Sweat Equity

You can tell a lot about a man's life by what he's hosing down on a Tuesday. Me, it was the men's room at Fairview Park, floor to ceiling, because some genius had decided the toilets were decorative. I'm Josiah Phelps, sixty-one years old, supervisor of park maintenance, and my love life at that point was a cactus in a closet. Doesn't bloom, doesn't die, just sits there while you water it out of guilt.

The dry spell was going on about three years by then, which I don't talk about, out of respect for myself. I was married to Adriana Carrington from the time I was fifty-five until fifty-eight, and here's the funny part. It didn't fail. It just sort of cooled into something easier. She'd say, "Josiah, you're my favorite person," and I'd say, "You too, Adriana," and we both knew that was the problem. Favorite person is what you call a friend you're legally stuck to. We split it amicable as a parking lot. She went back to her design firm, I went back to my park, and neither of us cried about it, which somehow made it worse.

So there I was, hosing a bathroom, thinking about how long it had been since anybody looked at me like a man instead of a maintenance schedule. I don't remember exactly what I was thinking, something dumb like maybe I should water that cactus. That's when my phone rang in my hip pocket and I had to shake the hose water off my hand to answer it.

"Phelps."

"Josiah? It's Delia in the district office. Good news, kinda. The rooftop greenhouse got funded after all."

That woke me up. That greenhouse had been on the wish list since before the pandemic, sitting up there on the maintenance building like a glass hat nobody wore.

"About time," I said. "Who's running it?"

There was a pause, the kind a person does when they're enjoying themselves. "Carrington Landscape Design. Your ex-wife, Josiah. She starts tomorrow."

I stood there dripping on a floor I'd just cleaned and said something intelligent like, "Well. Huh."

Wednesday came hot. July in this city is like being licked by a dog, wet and relentless, and the asphalt parking lot was shimmering like a mirage. I climbed the fire escape to the roof at seven, which is a rusted ladder bolted on by somebody in the seventies who clearly hated future generations, and I got to work hauling debris out of the greenhouse before she showed. Broken vents, pigeon droppings in drifts, an irrigation system that had died sometime during a previous administration. I was wrestling a bucket of gutter sludge out the door when I heard boots on the metal behind me.

Design boots. They were white with a heel, which is a lunatic choice for a construction site, but on her it worked. Adriana was fifty-eight and looked better than I did at forty, hair pinned up, sundress under a work jacket, sunglasses pushed up on her head.

"Josiah Phelps," she said, and smiled with her whole face. "You got old."

"You got expensive," I said. "Those boots are gonna break an ankle up here."

"They'll be fine."

They were not fine. That's when the bucket happened. I shifted it to wave at her, the handle slipped, and three gallons of gray gutter sludge did a slow, beautiful arc and landed on those boots and the bottom six inches of her sundress. The pigeons up in the vents actually laughed, I swear one of them did.

"Oh my God," she said. "Oh my God, Josiah!"

"I'll get the hose," I said, already moving.

"You will not get the hose, that thing hasn't run since Nixon, it'll come apart and take somebody's eye out." She was stomping in a circle, flapping the hem of her dress, and I was caught between apologizing and admiring her legs, which is a bad place to be caught. "Three years apart and you're still dumping things on me."

"In my defense, that was an accident."

"In your defense, nothing. You married me and dumped the whole house on me, this is just smaller."

So we bickered. Ten solid minutes, I checked the clock in the maintenance shed when I went for paper towels and a bucket of clean water. She sat on the workbench with her feet in my lap while I sponged the boots off, which was probably an accident too, or probably wasn't, and we argued about whether she'd charged the district a fair rate, and whether I still kept coffee in the shed for guests, and whether pigeons could be evicted humanely. It was the most fun I'd had with my clothes on in a decade, and I was aware of that fact the whole time, which made my hands less steady than they should've been around her ankles.

That's when the clipboard cleared the top of the fire escape.

Cain Johansson, city inspector, forty-five years of pure grievance in a short-sleeve dress shirt. Cain's had it out for me since I reported his brother for lifting copper out of the maintenance sheds, which was six years ago, and he's inspected my park nine times since, always finding something, once citing us for a bench he claimed was "nonstandard." He hauled himself onto the roof, looked at the sludge, the boots, the workbench, and my hands, and got a smile like a fishhook.

"Interesting operation you've got up here, Phelps. And this is the consultant?" He flipped a page. "Ms. Carrington. I wasn't aware the district hired outside firms for this."

"We did," Adriana said, standing and smoothing her dress, and I'll be damned if her voice didn't go full professional, crisp as a new dollar. "The greenhouse retrofit is funded through the conservancy grant. Mr. Phelps is providing site access and structural assessment."

"Right," Cain said, drawing the word out. "Assessment."

So we performed. God, did we perform. He walked the perimeter with his clipboard and we trailed him like a documentary crew, and I fed him load paths and square footage while Adriana talked irrigation zones and grants, and the whole time my eyes kept sliding to her. Her dress was still damp at the hem and stuck to one calf. Her shirt had gone translucent under the jacket where the sweat came through, and I could see the shadow of a bra strap, and every time she glanced at me her mouth did this little twitch like we were sharing a joke Cain couldn't hear. She looked at my shirt too. I was soaked through, work shirt plastered to my chest, and I caught her looking twice, three times, and she didn't pretend she wasn't. That's a thing about Adriana. She never pretended.

"He's going to cite us for something," I muttered while Cain measured a gutter.

"Then give him something boring to cite," she muttered back. "Act normal."

Normal. Sure. I was sixty-one years old and my heart was doing a polka, or close enough, don't quote me on the rhythm.

Cain left around noon with one violation, clogged scupper drains, which was real and boring and I almost thanked him. And then it was just the two of us and a dead greenhouse and about six hours of daylight left.

We started on the irrigation hose, the old main line, which had fused into a nest of itself somewhere under a bench planter. That meant lying on the hot concrete, both of us, reaching into the dark under there, passing loops of stiffened hose back and forth. She was on her side, arm deep, swearing softly in that way she had, and I was hauling a kinked section free when it suddenly released and I pitched forward and my hand landed square on her thigh. High on the thigh. Bare, warm, sun-heated skin, because that dress had ridden up while she worked.

I froze. She didn't pull away.

Neither of us said anything for what felt like a full summer. My hand sat there on her leg like it had paid rent. The pigeons cooed up in the vents. Somewhere below, a lawn mower droned. She turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder, sunglasses down now, and there was nothing surprised in her face. There was something decided in it.

"Josiah," she said.

"Yeah."

"You could move your hand."

"I know," I said, and didn't.

The air got thick as syrup. I could hear my own breathing. Her thigh was firm under my palm and her skin had that heat you only get from lying in the sun, and my brain was running the numbers, three years married, three years apart, one dead cactus, and none of the numbers added up to moving.

That's when the fire escape rattled like a junk cart.

"Mr. P? You up here?" Chrissie Willows, our summer intern, thirty-two, fresh out of the community college program, climbing up a full hour early with two gas station coffees and the energy of