Herringbone Floor

The sink in 2B had been leaking for a month, according to Francesca, and by the time I got under it Tuesday night the cabinet floor was warped like a rollercoaster. I'm a plumber, thirty-four years old, and I can tell you most leaks are one bad compression fitting and a landlord who doesn't care. This one was both.

So I'm flat on my back under there with my flashlight between my teeth, and that's when I saw the shoes.

Black patent heels, size 10 stamped inside, sitting on her floor by the door like somebody just stepped out of them. And my fingers went cold on the wrench. Not because a woman owns heels, obviously. Because I'd bought a pair exactly like them six months ago, size 11, and they were sitting in a Target bag under my own sink behind the bleach, where they'd been ever since Randi found them.

I lay there a second longer than I needed to. Then I tightened the fitting and got out of there.

She paid me in tacos, which she made while I cleaned up, and I tried not to stare at her the whole time. Francesca is thirty-one, cooks at that French place on Delano, and laughs like she's not checking the room first to see if it's okay. She'd started to apologize for it once and I told her don't, and she looked kind of surprised, like nobody ever told her that before.

"Benji, seriously, you fixed that in twenty minutes," she said, sliding a plate at me. "I had a handyman quote me two hundred bucks."

"He was gonna charge you for the counseling session too."

She laughed. Loud. Good.

I stopped thinking about the shoes after that. I didn't.

Being divorced at thirty-three and starting over in a duplex with low water pressure has its own reality. You got a lot of nights. And a lot of nights you stand in your own kitchen at eleven p.m. holding a tube of epoxy you don't need, telling yourself you're just gonna walk over and leave it on her step, no knocking, no conversation, nothing weird.

I knocked.

She opened the door in jeans and an apron still tied, hair pushed back with a pencil through it. Smelled like a kitchen, which I guess makes sense when your kitchen is your job.

"It's eleven," she said.

"I know. I had leftover epoxy."

"Nobody has leftover epoxy, Benji. Epoxy doesn't work like that." But she stepped back and held the door, so in I went. "Sit down. I got beer and I got scallions in my teeth, pick your poison."

She was picking at her teeth with a fingernail while she got two bottles out of the fridge, completely unbothered, and I sat there thinking, yeah. Yeah, this is the one I keep coming back for.

"So how's the sink," I asked.

"Bone dry. I ran the dishwasher twice just to watch it not leak. That's sad, right? That was my Tuesday night entertainment."

"My Tuesday night was worse."

"Oh yeah? What'd you do?"

"Thought about epoxy."

She laughed and pointed the bottle at me. "You're weird. I like weird. The sous-chef I dated was weird too but in a bad way, like he'd correct your knife grip at a party. You're weird like a guy who brings epoxy at eleven."

"Thanks. I think."

We talked about nothing for a while. Her shift, my boss Herbert who is a criminal, the landlord who is a bigger criminal. Normal stuff. And the whole time I kept one eye on the kitchen floor by the door, where the heels had been, and they weren't there. Gone. Put away or tossed or whatever people do with shoes, and I don't know why that landed on me like it did. It's not like they were a message. They were shoes.

Around midnight I got up to go, and I had one foot out the door when she called my name.

"Wait. The disposal. It's doing that thing again."

"I fixed the disposal."

"I know, but it's doing the thing again. The sound."

"The sound I fixed too."

"Benji." She crossed her arms, leaning in the doorway. "Come look at it or I'm gonna lie awake listening to it grind and I'll blame you specifically."

So I went back in. Her soap was on her hands when she caught my sleeve to point me at the sink, and I could smell it right off her skin, that clean green kind, and I stayed a lot longer than any disposal deserved. The disposal was fine. I ran it. It made the normal disposal sound. We both stood there listening to it like it was a band we liked.

"Sounds fine," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "It does."

I don't know how long we stood there. Long enough that it got embarrassing, and neither of us moved first.

I went home and laid in bed staring at the ceiling, and around two in the morning I got up, got the flashlight, and opened the cabinet under my own sink. Moved the bleach. Pulled out the Target bag.

The shoes were still in there, in the box, in the tissue paper, because I'm the kind of guy who keeps the tissue paper. Size 11, black patent, bought at a Target twenty minutes from my house on a night Randi was at her sister's, brought home and hidden in under an hour, and never worn. Six months. I held the box on my lap for a while like it was gonna do something.

Then I put it back behind the bleach and went to sleep, or something near it.

* * *

I started finding reasons.

Wednesday it was a faucet on her bathroom sink that wobbled, which is a two-minute fix, but I made it twenty because she sat on the tub edge and talked to me while I worked and I liked the talking. Saturday she had a slow disposal again, same disposal, and this time I didn't even pretend. I just said, "That disposal's fine, Fran."

"I know," she said, and handed me a beer.

That's how it went for about three weeks. I fixed things that weren't broken. She fed me. We got so I had a key thing going where she'd leave the door unlocked when she knew I was coming, which I told her was a terrible habit in this town, and she said so is falling for your plumber, and then we both went quiet and pretended she'd said something else.

Here's what I noticed about her place. She didn't apologize for stuff. There was a Goodwill bag by her door for two straight weeks, clothes going out, and she never once covered it up or moved it or made a joke about the mess. She just lived there. And when she cooked, which was always, the whole duplex smelled like butter and shallots, and I'd come home to my side and my place would smell like nothing, like a place where nobody really lives.

One night, maybe three weeks in, I was on her couch with a beer and she was prepping stuff for the next day, shallots in a bowl, knife going fast, and she got to talking about this guy she dated, the sous-chef.

"He told me I talked too loud at parties. Like a correction, you know? Like I was a staff issue."

"That's a garbage thing to say."

"Yeah, well." She kept cutting. "He said it at breakfast, which I cooked for him, which is a detail I fixate on."

And I sat there with my beer sweating in my hand, thinking about a black patent pair of heels size 11 behind my own bleach, and a woman who once looked at me and said, what are you, some kind of pervert, in a voice I still hear in hardware stores sometimes.

Fran looked up from the cutting board. "Benji. You went somewhere."

"Nowhere. I'm here."

"You're a terrible liar for a guy who lies to himself for a living."

"I don't lie for a living, I plumb."

"Same thing, pipes lie all the time." She pointed the knife at the Goodwill bag by the door. "You keep looking at that bag. Every time you're over here. You think I don't notice, but I notice everything, it's my whole problem."

My mouth was dry. "It's just a bag."

"Sure it is." She went back to the shallots. Didn't push. That's the thing about her, she never pushed, she just left the door open and let you decide whether you were walking through it.

I didn't walk through it that night. I took my beer and my epoxy-stained dignity home, and I stood in my kitchen a long time with the cabinet open and the box in my hands, and I still couldn't do it. Put it back. Closed the cabinet. Stood there in the dark feeling like the biggest coward in a rust-belt city.

Three weeks of this, back and forth, the bag by her door, the box under my sink. Then one night I was under her sink again, some excuse about the P-trap, and she came and stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed, and she didn't say anything for a minute. Then she said it.

"You keep looking at that dress in my pile, Benji. The green one in the Goodwill bag. And I want to see you in it."

I stayed under that sink a while longer than the P-trap needed. She let me. When I finally came out she was back at the counter and she said, real casual, "We do staff meal Sunday nights at the brasserie. After close. You should come."

"Sunday's my day off."

"That's the point of a day off."

"I dunno, Fran. Sitting there while your whole crew stares at the guy who fixed your disposal."

"Nobody stares. Everybody stares, actually, but not at you, they're all too tired. You'd eat better than you have in six years and you'd hear me laugh, which is a privilege not a lot of people get."

"It's loud, you said."

"I've decided it's a feature."

"Can't Sunday. I got a thing."

"What thing?"

"Herbert wants to look at some boiler."

"On a Sunday."

"He's a criminal, Fran. He doesn't keep business hours."

She laughed at that, the loud one, and I liked it, which was the problem. I packed up my wrench and left, and drove home, and sat in my truck in my own driveway for about twenty minutes with the engine off.

Around midnight I texted her. You free tomorrow?

She texted back inside a minute. It took you eight hours to type five words?

I have slow fingers. Plumber hands.