If You Can Get It

by Brendan Hodge

  “So, is the handyman work just until you can get the farm running full-time?” Jen asked.

  “It’s hard to say. I like working on old houses. And I think it’s important for farmers to be integrated into the community, not just treating farming as a business. That is how we got to the point where we eat corporate food that is grown in ways nature never intended.”

  “So, did you start the handyman work or the farming first?”

  “After I left seminary, I came out here to stay with a friend and sort out what to do with my life. The job market was terrible, and I was helping Joe’s father lay down some flooring and do other things around their house. He was telling me what an absurd quote he’d got from a contractor to do the work. I thought, ‘There must be a need for honest guys who are willing to do this work.’ So, I took out an ad and started doing work. After a year and a half, I was starting to feel bad about staying with Joe’s family for so long. I heard about this farm for sale, twenty miles out of town. It was going cheap, and there was a farmhouse on it, though it was in such bad shape that you could count the stars in some rooms at night. I had a little money in the bank from the insurance when my father died. So, I bought the place and started fixing it up.”

  “Wow,” said Katie. After a moment’s silence, she asked, “You said you were in a seminary?”

  Paul swirled his coffee thoughtfully, then shrugged. “I became convinced during college that I had a calling to the priesthood and transferred to a pontifical college halfway through. Then I went on to seminary for the Chicago Diocese. It pretty quickly became clear that it wasn’t my vocation. But I’m stubborn, so it took me a while to drop out. You said you saw my ad in the bulletin. Do you two go to Saint Anne’s?”

  “Oh no,” said Jen, then felt a sharp kick to her shin from Katie. “We were raised kind of Catholic,” she added, “but our parents didn’t really go to church except on Christmas and Easter until a couple years ago, when they got religion. They’re big fans of this priest named Father Larry, so they went to Saint Anne’s when they were visiting and brought the bulletin home.”

  “Father Larry.” Paul shook his head. “Sometimes I think I should just go find a Latin Mass.” After this inexplicable comment, Paul drained the rest of his coffee and gathered up his things. “I didn’t mean to spend all this time talking about myself. I had better get started.”

  Katie led the way to show him the light fixture she had picked out while Jen gathered up the plates and mugs and bore them away to the sink.

  It was midafternoon by the time Paul was done replacing all the electrical outlets.

  “The nice thing about Sears houses,” he observed, “is that they are very compact, so it is easy to run wire.”

  “How did they work?” Jen asked. “Did people just order them from the catalog and a truck dropped off all the supplies?”

  “Almost. All the supplies would come out in a train car. The lumber was precut, and the instructions were included. The buyer had to put up the frame, plaster, all of that. But the design was done, and the measurements were precise. The materials were quite good, too. A house like this would have sold for a couple thousand dollars in 1919, and all you would need was the labor to put it together. It really was an amazing feat. The quality was far better than modern mass-produced houses.”

  “Amazing. I had no idea. I always just thought of the Sears catalog as cheap family clothes.”

  “It was a different world back then. A more human economy.”

  Once again, Paul’s bill was less than seemed to Jen a normal price. Katie tried to persuade him to stay for dinner, but he refused. He did, however, promise faithfully to call in a few weeks when he was available to start planning the kitchen renovation.

  Katie continued her progress through the house, painting, repairing, and refinishing. Jen was impressed at the workmanship, though silently disappointed over the dearth of homemade meals. On a few of the nights when she came home to find Katie tired and spattered with paint, she resorted to her old standbys of salad or frozen entrées. But generally on these evenings, they survived on a diet of pizza or Mamma Ming’s.

  “This is amazing work that you’re doing,” she told Katie one night. “But I hope you don’t feel like you have to knock yourself out like this all the time. Unless you’re enjoying yourself.”

  Katie looked up from the masking tape she was applying to the window frame.

  “I enjoy it. I’ve never done this kind of work before. I hadn’t realized how satisfying it is. Besides,” she added. “I’ve tried looking for a job around here, but the local kids have it sewn up tight. The girls who work the Corner Café all went to high school together. I didn’t want you to think I was sitting around doing nothing since I don’t have a job.”

  “Sheesh, Katie, I wouldn’t think that. I hadn’t even noticed you weren’t working. You never just sit around anymore.”

  Katie flashed her a crooked smile. “I think that’s a compliment. Or is it?”

  Jen shook her head. “We all have to take what we can get. How long before you have that prep done?”

  “Another hour or so.”

  “After that, you’re done for the night?”

  “Yep.”

  “How about if I go make us one of your cookie recipes and we watch a movie when you’re done?”

  “I thought cookies made you fat.”

  “Shut up.”

  Their mother called on the tenth to discuss the house situation.

  “The buyers are set to close on the twentieth,” she told Jen. “And they want to move in before Christmas, so there’s no renting it back from them. Your father and I have found an apartment we can rent in Johnson month to month, but we can’t move in until after the first. Now, some friends invited us to stay with them for a few days. Our parish is giving us a send-off dinner on Saturday the twenty-second. So, if you still don’t mind having us, what I was thinking is that we’ll have everything moved into storage, spend those couple days with our friends here in town, and then come down to your place on the twenty-third and stay till just after New Year’s.”

  “Family holidays! It’s going to be just like old times.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind, Jennifer? I hate to be a burden on you two. I know the house isn’t huge.”

  “It’s just a week, Mom. It’ll be fine. We’re glad to have you.”

  “Really? Because we can stay in a hotel if that would be better.”

  “Only if you want to, Mom. Katie will move into my room with me, and you and Dad can have her room.”

  “Okay. Well, thank you girls so much. It’s going to be so nice to have the whole family together for Christmas again.”

  After a few more minutes of conversation, they ended the call.

  Katie, who had been eavesdropping avidly, pronounced, “We’re doomed.”

  “Katie, it’s going to be fine. This is the kind of thing families do.”

  “Wait and see if you still think that way when you’re having a sober New Year’s,” Katie predicted gloomily.

  Paul’s call later that week to inform them that he was available to start working on the kitchen was greeted with significantly more enthusiasm. He came over on Saturday and spent an hour taking every possible measurement of the kitchen, noting his findings down carefully on graph paper. The two sisters then took turns reeling off all the things that most appealed to them about a kitchen.

  “There has to be an island,” Jen said. “All modern kitchens have islands.”

  “The thing I really liked about how her island in California was laid out,” Katie said, “is that I could get things out of the fridge, put them on the island without taking a step, prepare things on the island, and then turn to the stove without taking a step. I feel like I walk all the time in this kitchen.”

  “That’s called a work triangle,” Paul explained, noting the phrase down on his pad.

  “I also want there to be room for people to come in and talk in the kitchen
without getting in the way,” Jen added. “Whenever there’s a party, people gravitate to the kitchen, because that’s where the food and drinks are coming from. There needs to be room for them to hang out without tripping over each other.”

  “If we replace these cabinets, I think it would look good if we had wood-finished ones instead of painted like these,” Katie said.

  “Oh, yeah, and those cool little racks under the cabinets for hanging wine glasses upside down. I’ve always wanted those. And a wine rack built in. Do you think we could have granite countertops, or would that look wrong in here?”

  “Tile would look more period,” Paul replied. “But it’s hard to clean. You could have butcher block on the island and then finished wood on the rest. I’ll get you some samples of different counters.”

  After this sort of conversation had run on for some time, and Jen and Katie had run out of ideas, Paul promised that he would think all these over and come back Monday evening with plans and drawings for them to discuss.

  At this juncture, Jen pulled out her checkbook. “I want to write you a check for all this planning work that you’re doing,” she said.

  Paul shook his head firmly. “I’m a handyman, not a designer. This is just my way of making sure you get the work that you want.”

  “That’s silly,” Jen said. “This is work. It’s something that we don’t know how to do and you have the skills to do for us. It takes time. I want to pay you a fair rate for it instead of taking advantage of you.”

  “This is just how I work.” Paul gathered up his papers, stacked them carefully, and put them into a battered leather satchel. “When I’ve got a hammer or a drill or a saw in my hand, I’m working, and I charge a fair rate for that. I think of this as just earning your business. Lots of people do free estimates.”

  “No.” Jen was adamant. “This isn’t just a free estimate; this is free work. That’s just not good business. Look, I’ve dealt with pricing and profitability issues for years, and this just doesn’t make any sense. Now, you seem to charge about twenty-five dollars an hour. That’s another thing. You charge too little. That’s why you’re so busy all the time but don’t seem to get ahead. If you charged more, the amount of business you got would even out, and you wouldn’t have to work so many hours. So,” she started writing in her checkbook, “I’m writing you a check for four hundred dollars. I’m sure you’ll spend at least ten hours on this over the weekend and Monday. And forty dollars an hour is the least you should be charging. Really, we should get you up to sixty or a hundred. Here.”

  She handed Paul the check. He accepted it, tight lipped, folded it carefully in half, and put it in his shirt pocket.

  It seemed as if they might part in silence, but Katie spoke up, feeling the tension more than her sister.

  “What time will you be coming Monday? Do you want to come for dinner, and then we can talk afterward? We’d love you have you.”

  Paul hesitated just a moment, then nodded. “All right.”

  “Come at six. Jen’s home from work by then, and I’ll have something good for dinner.”

  Shouldering his satchel, Paul nodded to both of them. “I will see you ladies at six, then.”

  Monday saw the first snowfall of the season, though a light one. Katie matched the weather with a thick, rich beef stew, which had been simmering on the stove all day, and fresh-baked bread.

  Conversation was slow at first, leaving Katie to recall Jen’s warning that “it’s super weird to invite the handyman over for dinner.” Refusing to admit defeat, she filled the silence with a series of crazy-things-that-happened-at-Starbucks stories. Eventually she prevailed on Jen to recount some of her China adventures, and at last Paul contributed several strangest-handyman-emergency calls.

  His plans, when he produced them, were meticulous: both graph-paper schematics of the kitchen layout and surprisingly artistic elevation and detail drawings, showing what each wall would look like as one faced it.

  “You see?” asked Jen. “How could you say this isn’t work? This is amazing.”

  Paul nodded but turned away, unwilling to meet her gaze.

  Katie served coffee and freshly baked cookies as they discussed changes to the plans and materials. It was ten o’clock by the time Paul left, with a meticulous set of notes and a promise to return the next night with revised plans as well as wood and countertop samples.

  Conversation began and flowed more easily the second night. It was nine o’clock before they turned from social topics to the kitchen and eleven before they finished. The notes this time were fewer, and the materials Paul suggested were accepted with enthusiasm. He cautioned as to the cost, but Jen didn’t bat an eye and promised to pay for all the materials up front.

  On Wednesday night, the conversation was even more relaxed, and discussion of the business at hand was restricted mostly to the question of when to begin the work. Paul expressed concern that it would be too disruptive for him to start work on the kitchen while their parents were staying there. Katie said that so long as he didn’t begin until after Christmas, and the big dinner it necessitated, she could get by with feeding everyone even while the kitchen was in the throes of renovation. Jen closed the matter by saying that if he was available to work, she had no intention of wasting perfectly good time, when he was likely to become busy again after New Year’s.

  “We can eat out some of those nights if we have to,” she said. “Besides, having someone outside the family around will keep us all on our best behavior. And you’ll like Mom and Dad.”

  Katie rolled her eyes at this last, but it was resolved that work would begin on the twenty-seventh.

  “Thank you,” said Paul rather formally as he was preparing to go. “I hope I haven’t seemed too forward in socializing with a customer. But I still don’t know many people my age in town and this has been a real pleasure.”

  “Us too!” Katie exclaimed. “A pleasure, I mean.”

  “We know even fewer people in town,” Jen said. “So we’ve been glad of the company.”

  Friday night was a night of angst as Katie contemplated the impending arrival of their parents and would allow nothing to calm her. She alternately cleaned frantically and harangued Jen because she just didn’t understand what they were getting into.

  “Katie,” said Jen, at last, taking her by the shoulders. “You have got to stop. You’ve just vacuumed this room for the second time, and it was already clean. Calm down.”

  Anger and tears seemed to vie for control of Katie’s face for a moment, and then her features suddenly cleared. “You know what we need?” she asked. “We need a party. A night-before-parents party.”

  “We don’t know anyone to party with,” Jen pointed out. “And Johnson isn’t exactly full of hopping clubs.”

  Katie was downcast, but only for an instant. “I’ll call Paul! He can come over. I’ll get a case of beer. You can make those fancy drinks you’re always making. We can crank the stereo.”

  “If it makes you happy, Katie.”

  Katie pulled out her cell phone and rushed to the fridge, where Paul’s business-card magnet hung. “Hey, Paul! It’s Katie. Are you doing anything tomorrow night?”

  Paul arrived the next night with a guitar case in one hand and a six-pack of Guinness in the other.

  “I didn’t know you played,” Katie said as she opened the door.

  “Only when I drink,” Paul promised.

  Katie had made a dessert of astonishing indulgence, which Jen had insisted repeatedly she would be completely unable to partake of, but did. Jen mixed up a Manhattan for herself, but Paul would accept only straight Bourbon. Katie was making rapid progress through a case of Little Kings and dancing slightly to the music that blasted from the stereo.

  The evening was, afterward, a somewhat fractured one in Jen’s memory, whether due to the succession of Manhattans or the selectivity of strong impressions. She remembered talking vivaciously over dinner but remembered very little of what she had said. Deeply ma
rked, such that she could call it up easily years later, was the image of Paul sitting in the armchair, a fire burning in the fireplace, the lights dimmed: his bearded head leaning back against the chair while he played Johnny Cash songs with his eyes half closed and a bottle of Guinness by his side.

  His singing voice was deeper than this speaking voice. She would not have thought to describe a sound so very masculine as “beautiful”, but she could think of no other word. Katie had curled up at the other end of the couch, a beer can still cradled in her hand, and fallen asleep. Jen, however, was happy to sit and watch Paul singing in the firelight.

  She wished that it would never stop.

  9

  For all of Katie’s concerns, Tom and Pat’s arrival proved a very quiet event.

  The party had reached its quiet end just after one in the morning, when Paul put away his guitar and Jen made him a mug of hot coffee for the road. After seeing him out and shutting the door, Jen contemplated Katie’s sleeping form on the couch for a moment, deciding in the end to leave her there.

  Jen woke not long after her usual time, feeling that slight ache throughout her body that signified too little sleep and a not-quite-hangover. The house was silent, and when she reached the living room, she found that Katie had, at some point during the night, taken herself to bed.

  The morning solitude, contrasted with the remains of the previous night’s party, served to emphasize that this morning would be the last time she would have her home wholly to herself until after her parents left. With this feeling giving her energy, she changed into winter running clothes, took a thirty-minute run in the biting, early-morning air, and then set about cleaning the kitchen and the dining room. By the time Katie roused herself, the house was ready for parental visitors and Jen was enjoying some late-morning relaxation over a cup of coffee and the Sunday paper.

  Tom and Pat arrived in the midafternoon. Their “moving in” consisted of two suitcases, a cardboard box full of meticulously wrapped presents, and Tom’s snowblower, which he deposited in the garage along with a gas can.