Together We Stand

by JA Lafrance

  “Certainly seems like more sinks are plugging up and toilets breaking,” Janet agreed. “Look, I said I’d do her…”

  “I know you said you’d do her, but she definitely does not want to do you, so I’m gonna go and do the five-minute job in five minutes,” Dark and Stormy said. “What? What’s up your ass? What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Janet said.

  The truck stopped at a red light, and Dark and Stormy turned her head. And stared at Janet for a full minute.

  “I was kinda nasty to this girl,” Janet mumbled. “‘Cause she couldn’t find my parts.”

  Dark and Stormy howled.

  “You know what I mean.” Janet jabbed her. And repeated the conversation.

  “That’s not like you,” Dark and Stormy said after a few minutes’ pause.

  “I know,” Janet said. “Fucking pandemic. It’s turning me into a bitch.”

  “It’s turning me into a born-again virgin,” Dark and Stormy said. She pulled up in front of Janet’s apartment block and extended her hands towards Janet. Janet sighed and gave her the Lowe’s bag. Then the Darth Vader respirator, with its N95 filter. “Thanks,” her friend said, hopping out of the car. “That’s the real reason I’m making you stay in the car, by the way, while I take care of Hot Nursie’s plumbing needs,” she cackled once safely outside. “Hoping straight girl has a Star Wars fetish.”

  “Bitch,” Janet said. But without much enthusiasm. Dark and Stormy winked, put on the respirator, and disappeared into the building.

  Janet sighed. She felt bad.

  And also, suddenly, really, really horny.

  But it was guilt and not lust that made Janet go back to Lowe’s after their last job was finished, hoping that the employee with the kissable lips—Freddie—would still be there.

  And she was.

  Not helping another customer.

  “Um.” Janet heard her say. “Can you say that again?” And she saw the customer react more or less the way she had earlier in the day. And she saw tears well up in Freddie’s eyes, as the customer, a bearded lumbersexual whose clean jeans and pressed shirt proclaimed him a DYI hobbyist and not a professional, raised his voice.

  “My drain line is leaking. This is an emergency. And you...”

  “Sink traps,” Janet interrupted him. “They’re just over here. Don’t forget a new gasket.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Good to run into someone here who knows what they’re talking about.” He threw Freddie a nasty glance.

  “Listen,” Janet said, moving between him and Freddie—then taking a few steps back. Six feet apart. This sucked. How was this normal? How could one really apologize from six feet away? “I wanted…”

  “To come back and humiliate me again?” Freddie said. “Ask me about some other parts I don’t know? Today’s my first day. My first day. Did you know everything about all this shit on your first day of—whatever it is that you do?”

  “No,” Janet said. “Listen, I just wanted to…”

  “I am not a plumber!” Freddie’s voice was high. And cracked. And hot. “I was, until a couple of weeks ago, a bartender. A very good bartender, by the way. But, surprise, I can’t work anymore, and there are thousands, millions of unemployed people everywhere, and this is the job I got. And it’s my first day. Thank you, very much, for helping to ensure that it was a really shitty day.”

  She turned around, and stormed off, leaving Janet feeling utterly awful.

  And also, wet. Ridiculously, outrageously, lustfully wet.

  Soaked.

  The bathroom floor was soaked, and Freddie was in tears.

  “Gio! Help me!”

  By the time Gio bounded up the stairs from the basement to which Freddie had banished him from their bedroom after they had broken up—three days before the lockdown orders made looking for a place of his own challenging—their toilet was doing a laudable impression of Yellowstone’s Old Faithful, and there was a good inch of water on the bathroom floor.

  “Fuck,” Gio said. “Fred. I’m late for work. I gotta run. Call a plumber.”

  “You’re late for work, you’ve got to run, call a plumber?” Freddie repeated. “Seriously?” But he was already gone—and she was reminded, again, of why breaking up with him had been the right thing to do. Totally, so totally in character, and here she was, ankle-deep in shit—well, at least it wasn’t shit. Still. Seriously? I’m late for work, I gotta run, call a plumber? What kind of partner said that?

  Gio. That’s who.

  Apparently, everyone was having plumbing problems, nobody was going to help her today, and by the time Freddie got through to Plumbers in Overall’s, she was in tears.

  But not so much in tears that she didn’t notice the apostrophe fault and winced at it.

  “Plumbers in Overalls, we always wear overalls, so you never see a butt crack, guaranteed,” a sing-song voice answered the phone.

  “This is an emergency!” Freddie screamed into the phone. Hating the sing-song voice—yet feeling strangely soothed by it.

  “It always is, babelicious,” the voice responded. “What can I do for you?”

  “My toilet is exploding,” Freddie started to explain, then cry, and then, the sing-song voice took charge, and Freddie found herself in the basement, turning off the main water line—she didn’t even know that was a thing. The flow of the water slowed, then stopped.

  “My partner will be there in five minutes,” the sing-song voice promised. “In the meantime, see if you can control the water damage.”

  Water damage. Right.

  Freddie gathered up all the towels, dish cloths, and blankets she could find, and started mopping up the water.

  Well, damming the water within the bathroom and hallway.

  And adding to it a little, because she was still crying. Because life was horrible, and how was she going to pay for this? Her budget was already strained. The Lowe’s job paid over minimum wage, but unlike her bartending job, no tips. And Gio had been an ass about money since they broke up. He’d pay half the bill, no more. And it was hard to blame him, because working in the kitchen of a long-term care facility was no fat cat job either.

  Life was horrible, she was ankle-deep in water, she was soaked—and not in a good way.

  “Fuck you, universe, what else are you going to throw at me today?” she muttered to herself as she opened the door.

  “Fuck me,” she said. “You?”

  It was not, Janet knew, an invitation. But the temptation to fantasize about it as one came to her immediately. What was wrong with her?

  “Karma,” she said weakly. “I mean, I wanted to—I was wishing I could figure out how to apologize to you. For being a bitch yesterday. And here…”

  “Fuck you,” Freddie, eyes red and face wet with tears, said. “I don’t need an apology. I need a plumber.”

  “That would be me,” Janet said. Lifted up her toolbox.

  Freddie stood in the damp hallway and watched the plumber’s bent back. The woman worked quickly and quietly, with an efficiency of movement that both the bartender and the one-time martial artist in Freddie admired.

  “Done,” she said after about fifteen minutes.

  “Done?” Freddie echoed stupidly.

  “Done, just a new flush kit. And a new valve,” the plumber explained. “Go turn on the main valve and let’s flush this motherfucker. Er. Toilet.”

  “Very professional,” Freddie said. “If I spoke to you like that at Lowe’s, I’d get fired.”

  “Yeah. About that.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” Freddie turned her back on the plumber and ran downstairs to the basement. “Flush!” she yelled.

  “All good!” She heard the woman call back. “Like I said. Done.”

  When Freddie came back upstairs, the woman was kneeling by the bathtub, wringing out towels and mopping up more water.

  “I’ll do that,” Freddie said. “Just give me the bill and go.”

  “Look,” the plumber said.<
br />
  “Seriously. There is no karma. There is nothing. There is you doing your job, getting paid for it, and leaving. OK?”

  The woman nodded.

  “OK,” she said. “Sorry,” she added.

  And Freddie felt—something that she did not want to feel, so she squished it down hard.

  “Oh, by the way, Miss Knows Everything About Plumbing,” she said viciously. “Your stupid company name? It’s spelled wrong. Everywhere.”

  “What?”

  “It’s supposed to be Overalls, no apostrophe. Not O-V-E-R-A-L-L-apostrophe-S. Even a stupid, unemployed bartender who now has to work customer service at Lowe’s knows that. It’s like, grade six English. Grade four.”

  The plumber looked at Freddie, and Freddie braced herself for attack. Anger.

  But the other woman just sighed. Shrugged. And left.

  She had been gone a good hour, two, before Freddie realized she had not left an invoice.

  Janet got through the day without telling Dark and Stormy who their emergency exploding toilet client was, and how the experience had gone—or why the job was missing an invoice. And Dark and Stormy, pensive herself, didn’t press. But it was still with relief that Janet said goodbye to her friend and business partner at the end of a very long day, and let herself into her apartment.

  Her cats were waiting for her. She had accidentally inherited the three-year-old littermates when a neighbour—the former occupant of the flat that now belonged to the hot nurse she and Dark and Stormy both lusted after—left them behind.

  She was a reluctant cat mother, who had resisted many earlier attempts to have cats infiltrate her life.

  “Already a walking, talking butch dyke stereotype,” she had told Dark and Stormy repeatedly. “Come on. Let me be the one cat-free lesbian in our lives.”

  “Just ‘cause you’re a plumber who walks around with a bag full of dildo-like plumbing implements?” Dark and Stormy laughed. But she never pressed any of her foster cats and kittens on Janet. And, when she arrived for dinner one day and found two twin calico cats curled up on Janet’s couch, she simply petted them, asked their names, and did not laugh when, on the spur of the moment, Janet called them Drip and Suck.

  She also did not say, “About time,” which was why she and Janet were going to be best friends forever.

  Drip and Suck jumped up into her lap as soon as Janet collapsed onto the couch. She rubbed Drip’s head and Suck’s chin. Sighed. She didn’t quite understand what had gone so very wrong at the beautiful Lowe’s employee’s house. And, yesterday morning in the hardware store. Why had she been so fucking rude? It wasn’t like her. Freddie had schooled her, and she had deserved it.

  But why hadn’t the woman even attempted to listen to her apology?

  She reached for her phone to text Dark and Stormy. Changed her mind. Her friend was also strained and tired. Unlikely to be in a mood for Janet’s whingeing.

  But she couldn’t put down the phone.

  “Did you know that there’s a thing called an apostrophe fault in the name of our business?” she typed.

  Dark and Stormy’s response was quick.

  “Yes. I told you so when you filled out the paperwork. I told you again when you got the business cards printed. And I reminded you, again, when you ordered the decal for the truck. You said, and I quote, ‘Our target audience don’t give a fuck if we know grammar. They need us to know plumbing.’”

  “Oh.” Janet reflected. It did sound like something she’d say. She didn’t remember. But her memory was shit these days. She didn’t know if it was the stress of the lockdown, the ambient stress of her clients, or perhaps just age.

  Not that she was old. Thirty-six wasn’t old anymore. It was like the new twenty-one, right?

  She wondered how old Freddie was. Younger. But not too young? Twenty-five, say, but not nineteen?

  “What’s up, babelicious? Want me to come visit and watch you get drunk?” Dark and Stormy did not drink. Ever. “Too dangerous,” she had told Janet way back when, when they had first met, and Janet didn’t understand, but accepted. But she did make killer cocktails. Including Dark and Stormies. “I left all the ingredients for Dark and Stormies and Moscow Mules in your pantry last time I was over.”

  “No,” Janet typed. Sighed. “I’m just off. You know. Life.”

  Janet smiled at the string of hearts and hugs that followed. And laughed, hysterically, at the advice that ended the exchange: “Masturbate. But don’t think of the Hot Nurse—I’m using her tonight and I do not want a threesome.”

  Freddie learned fast, and by the end of day three, she knew what brass fittings and connectors were, what they looked like, and where they were stocked. And, she knew the difference between compression and soldered cut-off valves. Also, she had learned that contractors and plumbers arrived at the store early in the morning—and they knew exactly what they were looking for, and also, what to do with it. Usually, anyway. The afternoons brought the hobbyists. Or the people who hoped they could fix all their plumbing problems with Drano.

  Between customers—few of whom were wearing masks, and few of whom were practicing physical distancing, constantly forcing her to mentally measure the distance between them and take a few steps backwards without seeming rude—Freddie walked up and down the plumbing aisle, memorizing names, prices, and locations.

  It was almost fun.

  Almost.

  Still. When a customer asked her for a twin ell, and she knew precisely what it looked like and where it was, and also how much it cost—she got a little thrill.

  “Hey.” The voice, coming from behind her, was familiar. And it gave her a big thrill. And flooded her with… very complicated feelings. She felt her face turn very, very red. Even her ears, Freddie was sure, were on fire. She remembered being snotty and rude—and, oh, yes, the plumber had been rude and contemptuous first, but Freddie could have taken the higher ground.

  She hadn’t.

  She had mocked the woman who had just saved her from a massive flood for a stupid apostrophe fault.

  And now the woman was back in the store. Probably pissed—oh. Of course. She had never given her an invoice.

  Freddie felt her shoulders relax a little. The woman might be pissed, but Freddie owed her money, and she would pay her. And they would be civil to each other.

  She turned around.

  It seemed an eternity before Freddie turned around, an eternity in which Janet doubted her impulse, and also her sanity. There was, maybe, time for her to turn around herself and run in the other direction. But she didn’t and, as Freddie finally moved to face her, Janet thrust the bouquet of flowers towards her.

  “What?”

  The other woman looked stunned, and Janet felt—and, was sure, looked—foolish. She was thrusting the bouquet of red Gerbera daisies, purple hydrangeas, and pink freesias across the six-foot space that separated them, and although Janet was tall and her arms were long, the proffered flowers did not quite reach Freddie. They hovered in the pandemic-created no-touch zone between them.

  Finally, too slowly, Freddie reached for them.

  “What is this?”

  “An apology,” Janet said. And fought the impulse to close the chasm between them. “The other morning. I was rushed. And stressed. And in a bad mood. I took it out on you. I was rude. And…”

  “I’m really sorry about what I said yesterday,” Freddie said. “That apostrophe…”

  “I don’t care,” Janet interrupted. “Really. Do I look as if I give a fuck about apostrophes?”

  “It’s dangerous to judge books by their covers,” Freddie said.

  “It’s totally OK to judge a lesbian by her overalls,” Janet reassured her. And paused. This was a moment, right? This was totally a moment. This was the time to make a plan. To meet for—well, nothing was open. And also, social distance. But like, they could text. Talk on the phone. Go for one of those awkward together-but-six-feet-apart walks. There was chemistry here, Janet was sure.

/>   Deploy awkward flirting technique number four.

  “So. I know your name is Freddie. I’m Janet…”

  “Freddie!” Coming down the aisle was a very pretty man about Freddie’s age. Dressed in a red track suit, he was holding a bouquet.

  Tulips.

  An offering smaller than hers, but, for fuck’s sake, Janet thought.

  “Gio.” Freddie turned toward her ex, the bouquet of flowers from the plumber pressed against her chest. Janet, her name was Janet, and it was a name Freddie had never really liked before, but now it was the most beautiful name in the world. Her name was Janet and she had brought Freddie flowers.

  “I brought you flowers,” Gio said unceremoniously, thrusting a bunch of white tulips at her. “Here.” And he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “An apology. For yesterday.”

  Freddie accepted the second offering of flowers awkwardly. Never, she thought, had Gio given her flowers. Ever. Never, she suddenly realized, had any lover given her flowers. Until today.

  Janet had brought her flowers.

  She buried her face in the daisies, hydrangeas, and freesias of the plumber’s bouquet.

  They smelled of spring. Hope. Promise. All the things this spring hadn’t been. She raised her gaze up to Gio’s face.

  “Chris, you know, Chris from work? They said I should give you flowers. That you’d be pissed because I left you to deal with that toilet thing,” he answered her unspoken question.

  “Janet helped me deal with the toilet thing,” Freddie said, turning away from him back to the plumber.

  But the plumber was gone.

  She wasn’t going to cry—for fuck’s sake, she was thirty-six and not seventeen—but the tears came as soon as Janet was in the safety of her truck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, why was she so stupid? What did she think was going to happen? Romance in the time of corona, pick up in the plumbing aisle—she was going to show up at Lowe’s flowers in hand, sweep Freddie off her feet—and get an employee discount on the U-Haul they’d rent to move Freddie’s things to Janet’s apartment from that shitty old house that probably needed to have all of its pipes redone?