Ladder Talk

It's for the dogs. That's what I said, holding out the Tupperware of dumplings at Olaf like he was a stray I was trying to coax off a porch. He was halfway down a ladder in the chapel at the time, and the look he gave me over his shoulder was the look of a man who suspects the dumplings come with strings attached.

"It's for the dogs," I said again, which made no sense, since the dogs at Eternal Paws are all dead and have been for years. But it was Lunar New Year and I had made forty dumplings and nobody had come.

Olaf is the plumber. I'm Gloria, forty-four, hairdresser by trade, volunteer groundskeeper by weekend. We've both been doing this pet cemetery thing long enough that we know each other mostly by the sound of our trucks in the gravel. He's forty-nine, divorced, and built like someone who carries things for a living, which he does, he carries tools. He got down off the ladder and set his pipe wrench on the little altar rail, which I'm pretty sure is not what the altar rail is for.

"I was just fixing the sink," he said. "In the shed. The one that drips."

"I know. I put in the request."

"Then why the dumplings?"

"Because it's a dinner. I said in the group email, first one who shows up gets first pick. You're the only one who showed up, so congratulations, you're the whole party."

He looked at the Tupperware, then at the door, like there might be forty other volunteers hiding behind it. There weren't. It was February, cold enough that the stone markers out back had frost on the names, and the little chapel smelled like candle wax and pipe insulation. I had set up two folding chairs and the hot plate from the shed, and I had a paper tablecloth with red flowers on it that I'd bought at the dollar store, and I'll admit the whole thing looked less like a dinner and more like a very sad séance.

"Sit," I said. "You can't fix a sink on an empty stomach. That's just science."

He sat. He sat the way big men sit in small folding chairs, which is carefully, like the chair is a rumor. I plugged in the hot plate and dumped the dumplings in my good pan, the one with the chip on the handle, and things were going fine, actually fine, right up until I looked at his ladder.

The ladder had a sticker on it. You know the kind. It's some safety company's idea of a warning, except the warning is one of those optical illusions where if you stare at it, it looks like it's moving, or the dots change color, or the staircase goes up and down at the same time. I had been staring at it for a good twenty seconds while the dumplings steamed.

"What is that?" I asked.

Olaf leaned over to look. "Oh, that's an illusion. If you look at the black dots, they turn white."

I looked. They turned white. "Well, stop it!"

"It's not doing it on purpose. It's your eyes. Your brain fills in the blanks."

"So my brain is lying to me."

"Sort of, yeah. Your brain lies to you all the time. It's why plumbing is hard. You think the leak is where the water is, but the water is where the leak wants you to think it is."

That sentence made no sense and I laughed anyway, and then I said, "You're smooth, you know that? Talking all these years of plumbing at me. My brain filling in blanks. Is that what you say to all the girls?"

I said it as a joke. Mostly. He did not take it as a joke. He went a color I'd describe as emergency, and said, "I wasn't. I mean, the dots. I was talking about the dots."

"Sure you were."

"The dots," he said again, with the desperation of a man who has just realized every exit is blocked.

And here's where it got worse, because I went to move the pan and a dumpling slipped off the spatula and hit the floor, and I bent to pick it up, and I was wearing my good blouse, the blue one with the buttons that never quite agreed with each other, and it gaped. I didn't notice. He noticed. I know he noticed because when I stood back up he was bright red and he was reaching for something to hold on to and what he reached for was my bucket, the mop bucket, which went over with a crash and a splash of gray chapel-floor water all across the paper tablecloth and half the folding chair.

"Oh no," he said.

"It's fine," I said.

"I knocked over your bucket."

"It's fine. It's mop water. It's the cleanest dirt in the building."

He was apologizing, and I was apologizing for the dumpling, and we were both crouched down wiping floor with the same roll of paper towels, and that's when the water got me. It had soaked through the tablecloth and pooled right where I was kneeling, and my blouse took the worst of it. Cold February water on a cold February night, right down the front.

I stood up, peeled the blouse off without thinking, because I've spent twenty years around shampoo bowls and sinks and I have the garment survival instincts of a woman who has lost many blouses to rinse water. I draped it over the hot plate's cord stand, where it would at least be near warmth, and I stood there in my bra, which was a plain white thing with one strap that had a safety pin in it, and said, "That's the last time I trust that tablecloth."

Olaf made a sound as if a kettle were beginning to whistle.

I looked at him. He looked at the floor, the wall, the ladder, anywhere. His ears were so red they could have been lit.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I wasn't, I mean, I turned around. I'm turning around now. I apologize. Profusely."

"Olaf."

"I'll wait in the truck. I'll fix the sink for free."

"Olaf. It's funny. Look at it. There's a safety pin in my strap. I look like a craft project. Any woman who tells you that isn't funny is lying."

He turned around, slowly, the way you'd approach a dog that had already bitten you once. He looked at me for about half a second, which I counted, and then looked at the dumplings instead, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the wet chair, which put an end to the laughing.

* * *

We ate dumplings off paper plates with our coats on, because taking the blouse off had seemed bold until the alternative was freezing in a bra in an unheated chapel, and the bra lost. I put the blouse back on damp, which is its own special misery, but I didn't care by then. Olaf had two helpings and told me about his ex-wife's cat, which is buried out by the willow, spot forty-one, and I told him about the time a poodle owner asked me to give the marker a blowout, and he laughed, a real laugh, and for