzzling that as well.” Luke winked and continued.
“I have the wires fixed. It really didn’t take long. If it makes you feel better, the other guy may not have known what he was doing, but he managed to get the boxes in right, without destroying the walls, and just mixed the wires in a way that I can’t even imagine. Not exactly a good thing, but not the end of the world either, you know?” Aggie smiled and nodded, too tired to answer.
“I think that the little roundish room you asked me about just needs the old carpeting removed, floors refinished, and a good coat of paint. I already checked, and there are beautiful hardwood floors under that green, shaggy monstrosity. All in all, I think I can have it ready for her to move into by next Thursday or Friday night, if you want me to do it. I’ll go get the paint tonight on my way home, but with your ok, I can pull out that carpeting right after I eat my lunch.” Luke seemed to hesitate. Aggie couldn’t decide if he had another question or if there was something else.
“Thank you, Luke. I’d appreciate you taking out that carpeting. I am so tired; I doubt I can do anything more right now. I was hoping to do most of the work around here myself. Save money, you know? Well, I see that I am going to need more help than I thought.” She paused a moment, trying to read his face. She wondered why other people didn’t have open book faces like hers. “So, if y
ou’ll tell me how much time you have to work on this place, I have a feeling that I can fill it up. On the other hand, the good news is that we have the paint for that room. I bought it last week.”
Luke excused himself and went into the kitchen. Taken aback, Aggie slowly became afraid she had overwhelmed him with too much work already. Mentally, she began writing a “help wanted” ad for the local classifieds and prayed that the Lord would protect her from people like her first electrician.
When Luke returned, he held two paper plates piled with salad and lasagna. Setting them on the makeshift coffee table, Luke lifted sleeping Ian from her lap and laid him in the nearby playpen. Something about the take-charge actions irritated her and blessed her at the same time. Luke offered to pray for the meal once he’d returned to his seat. Still stunned, Aggie nodded and bowed her head. “Lord, thank you for Mom’s great leftover lasagna. Thank you for new friends to share it with, and a wonderful old home to restore to Your glory. In the name of Jesus, Amen.”
Aggie raised her head and smiled. “I can tell you are going to be a very difficult person to stay irritated with.” Taking a bite of the delicious lunch, Aggie added, “And please thank your mother for this. I love lasagna, and the frozen ones just don’t quite cut it.”
Luke smiled, started to speak again, and then hesitated. Aggie smiled, and nodded her encouragement, but it was several minutes before he spoke. “Aggie, I like to help. I always have-- I, well-- I see a need, and I want to fill it.”
Long, silent pauses, where he clearly had more to say, almost drove Aggie to distraction, but she tried to hold her tongue. She couldn’t decide if she was that nerve-wracking or if it was something peculiar to Luke. As the minutes ticked by, Aggie, ready to scream with frustration, kept chewing so she wouldn’t prematurely open her mouth.
Ready or Not (Aggie's Inheritance) Page 17