by Murphy, R.
“Hey, Stan?” I broke out of my incompetent-homeowner reverie.
“Yeah?’
“So all you have to do is pile up the rocks into a wall?”
Stan looked at me, deadpan. “You don’t think that’s enough? Standing in a freezing lake and heaving a ton of rocks into a wall?”
“No, no, no. That’s not what I mean,” I back-pedaled frantically. “I mean, after you pile the rocks into a wall, are you done?”
“Nope. Then you shovel shale behind the rocks to make your lakefront higher. Or reinforce it with sandbags. If you’re lucky your wall will be higher than the water when the water rises.”
I’m no engineer, mind you. But I didn’t need to be an engineer to know this project would require a lot of work. Hard, physical, dirty, cold, wet work. Especially if you remember that I’m a woman of a certain age with a predilection for books, cookies, and wine, who avoids strenuous exercise whenever possible. A slightly out-of-shape woman with no extra money in the bank to pay a ‘lakefront builder upper’ repair person even if I could find one in the yellow pages. I could see the path the next couple of weeks would take, and it wasn’t pretty.
“I suppose I have to buy some waterproof boots, huh?” I yelled to Stan as he fished for rocks toward the far end of his property.
“Yup,” he hollered back. “You don’t want to be standing for hours in ice water without them.” I shivered at the mere thought of it. “I’ll come over and help you whenever I can,” Stan continued, resuming his icy stroll back toward me. “You let me dig out the biggest rocks. You don’t want to hurt your back lifting them, not if you’re going to sing in New York in a few weeks.”
“You’re the best, Stan!” I yelled. “I’ll figure out a nice way to say thank you, I promise.”
“Stop carrying on like that, now,” Stan gently reprimanded me. “This is what neighbors do for each other out here. Now get yourself to the hardware store and buy some rubber boots, like mine.” He sloshed one foot in the air for me to glance at the details on it. “Then we’ll see what we can do.”
“Okay. Do you need anything in town as long as I’m going that way?”
“Nope, I’m all set.” I waved goodbye and left Stan wandering in the waves, pausing occasionally to bend and heave a rock onto the shore.
As I bustled into the house, I scolded myself all the way. “You see, Roz, there you go complaining to Katie about how bored you are with just cooking and cleaning, so the Universe decides to spice up your life by flooding your house. When are you just going to learn to take life as it comes and keep your whining to yourself? Honestly . . .” I thought of the wet, cold, weeks ahead. “When are you going to learn, Roz, that whenever you complain about having a headache, the Universe decides to take your mind off that pain by dropping a five-pound frozen chicken on your foot.”
(Now that I think about it, I realize that one day I’ll probably start worrying about the nagging nature of my rich inner life. Today, though, was not that day.)
The hardware store offered a selection of rubber waders: I could choose black or army surplus green. I guess not a lot of fashion-forward women spend their time heaving rocks in spring floods. Begrudgingly, I shelled out the bucks for the black boots. Might as well invest in the classics, I figured. Maybe Coco Chanel got started with her little black dress this way.
Late-afternoon sun slanted through the naked trees as I drove home from Avondale. Only an hour or two remained before dark. Stan, ever sensible, had wrapped up for the day. Normally I’d spend those hours showering and primping for my date with David. Tonight, though, I planned a soggy rendezvous with the lake first.
My new waders were large enough that I could stuff two pair of socks inside them, and I did. Then I donned my oversized puffy jacket and rubber gloves. Sporting my huge black boots, dark-green hooded jacket, and bright-yellow rubber gloves, I waved at myself as I stomped past the mirror. “I look like a fricking glandular daffodil,” I muttered, shaking my head as I went down the stairs to my lakefront-level cellar.
Now here’s the thing about wearing waders and rubber gloves when you walk into a lake churning with snow melt-off: you may think you’re going to keep warm, but you’re just deluding yourself. All you’re doing is postponing the inevitable. Imagine sticking your foot into the freezer. It might stay dry for a bit, but it’s still going to get wicked cold eventually. That’s just what happens in a lake. Only much quicker.
For about thirty minutes I imitated Stan and sauntered through the shallow waters surrounding my beach. I hunted for good-sized stones—maybe a little bigger than my head—pried them out of the muck, and hoisted them onto the shore. After digging out a dozen rocks I clambered out of the frothy water and piled my rocks into a pitifully tiny cairn. Hands and feet numb, filthy from the chin down, my only thought when I hiked upstairs was, This is going to be a verrrry long spring.
A steamy shower restored me. Mascara, lipstick, black slacks, a lighter-than-normal-weight sweater, and I was dressed for my celebratory dinner. For a change, I unearthed a pair of pearl earrings from the bottom of my jewelry box. While I rummaged for the pearls, I eyed the ring I’d found yesterday, still isolated in its white jeweler’s box. I hadn’t tried it on yet. I realized, with a sinking heart, that in light of my current lakefront crisis, it might be a while before I could resume my Bob quest.
By seven o’clock, after a slow drive along dark winding roads, I pulled into the winery, navigated past the dim tasting rooms and toward the lights in the back. As I left the car I could hear the clink of glass and men’s voices in the rear workroom.
The processing area was high ceilinged, cold, full of tall steel vats with wine meters and gauges poking out of them. Some massive oak barrels lined the back wall, and complicated machinery loaded with conveyor belts and empty wine bottles stood against the wall closest to the loading dock. As I entered, David and Alex packed bottled rieslings into sturdy cardboard cases.
They turned around at my “hi,” and David walked over to introduce me. “Alex, this is my friend Roz, the writer I mentioned. If you ever need a pourer, she’s up for the challenge.”
“Great to meet you,” Alex said, reaching for my outstretched hand. A large, muscular man, bald head shiny with sweat, with a huge graying walrus mustache. “I hear you two have some fun plans for tonight.” His blue eyes twinkled.
“Oh, nothing fancy, just dinner at the new Greek restaurant in Southport. We haven’t been there before, so I wanted to try it,” I said.
“My wife and I ate there a couple of weeks ago. Make sure you taste the spanakopita, the spinach pie. My wife loved it, and she’s a great cook. Did you know the restaurant is BYOB? David, why don’t you grab a bottle of riesling from the front room when you head out for dinner. I’d give you one of these”—he gestured at the newly bottled wines surrounding them—“but the wine really should open up in the bottle for a little bit before we start drinking it.” Alex glanced at the clock. “I have to get going or I’ll be late for that Chamber meeting. Dave, can you close up here?”
“Sure, no problem,” David said, walking to the end of the truck loading dock and lowering and locking the metal bay doors.
Alex grabbed his coat and turned toward the door. “See you tomorrow, David. Nice meeting you, Roz, and you two have fun tonight.” He winked and ducked through the tasting room door.
“Alex seems nice,” I said, picking new bottles of wine out of their cases to study labels while I waited for David.
“He’s a great guy. As far as I can tell, Alex knows just about everything about grapes and wine. His wife, Sue, runs the tasting room. I’ve learned a lot working here with both of them.”
“Do they have children?”
David answered as he shut off the lights. “Two kids—grown—who live out on the West Coast. I know Alex and Susie want them to come back
and run the winery, but I’m not sure how that’s all going to work out.” We left the processing area and navigated the dim tasting room. “Let’s pick up that riesling from the cooler. It’ll be perfect with dinner in a little bit. I’ll have to remember to tell Sue tomorrow so she can update the inventory.”
Twenty minutes later we were sitting in a red leatherette booth at the bright, cheerful Greek diner with our riesling chilling in a nearby ice bucket. Four-inch-high pies decorated a tall glass case placed strategically by the front door, close to the cash register. Ten pages long, our laminated, oversized menus offered exotic delights I’d only dreamt of in my snowbound home. Oh, how I’d missed Greek diners! A long-time devotee of spinach pie, I knew what I wanted without even looking at the menu. I started telling David about my lakefront project while he selected his meal and concluded with, “Stan’s going to help me with the biggest rocks, so I don’t think I’m taking a chance at hurting my back again.”
David stared at me for a moment and then reached for his wine. He sipped meditatively then said, “You know, Roz, there are probably other ways to solve the high-water problem. And first, I’ve got to say that I’m not really sure you’ll have a problem. Don’t forget, your house has been there for twenty years, and it’s still standing. This won’t be the first time it’s seen high water.”
“I know, I know,” I protested, “but I can’t just sit there and do nothing. I wake up in the middle of the night and hear those storm waves pounding on my shore and I can’t get back to sleep. Every day the water eats another inch or two of shale. I have this image of the lake slowly seeping into my house, with fish swimming around my kitchen table.” I paused for a moment, horrified at the picture I’d painted. Then I continued, “Have I ever told you one of my mottoes?”
David grinned. “The one about ‘It’s always an adventure in Roz-ville?’”
“Well, I guess that one would relate here, wouldn’t it? But I was thinking of another motto: ‘Leave no worry unworried.’”
David’s grin broadened. “I’ve seen you put that one into effect, what with all your fretting about how you’d pay for Manhattan. Once you get your teeth into a worry, you are kind of like a small dog with a big bone.”
“It’s genetic.” I sighed. “I think I inherited all this worrying from my grandmother.”
“Anyway,” David said, “getting back to reinforcing your lakefront, I could probably think of one or two guys who might be willing to fill sandbags and get them to your house. I have a friend in the volunteer fire department. I could call him and see if they could do something.”
“If they could do something, they should probably help Stan first. He’s closer to flooding than I am, and he could use a hand.”
“He’s got a son nearby, doesn’t he?”
“Aaron. He’d have to come up from Corning, though. It’s a ways off.”
“The roads are clear now, so that wouldn’t be a big deal.”
“I suppose,” I admitted, reluctant to yield my point.
“But you’re on your own. I know Stan will help you, and I’ll stop by whenever I can get away from the winery, but even with three people, reinforcing close to one hundred feet of lakefront is a huge amount of work. Even if you worked on it full-time for weeks, you might not get it done. Let’s face it, Roz.” He looked at me. “Neither one of us is twenty-one anymore.”
“I’m trying to think of it as fresh air and good exercise,” I mumbled.
“Good exercise?” David looked at me quizzically. “It’s also a really good way to hurt your back and get pneumonia.”
“Wow. You’re a fountain of positivity tonight, David.” I gulped an over-large mouthful of wine. “I’m going to give working on the lakefront a shot for a few days. I’ll be outside in the fresh air instead of cleaning closets. At least it’ll be a change of pace.”
I could see him mentally shaking his head, but he only said, “I’ve promised Alex I’d be there for the rest of the bottling this week, and I think he’s going to try to do last year’s pinot, but I’ll help you whenever I get a chance. Anyway, I thought we were here to celebrate your tax refund.”
“You’re right.” By this point the wine had kicked in a bit and I felt mellow and thoughtful, pondering our earlier phone conversation. “Isn’t it strange, the way things work out sometimes? I stressed and worried for weeks about how I’d get the money for that weekend and—plunk!—the Universe just drops the answer in my lap with no real effort on my part. That kind of miracle never happens to me.” I swirled my wineglass in tight circles on the slick Formica tabletop and continued, “Then there are times when the littlest thing you say or do brings your whole life crashing down around your ears, and you had no idea anything would happen.”
“Okay.” David glanced at my glass of wine, obviously trying to gauge how much I’d had to drink. “Like what little thing, for instance?”
“Well”—I thought for a minute—“I took one two-week vacation in eight years, and I lost my job because of it.”
“There must be more to it than that,” David responded, shocked.
“No, not really. It was kind of a perfect storm of horrific timing. I’d worked fifty hours a week for this company for almost twenty years. The last six of them I’d earned my MBA at night, and I was completely exhausted. On top of that, my sister had an awful time with cancer and she’d been hospitalized several times. I took a few days off and went home to be with the family a couple of times when that happened. After she died, and I finished my MBA, I decided I needed to take my first two-week vacation in years. I had plenty of vacation time accrued, but my timing sucked.” David’s eyes never moved from my face as I continued.
“My company had hired a new outside director a couple of levels above me, and he began his job while I was out. This new director had a sidekick he liked to work with, and the only way he could bring the sidekick into the company was by getting rid of an existing manager. Someone told me, months later, that the new director said of me when he started, ‘If we can do without her for two weeks, we can probably do without her entirely.’ So in the next round of lay-offs, they let me go. After almost twenty years.”
“Oh, hon.” David reached for my hand. “Jeez, I had no idea. Did you fight it? Did anybody stand up for you?”
“It happened in a ‘right to work’ state, so my lawyer said the company could get rid of anybody anytime. ‘They can fire you if they didn’t like your earrings this morning,’ is the way he put it. Rumors of additional lay-offs scared everyone, so none of my coworkers wanted to make waves about me. I can understand it. Everybody was terrified of losing their job. I hated the whole situation, but I could understand it. Anyway”—I shook my head to clear it—“I just mentioned that example to show how you can do the littlest thing, like take an approved, much-needed vacation, and bring your whole world crashing down. So maybe it makes sense that, once in a while, the Universe compensates by dropping a gift in your lap for no reason.”
David continued holding my hand, stroking it with his thumb. “You’re something else, Roz. On the surface you’re all busy and happy and nutty and underneath . . . wow.”
“Ahhhhh, everybody’s like this. ‘Tears of a Clown,’ especially when I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine. It’s really good wine, by the way,” I said, emptying my glass.
My comment started David talking about his overtime tasks at the winery, and eventually our dinners came. Just delicious. It had been years since I’d eaten such excellent spinach pie. We passed on dessert, and when our decaf arrived, David launched into his surprise.
“You’ll never guess what I bought today,” he said.
“Your new grape vines?”
“Nope. Two tickets for Anything Goes on the Thursday night of our Manhattan weekend. Friday was sold out.”
“Oh, my gosh, David. How wonder
ful! I’ve read such good reviews of that show, and I’ve always wanted to see it!” I jumped out of my seat, ran over to David’s side of the booth, threw my arms around him, and gave him an enthusiastic kiss, much to the amusement of our fellow diners.
“And,” he continued, beaming, “I’ve made us some reservations for a nice dinner beforehand, at the Algonquin Hotel.”
My arms dropped slowly to my side. “The Algonquin? What made you think of the Algonquin?”
“Is that a problem? I thought you mentioned it from your Christmas trip to your sister’s. Didn’t you like it? That restaurant is very close to the Broadway theaters and it’s one of those historic hotels you’re always talking about.”
“The Algonquin is fine,” I said slowly. “It’s lovely. You just surprised me, that’s all. How thoughtful of you, David.” I gave him another kiss, slid out of the booth, and went back to my coffee. “This trip to Manhattan will be so wonderful. I can hardly believe we’ll be there in only a few weeks. Between Anything Goes, the Big Apple opera Stacey’s got lined up, my tea at The Plaza with my roommates, and singing at Carnegie Hall, I can’t imagine a better weekend.”
“I forgot about the opera,” David said. “That’s included in our package, right?”