The Off-Season Incident

My name's Debbie Weaver. I'm thirty-six, I teach sixth grade, and last Tuesday I fell through my own deck. Let me back up.

Sandpiper Shores in January is not the postcard. The tourists are gone. Everything's damp. The sky sits low and gray like a lid. You get one week of nice weather in February if you're lucky, and the rest is just wet cold that doesn't even deserve the word cold.

I'd lived here two years since the divorce. My ex took the good couch and left me a house with a deck that had been quietly rotting since the Bush years, whichever one you pick. Three planks were missing. The whole thing sagged toward the kumquat tree like it was thinking about jumping.

And Bev Stephens was coming.

Bev is the HOA president. Retired librarian, fifty-five, lives three doors down, been here twenty years. Every January she does her inspection walk with a clipboard. She once fined Ray next door because his mailbox was the wrong shade of white. I believe that to my core. I saw the paperwork.

So there I was on a Tuesday morning, dragging a folding chair out to the deck anyway, because the sun came out for eleven minutes and I'm not a robot. I stepped where I've stepped a hundred times. Except this time the plank gave.

Not creaked. Gave.

My right leg went through up to the knee. My ankle twisted on the way down and I sat hard on the joist, which turned out to be the only lucky part, because the joist held. Mostly. My coffee did not hold. It went everywhere, including into the gap where my leg was.

"Ow. Ow ow ow!" Very articulate. The sixth graders would've been proud.

I wrestled my leg out and sat on the steps, ankle already puffing up, staring at the hole in my deck. Through the hole I could see the dirt and one sad kumquat that had dropped and rolled under there like it was hiding too.

Then I heard the crash next door, which was actually my crash, echoing off his fence, and Chester Mullen came over the side gate with a crowbar in his hand. Not running. Trotting. Like a man answering a fire alarm he wasn't sure was real.

"Debbie? You okay? I heard a bang."

"I fell through my deck."

Chester is thirty-nine, works too much, was married at twenty-eight and divorced at thirty-five, has a daughter who visits every other weekend. He's the kind of neighbor who borrows your ladder and returns it with a new coat of paint on the handle. I liked him. In a normal way. Mostly.

"Through it?" He looked at the hole. "Through it."

"The joists are probably fine," I said.

He got down on his belly and stuck his head in the gap like a raccoon. Silence. Then, muffled: "Debbie, these joists are mush. I could chew through this one."

"Great."

"No, I mean it. This is wet rot. The whole back half is toast. One good party and everybody's in the kumquats."

He stood up, wiped his hands on his jeans, and did that thing where he stared at a problem like it owed him money. "Okay. I can fix this. I used to frame houses, before I got sensible and started doing insurance paperwork."

"Before we do anything, is there a cost? Because I can pay, I just need to know the number, and I'd rather settle that up front."

"Deck boards and screws, maybe eighty bucks. My labor is free if you feed me. Luke can probably help."

Luke Emerson. Handyman, forty-two, fixed my garbage disposal two years ago, charged me a fair price and left. Good man. Fine.

"Call him," I said. "Money's settled. Eighty bucks, dinner, done."

Chester called. Luke said he'd swing by after one with lumber from the yard in Flagler Beach. Meanwhile Chester went and got a pry bar and started ripping the worst planks off, which made a noise like a whale being interviewed.

I limped inside for ice. Sat in a kitchen chair with a bag of frozen peas on my ankle, which is the most Florida remedy there is, and watched through the window as my neighbor dismantled my deck with growing enthusiasm.

That's when Bev appeared.

She materialized at the side fence the way she always does, clipboard first, then reading glasses, then the rest of Bev. Chester had his back to her, prying a plank, swearing at it in a friendly way.

"Excuse me," Bev called. "Is that construction?"

Chester kept working. I hobbled to the door as fast as a woman with frozen peas can.

"It's gardening," I said.

Bev looked at the half-destroyed deck. Then at me. Then at the crowbar. "Gardening."

"Pruning. Aggressive pruning."

"There's a noise complaint ordinance, Deborah. Section twelve. Unauthorized construction requires a permit and prior notice to the board."

"It's not construction, it's yard work. Everybody does yard work."

"Yard work," Bev said, and wrote something down. The pen made a scratchy sound that I will hear in my dreams. "I'll note that. I do my full inspection walk Thursday. I expect this to be resolved and tidy."

And she was gone, three doors down, presumably to measure the angle of someone's trash can.

"Tidy," I said to nobody. "She wants it tidy by Thursday."

Chester had watched the whole exchange from the deck with the expression of a man at a tennis match he didn't buy tickets for. "What was that?"

"That was Bev. If she sees this deck undone Thursday, I get fined. If she sees it half-done, I get fined twice."

"So we finish it."

"We finish it."

Here's where it goes sideways, and I want you to know I had no part in the sideways. Chester decided the fastest way to prep the new boards was to strip the old stain off the frame rails, and he had a can of paint thinner that Luke had apparently left in Chester's garage back in, I don't know, the previous geological era. He opened it, set it on the deck edge, and went to work.

The can sat there. The can looked at us. The can rolled.

Straight off the edge, onto the step, lid popping on impact, a nice thin fan of paint thinner arcing across Chester's jeans and, because the universe has a sense of humor, across the cardigan I'd hung on the fence rail. The good one. The teal one. The one that took me a year to