The three of them sat together at a quiet booth, waiting for their burgers, when Miles finally called her personal cellphone.
She played it cool and platonic, partly to avoid hurting Clarence's feelings, but mostly because she was leery of Miles, now. "Who was that?" Clarence asked, once she hung up.
"Nobody you know," she said, shoving the phone back in her purse.
"All the more reason I should know who it is," Clarence said, adjusting his jewelry.
She shot him an annoyed look, and he dropped it.
She didn't hear her phone ring again, but she checked it after putting Katina to bed. No more calls from Miles. She turned it off, plugged it into the charger and stepped out onto her porch to take in the city lights with more night air.
She pondered Miles' call. What was the purpose of it? His transfer: work stuff. He called to talk shop.
No. That didn't make any sense. If he wasn't interested in her, he wouldn't have called unless he needed something work-related. And if the purpose was more than to share job news, she hadn't given him much of a chance to spit it out.
Well, bad timing wasn't her fault, either. Why had he waited so long--was he trying to soften her up with suspense? Did a date fall through, so he rebounded to the first phone number in his recent calls list?
Her mind considered multiple scenarios, all of which involved Miles doing her wrong in some way. In her heart, she wanted none of them to be true.
The weekend came without another call from Miles. Shauna wasn't sleeping well, lately, and wound up vegetating all of Friday and most of Saturday away. She finished the book she'd been reading, then watched TV with Katina. She stumbled on The Bodyguard on a premium channel. Halfway through, she set her DVR to keep the movie so she could watch it again. Suddenly grasping at any straw Hollywood could give her regarding interracial romance, she searched the programming for the coming week and scheduled both Guess Who and Something New for recording. She had liked Sanaa Lathan as an actress ever since Love and Basketball, so one of the movies would have at least that much going for it.
Mum broke Shauna's self-imposed hibernation with an invite to supper Saturday. They had a pleasant visit, but Daddy started complaining about his cable reception again.
Suddenly Shauna had a plan to break the suspense and see where the cards fell.
With her clout as a Customer Service team leader, she booked a trouble call for her parents, requesting a specific technician. 10
Miles spent most of the weekend at Rita's house, was called out on standby late Friday, then for a full work day Saturday. Sunday morning his standby expired, and he reported to Denny at the Libra Street office.
Denny Wepner was well-suited to his job. He was a born troubleshooter with many years of experience. He led from the front
-preferring to be out in the field helping his techs, rather than stuck in the office tapping keyboards. Sunday he rode along with Miles, offering help and advice when needed, but mostly evaluating what level Miles was at. Declaring that Miles had both the aptitude and determination to make a good troubleshooter, he promised him a normal Service route for Monday.
Monday morning, after a meeting in which Denny concentrated on the inter-office softball tournament at the upcoming company picnic, Miles was, indeed, handed a route which seemed comparable to the other routes being thumbed through and talked about.
Miles took to troubleshooting like a duck to water. Not only that, but customers were usually happy when he left a job, and Dispatch seemed to treat him with more respect, now that he was one of the elite.
Tuesday, with only one job left to run, he was on-track to finish within a normal eight-hour shift, and possibly have time left over to clean and organize his van. Then he rolled up on a house in a heavilywooded suburb, where the customer, a Mr. Lamont Gales, had ongoing problems with ingress.
Still looking over the work order as he walked to the door, Miles barely noticed the green Saturn in the driveway. When the door opened and Shauna stood before him, he was jolted.
Confused by the abortive phone call days ago, sated by a weekend with Rita, then consumed by the novelty of a new routine at work, she had drifted to the back of his mind. Now, it didn't seem possible he could have forgotten how beautiful she was. She was dressed down again, in tight sweatpants and a halter top, like she was ready for house cleaning. Peeking around her legs was the most adorable little girl Miles had ever seen, dressed in a pink princess costume, complete with glittering tiara. He was speechless.
"Hey, Miles," Shauna said. "You're right on time."
"Um, uh..."
"Come on in," she said, opening the door wide to lead him inside.
The motion of her magnificent hips kept him speechless as he followed her. The little princess fell in step beside him, looking up to study his face intently in a most unnerving way.
The house had a cozy atmosphere, but the master bedroom was undergoing renovation. All the fixtures were bare, drop cloth covered the floor and furniture, and Shauna's parents were dressed in sweatpants and T-shirts, speckled with paint splatters.
"Mum, Daddy," Shauna said, "this is Miles, the Service Tech from Avcom. Miles, this is Lamont and Gloria."
They shook hands. Both were rather short, and Miles could see where Shauna got her looks. Lamont reminded him of Reggie Jackson. Gloria, despite her age, had beauty and class that no paintsplattered work clothes could tarnish.
"Here's the deal, Miles," Lamont said, motioning for Miles to follow him. He took Miles on a tour of all the TVs in the house, which were pulled well away from the walls, along with surrounding furniture, and easy to get to. Every set had the same diagonal lines or double image on the same channels, which told Miles the source of the ingress was upstream of the splitter. "All kinds of technicians been out here," Lamont said. "Every one of them told me something different, but nobody fixed the problem."
"I apologize, Mr. Gales," Miles said. "I'll do my best to take care of it for you."
Lamont nodded and returned to his renovation.
Miles tightened fittings and replaced jumpers, just to eliminate future problems. He crossed paths with Shauna a couple times, but didn't know what to say, after that last phone conversation had gone so poorly. Maybe he had read all the signals wrong, after all. Or maybe he had offended her somehow.
The little girl followed him around as he went from room to room, checking TVs. He smiled and tried to make polite talk, but she said nothing, only grinned bashfully.
Outside, he checked signal at the splitter. Ingress. He checked signal at the ground block. Ingress.
He looked down to see the little girl's angelic face watching him with puzzlement. "That sure is a pretty dress," he said.
In a voice almost too quiet to hear, she said something which sounded like, "Thank-you."
"What's your name?"
She answered almost in a whisper.
"Did you say Tina or Katrina?" he asked.
She wrinkled her nose and said, much louder, "Ka-TINA!"
"It's nice to meet you, Katina. My name is Miles. Are you a princess?"
She giggled and covered her mouth with both hands. Somebody called her name from inside, and she ran back in the house, glancing over her shoulder at him.
The aerial drop disappeared into trees so tightly interwoven that he couldn't even guess where the pole was.
He followed the drop into the woods. It was about 175 feet long. Between thick tangles of branches, sunlight caught the shiny metal braid where squirrels had chewed away the jacket. So the cause of the ingress was no longer a mystery. When he found the pole, he also understood why no other tech had replaced the drop: there was no room in the surrounding snarl of trees for a ladder.
He had a pair of gaffs in the van. He probably wasn't supposed to have them, since he'd never been trained to gaff, but he'd inherited them along with tons of other stuff when he was assigned his first full-sized work van, and kept them just in case he needed them one day. It looked li
ke he needed them now.
Emerging from the woods, Miles noticed the garage door open. Gloria sat in the passenger seat of a late-model Lincoln. Lamont stood leaning against the fender, facing the woods. Katina stood beside him. When Lamont saw Miles emerge from the tree line, he motioned him over.
"We're going to Home Depot for a little bit," Lamont said. "Maybe another few errands. My daughter's inside if you need something signed. You alright?"
Miles nodded.
"You're gonna get my TV looking like it should, right? I'm tired of getting the runaround, now."
"You should see a big improvement when you get back, Mr. Gales."
Lamont nodded, then leaned down to give Katina a little nudge. "Get on back in the house, little one."
Katina ran inside. Shauna's parents drove away. Miles walked back to the van.
He pulled off a long stretch of messenger cable, tie-wrapping all the squirrel guard he had to the section which would hang in the woods. He cut the old drop down at the house hook, then used the messenger to tie the old drop to the new one. He removed his tool belt, buckled on his climbing belt, then put the tool belt back on. He dropped the hard hat on his head, grabbed the gaffs and marched into the woods.
At the base of the pole he examined the gaffs, and realized there were two different ways he could strap them on. Not knowing which was best, he just picked a gaff, picked a leg, and started buckling. When they were on, and tight, he removed the leather sheaths from the spikes, double-checked his tools and parts, then sunk a spike into the pole.
The pole was old, dry and weathered, with widened cracks everywhere the wood grain had separated over time. There were also hundreds of chips and scars, probably from dozens of telephone linemen gaffing this pole over the years. But it seemed to hold his weight, so he pulled his whole body up against the pole, cocked his other leg, and sunk that spike into the wood. He climbed.
Miles had strong legs, from lots of walking as a kid, from all the running and squatting involved in playing baseball up through high school, and all the gymnastics he now performed getting into, out of, and through attics. But halfway up the pole, his leg muscles were on fire. He ignored the pain and kept climbing.
Finally he reached the tap. He tied his safety strap around the strand, leaned back, grabbed the old drop and hauled it in hand-overhand. The slack dangled under him and wadded up as he kept pulling the new drop through the trees this way. Finally he held the end of the new messenger cable in his hand. He removed the last vestiges of the old, chewed-up line and let it fall underneath him. He tied off the new drop, coiled the service loops, tagged it and installed the fitting, then connected to the tap. He pulled himself close to the pole, unfastened his safety strap and looked down.
He began to climb down the pole. One foothold. Two. A third. Then so much was blurred into the next split second he couldn't remember all of it. He remembered the pole shooting up rapidly between his arms. He remembered a hard impact with the ground and a blinding pain through his tailbone and spine.
He didn't know how long he laid there, staring up at the spot where he'd just been, some thirty feet overhead. He couldn't remember any warning, but one of his spikes must have ripped through the dry, brittle wood while he was moving the other spike down for the next foothold.
His thinking was jumbled, but gradually straightened out with the passing of time. He sat up and looked around. His hard hat lay seven yards away. His tools lay in a shotgun pattern on the forest floor around his pelvic area. His shirt was torn open in front. The insides of his arms were raw, red, pulpy oozing flesh from the wrists to the biceps--the skin left somewhere on the pole above him.
He stood and began to collect his tools. Then he froze when he saw a flash of pink. He blinked to focus his blurry vision and saw Katina standing near his hard hat, eyes wide, mouth agape. Horrified, she whirled and disappeared.
Oh, great, he thought. She's running to tell Shauna what the dumbass white boy just did. He cursed himself. On top of the embarrassment, Shauna was a fellow employee. He had probably just violated a hundred safety regulations, with her as a witness. Too late, it occurred to him he should have called Denny to ask for assistance from somebody qualified to gaff.
But he had wanted to play the hero.
Well, chances were, he'd have done the same for a customer he didn't know.
He drug the old drop, in a tangled wad, to the back of his van. He dumped his hard hat, climbing belt and gaffs next to it, and limped back to the house box, hoping he hadn't broken his back or something.
As he tried to finish hooking up this end of the drop, Katina led Shauna outside by the hand. Shauna had a cordless phone pressed against one ear.
When she saw Miles, her eyes widened. "I'll have to call you back," she said, pushed a button on the phone and handed it to Katina. "Miles, what happened?" Concern tightened her voice to a higher pitch.
"Fell off the pole," he said. "But I've almost got you hooked back up."
Now anger flashed in her eyes as she stepped closer. "Miles, you're bleeding all over!"
"Sorry," he said, just now starting to feel the ugly sting of his shredded flesh. "I'll clean it up."
She reached up to where he was working in the house box and gently, but insistently, pulled his trembling hands away from the wiring. "Come inside with me right now," she said. Keeping a grip on one hand, she pulled him inside, Katina leading the way, opening doors.
Miles gained a renewed appreciation for air conditioning, and shelter from the sun, back inside the house, though the change in temperature seemed to make his scrapes sting that much more.
They entered a bathroom. Shauna lowered the cover over the toilet seat and had him sit down. She felt his forehead, turned on the sink faucet, and opened the medicine cabinet. She pulled several items out and sat them on the counter, then dampened a washrag and held it against his forehead. "Hold that there."
Miles raised a shaky hand toward the dishrag, but felt a strange resistance to the movement. Katina beat him to it, anyway, holding the rag against his forehead while staring at Miles' bloody arms.
"Thank-you, Baby," Shauna told Katina, and shut the faucet off. "That shirt is in the way. Let's get it off." She squatted and bunched up the bottom of Miles shirt--or what was left of it.
Miles tried to lift his arms to facilitate easy shirt removal, but felt that strange resistance again when his elbows came up to chest level. Shauna gasped and Katina whispered, "Oh, Mommy! Look!"
Miles looked down. Huge wooden splinters had stapled the tattered remains of his shirt front to his flesh in several places.
"Just sit still, Miles," Shauna said. "Don't move."
Shauna leaned in close to him. Despite the pain, he enjoyed the view: Not just her fantastic cleavage, but also the radiance of her eyes and face, now wrinkled slightly with worry. And the perfection of her small, beautiful hands as they gently, but firmly, tugged the splinters out.
That done, she probed at the punctures with her delicate fingers. He didn't flinch, but she said, "I'm sorry. I'm just trying to squeeze the dirty blood out. They put chemicals on those poles."
"Creosote," he said.
He was able to lift his arms now. She pulled the shirt off him and examined his chest and stomach quietly for a moment. She rose and turned on the shower, keeping one hand under the water flow to gauge the temperature. After about a minute she gestured to him. "Stand up and lean over the tub for a second."
He did as she said. She used the shower massage head on a flexible hose to rinse off his wounds.
That really stung. He sucked in air. His arms recoiled from the pulsing water.
"I'm sorry," she said. "This will only take a minute. I promise."
She sounded genuinely sympathetic, but that promised minute still seemed to drag on forever. Finally, she shut off the shower and had him sit again.
"Mommy," Katina said, "this rag is getting hot."
Shauna examined Miles' face, but spoke to her daughter. "
Set it on the counter please, Baby. Would you untie his boots and pull them off for me?"
"Let's not get carried away," Miles said. "There's nothing wrong with my feet." Aside from probable sweat odor, he thought. Like I'm not embarrassed enough already.
"Just sit still, Miles." Shauna's tone was sharp and bossy. She rinsed the washcloth with cold water, squeezed it out and pressed it back against Miles' forehead. "Hold that there."
The cool rag did feel good. But with his elbow bent at this angle, the raw flesh of his bicep and forearm touched, and adhered similar to how duct tape sticks to itself.
With cotton swabs dipped in hydrogen peroxide, Shauna dabbed at his areas of oozing, raw tissue. It stung, but not as bad as the water had.
"The laces are too tight, Mommy."
Shauna stood, considering Miles for a moment. She glanced at the medicine cabinet and pursed her lips. "OK, let's get you to the living room and make you comfortable while I see what we have in the house."
Miles lowered the rag and tried to unstick his arm from itself. "Shauna, I'll be fine. It's not that bad."
"C'mon," she said. "Please. Let's go."
He rose and bent down to pluck his tattered shirt from the floor. "Let me finish the job, at least. Then I'll take care of this stuff."
Quick as a cat, she beat him to the shirt and yanked it away from his reach. "Miles! Quit talking crazy and go sit down, please. My parents' TV can wait."
He was torn. He wanted to finish the job and be gone before her parents got back, avoiding further embarrassment. But it was also kind of a rush to have her fussing over him like this. Maybe he could somehow leverage this into something positive.
She led the way to the living room easy chair. Feeling a measure of guilt, he ogled her spectacular booty as he followed.
He sat on the easy chair. She gently reclined the seat, replacing the damp rag on his forehead. Then she knelt before him, untied his boots, and tugged them off. Now he really felt guilty and embarrassed, but it was surprising how good it felt to have his feet released.
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