Summer Heat and Steady Hands

The house lacked air conditioning, and the temperature made its feelings known. Danny wiped his forearm across his forehead and looked at the copper pipes running along the ceiling of the master bathroom. Ninety-eight degrees outside. Worse inside. The place was shuttered for sale, empty except for dust sheets and the two of them.

"How's that solder coming?" Cole called from the hallway.

"Coming." Danny looked at the joint. It was not coming.

Cole appeared in the doorway and leaned on the frame. Thirty years old, forearms like rope, a smile he handed out like it cost nothing. He was the boss's son and everybody knew it and somehow nobody minded, which Danny figured was its own kind of skill.

"Let me see." Cole crossed the room. The bathroom was not built for two men plus tools. He stood close, real close, one hand braced on the vanity beside Danny's hip, and looked at the pipe over Danny's shoulder. His breath moved the hair at Danny's temple.

Danny held very still. The torch was off, at least.

"You're heating it too long," Cole said. "You see the solder flow, you stop. It's not a campfire."

"Right. Yeah. I knew that."

Cole laughed. It was a good laugh, low and short. "No you didn't. But you will!" He stepped back and the space where he'd been felt strangely cool, which was insane, because the whole room was an oven.

Lou stuck his head in around noon, already half out the door. "Cole. Peterson job sprung a leak, they need me now. You finish the rough-in here?"

"It's basically done."

"It's not basically done," Lou said. "It's done or it's not."

"It's done, Dad. Go."

Lou pointed at Danny. "Listen to him. He's the one paying your check someday." Then he was gone. The diesel truck coughed twice in the driveway and faded off down the block.

And then it was quiet. Just the two of them in a dead house in Sherman Oaks with the sun beating on the shingles like it had a grudge.

Danny went back to the pipes. Or he tried to. Cole had taken over the hallway with a stud finder and a drill, and every so often Danny would catch the sound of him humming something, no tune to it, just noise he made because silence was for other people.

By two o'clock Danny had finished the joints and moved to the supply lines, and by three he was sweating through his shirt and hating everything, including the shirt. He heard Cole come down the stairs. Heard the front door open. Heard the refrigerator in the garage, the only working appliance in the place, grunt awake.

Cole came back with two bottles of beer. Green glass, sweating worse than Danny was.

"House is empty, boss is gone, and it's a hundred degrees," Cole said, holding one out. "I'm calling it an employee benefit."

Danny took it. "I'm twenty-four, you know. Legally allowed."

"I know how old you are, Danny. I signed your paperwork." Cole clinked his bottle against Danny's. "To finished rough-ins."

"To rough-ins," Danny said, and drank. The beer was warm-ish and perfect.

They ended up sitting on the floor of the living room, backs against the wall under a window that faced the backyard. There was no furniture, so the floor was the furniture. Danny had expected Cole to make calls or check invoices or do whatever a foreman's son did with a free hour. Instead Cole just drank and looked at the pool in the yard, which was green and full of leaves and nobody's problem anymore.

"You've been here four months," Cole said. "You like the city yet?"

"Parts of it."

"Which parts?"

"The parts with working air conditioning."

Cole laughed again, that same short bark. "Fair. Where'd you come from before?"

"Spokane."

"Spokane. Huh. What'd you do there?"

"Same thing. Plumbing. Worked for my uncle's outfit since I was twenty-one." Danny turned the bottle in his hands. "Then my uncle sold the business and I wanted a change anyway. So."

"Change." Cole nodded slowly. "That include the ex, or was that separate?"

Danny looked at him. "How'd you know about an ex?"

"Because you said 'anyway' like it was doing heavy lifting." Cole took a drink. "Dad mentioned you came out here on your own. No girlfriend trailing along, no roommate. Guys who move alone usually left something behind."

Danny stared at the green pool. "Four years," he said. "Ended in March."

"Ouch."

"Yeah. Well." He shrugged, and it came out wrong, too sharp. "It's fine. It's fine, mostly."

"Didn't ask if it was fine. Asked nothing, actually." Cole was quiet a second. "You don't have to talk about it."

And the weird thing was that Danny sort of wanted to. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was that Cole asked questions like he actually wanted the answer, which was not a thing Danny had gotten a lot of lately.

"She didn't want to leave Spokane," he said. "I did. That was basically the whole argument, for like a year."

"That'll do it."

"I kept thinking she'd change her mind. She kept thinking I would. Neither of us was right." He drank. "I'm not sorry I came. That's the screwed up part. You can be sad and right at the same time."

Cole looked over at him. Danny felt it, the weight of the look, and turned his head, and for a second neither of them looked away. Cole's eyes were dark and there was sweat at his hairline and his shirt was open one button more than it needed to be. The look lasted maybe two seconds. Three. Then Cole tipped his bottle up and broke it.

"Sorry," he said, like he'd been caught at something. "Spokane. God. Coldest place I ever worked was a job in Big Bear in January. I complained the entire time. You'd have laughed at me."

"I'd have laughed at you hard," Danny agreed.

"Right? Freezing my hands off on a water heater and some local guy watching like, welcome to California, princess."

Danny grinned. He realized he'd been grinning a lot in the last hour and that the last time that happened was months ago.

The light through the window had gone from white to gold. Cole checked his phone, made a face, put it away.

"We got maybe another hour of daylight," he said. "You want to knock out the laundry box now or tomorrow?"

"Now's fine!" Danny started to get up and his knee popped loud as a firecracker on the hardwood, and Cole cracked up, and Danny cracked up too, and for a second they were just two guys laughing on the floor of an empty house.

Cole got up first and put a hand out. Danny took it. Cole pulled him to his feet in one easy haul, and for a moment they were standing closer than the pull required, Cole still holding his hand a beat longer than a guy holds a hand, Danny's pulse doing something new and confusing about it.

Neither of them said anything. Cole let go first.

"Laundry room," he said, and his voice was normal again, or normal enough, and he walked off down the hall with the two empty bottles.

Danny stood there a second in the gold light with his heart going faster than a knee pop explained. Then he grabbed the pipe wrench and followed.

The laundry room was the size of a closet.

The laundry box took forty minutes. Cole held the flashlight because the room had no bulb, and Danny sweated through his shirt and cussed in two languages, one of which was plumbing.

"There. Sealed," he said, backing out of the crawlspace with gray dust on his forearms.

"You're a machine," Cole said. "I would've quit an hour ago."

"You would not."

"No. But I would've complained beautifully."

They came back out to the main room and the light was orange now, going down, and the house was still ninety-eight degrees if it was a degree. Danny peeled his shirt off and just stood there fanning himself with it. The air didn't move. Nothing moved. Somewhere outside a sprinkler ticked.

Cole looked at him. Not in a way Danny could call anything. Just looked, a second too long, then looked away and rubbed his jaw.

"So here's a thought," Cole said. "Pool."

"The green one? The one full of leaves?"

"It's green on top. Underneath it's a pool. I saw it this morning when I walked the property. There's a skimmer net in the garage and the filter's on a timer, it just needs the junk skimmed off. Twenty minutes of work."

"And then what, we swim?"

"I mean." Cole shrugged, palms up. "It's a hundred degrees in a house with no air conditioning and there's a pool sitting right there. I'm not gonna pretend it's a complicated plan."

Danny thought about it for maybe three seconds, which was mostly three seconds of thinking about getting out of his dusty shirt. "Yeah, okay. Weirdly that's the best offer I've had all week."

"That's sad, man."

"Tell me about it."

They went out to the garage. The refrigerator hummed in the corner like it was the only living thing left, which, in this house, it basically was. Cole found the skimmer net hanging on a nail and a couple of folded lawn chairs leaning against the wall. There was also a plastic bin of pool stuff, and Cole dug through it and came up with two pairs of swim trunks, tags still on.

"Huh," Danny said.

"Staging," Cole said, tossing him one. "Realtor does it. Puts trunks and a couple floaties out so the pool photographs like somebody uses it." He turned the other pair over in his hands, checked the size on the tag, and made a face. "These'll fit you. The big ones are mine."

"You're just gonna wear some rando's staged trunks."

"They're mine now. Finders keepers. It's in the plumbers' code."

"It is not in any code."

"Section nine," Cole said, already walking out the back door. "Look it up."

The yard was small and dry and quiet, a block wall around it, a lemon tree in the corner going crazy with nobody picking it. The pool was worse up close. Leaves everywhere, a film on top, a couple of bugs doing whatever bugs do when a pool dies. Danny took the net and went to work along the near edge while Cole got the hose running to top off the water level.

It was close to an hour before it looked like anything. Golden hour turned to blue hour while they worked, and Danny skimmed and Cole skimmed and at some point the water underneath stopped looking like a swamp and started looking like water. Cole turned the filter up to run hard, and it chugged and gurgled and started pulling the rest of the surface film toward the skimmer.

"Good enough," Cole said finally, standing at the edge with his hands on his hips. "It's not a resort. But it's water and it's wet and I don't care about anything else."

"You're the boss's son. You're allowed to care."

"Not about this." He pulled his shirt off over his head in one motion.

Danny had spent the whole afternoon trying not to notice the guy, and now there was nothing between noticing and not noticing. Cole was built like someone who actually worked, broad through the shoulders, heavy in the chest, a little soft at the middle in a way that looked earned rather than lazy. Hair on him. Forearms like rope. A scar on one shoulder, white and old.

"Like what you see?" Cole said it easy, grinning, already stepping out of his boots.

"Thinking about where the scar's from," Danny said, which was true, and also a dodge, and he was pretty sure they both knew it was a dodge.

"Chainsaw. Big Bear. January. That trip keeps paying dividends." Cole dropped his jeans and stepped into the staged trunks, which were black and fit him fine, and turned around with his hands out like, well? "You getting in or supervising?"

"Getting in." Danny turned around, pulled his shorts off, and stepped into the trunks Cole had tossed him. They fit. Of course they fit. He didn't think about why Cole had checked the tag, because thinking about that led somewhere.

The first step into the pool was the best thing that had happened to Danny in four months. The second step was better. By the third he was gone, down to his chin in cool water, and the sound he made was embarrassing and he didn't care.

"Oh my god," he said. "Okay. Yes. This was the right call!"

"Told you." Cole came down the steps slow, like a man getting into a bath he'd been promised all day, and sank to his shoulders and let out a long breath. "Section nine of the code is about finding pools in empty houses. It's a good section."

The filter hummed. The sky went from blue to purple. They floated around the deep end and talked about nothing, jobs they'd hated, the