The Plumber and the Boss

I bought the Snowbird Inn at thirty-eight, a year before my divorce finished eating itself, and I have been apologizing to it ever since. That's how it feels, anyway. Like the building and I are in a long argument about who wasted whose money.

Cheryl, forty-two now, lodge owner, former marketing executive, current woman who knows what a P-trap is because she's had to explain it to three different men who should have known. That's the résumé. The ski instructor thing happened when I was thirty-nine and it ended fine, so at least one relationship in this town didn't leave me with a bill.

The lodge is a converted Victorian up at the top of Boreas Pass, and Boreas Pass is one street, two bars, and a hardware store that closes when the owner feels like it. The lodge has charm, the listing said. What the lodge has is pipes. Pipes that were installed by somebody in eighteen ninety-something and have hated me personally ever since.

And then there's Gabe.

Gabe Delgado, forty-four, plumber, drives a van with GABE'S PLUMBING AND HEATING stenciled on the side in letters so confident they should be illegal. I hired him because everyone in town told me he was the only one worth hiring, which turned out to be true, which annoyed me even more.

This is what you need to know about us. We fight. Not screaming fights, nothing you could put on a poster. Just a low grinding friction, every visit, every invoice, every sentence. He does good work. His work is genuinely excellent and I hate saying that because then he wins the sentence. His attitude is the problem. He does not like being told anything. I do not like not telling people things. I ran marketing departments. Telling people things was the whole job.

So of course I micromanage him, and of course he bristles, and we've been doing this dance for two years like a couple of thirty-dollar dancing lessons nobody asked for.

The divorce, in case you're wondering, is three years in the rearview and mostly harmless now. Jamal lives in Denver with a woman named Beth who does yoga retreats. I get a cheerful text every Christmas. Fine. All fine. The lodge is mine, the debt is mine, the boiler is mine, and the boiler and I are not speaking.

* * *

Tuesday morning, the guest wing toilet on the second floor backed up like it was auditioning for a nature documentary. I called Gabe's cell at eight.

"Delgado."

"It's Cheryl, Snowbird Inn. Guest wing toilet's backed up, and before you ask, yes, I tried the plunger, and no, I don't want to hear about the plunger."

"Good morning to you too," he said, and I could hear him already not caring. "I can be there at ten."

"Can you be there at nine?" I said.

"Ten," he said, in that flat way he has, and hung up. He is the only man in Colorado who hangs up on me, which is either why I keep calling him or why I shouldn't.

He showed up at nine-forty with a toolbox and no apology, wearing that gray fleece with the sleeves shoved up, and I watched him walk in past the front desk and thought, not for the first time, that the man has no business having forearms like that in a town with a population of six hundred. He's Black, dark-skinned, close-shaved, built like he was designed for carrying boilers up stairs. I noticed that the first day he came out to quote me and I've resented noticing ever since, because I already didn't like him and finding him attractive felt like a personal failing. Like discovering the scam artist who robbed you had a great jawline.

We're a white woman and a Black man, if you're keeping score at home, and the town has kept score out loud. Right now he was marching past me toward the stairs.

"Which room?"

"End of the hall. Six. And Gabe, be careful, the floor in there is original."

"The floor's fine. It's the toilet that's sick."

"I'm just saying, watch the floor."

"I've watched the floor twice a year for two years, Cheryl. I know the floor."

He went up. I followed, because of course I did, standing in the doorway of room six while he knelt on the tile and opened his toolbox like a surgeon who hated his patient. The tile in that bathroom is white, old hex tile, and it does something for him visually that I found deeply irritating. Dark hands on white tile. I resented the picture it made. I resented that my brain took the picture at all.

"So," I said, arms crossed because arms crossed makes me look like management, "this is the second plumbing call this month."

"Third."

"The drain in the kitchen doesn't count, that was different."

"It was plumbing and you called me, so it counts." He pulled the closet auger out and fed it into the bowl. "You've been using those flushable wipes again. Front desk admitted it last time."

"They said they'd stop!"

"They always say they'll stop!" He worked the auger, crank after crank, not even breathing hard. "You want fewer calls from me, you get rid of the wipes. It's not complicated."

"I'm not paying you to lecture me about wipes."

"Then you're not paying me, because that accounts for the entire visit." He glanced up at me and there was the smallest crack of a smile, gone in half a second. "Wipes. All the wipes. Burn them if you have to."

"The last job you did here leaked, you know. The laundry room pipe. We had a bucket under it for a week."

"That's not what happened and you know it. I fixed the joint. Your handyman, Ray, tightened the union too far afterwards and cracked it. I came back and fixed that too, for free."

"You charged me a trip fee."

"Half a trip fee."

"It said trip fee on the invoice!"

"It said half, in parentheses, at the bottom. You don't read my invoices, you just glare at them."

I glared at the current invoice situation, meaning at him, and he went back to cranking the auger with this maddening patience, like the toilet and I were both children and only one of us was worth the crank. The pipe groaned, the water level dropped with a gurgle, and he flushed it twice and watched it run like a man with no doubts left about anything.

"There," he said, standing, wiping his hands on a rag. "Tell the front desk: wipes go in a can. I'll see you when the boiler dies."

"The boiler is not dying."

"The boiler is seventy years old, Cheryl."

"It's a Victorian boiler. It's period appropriate."

He laughed. Actually laughed, one short bark, and hauled his toolbox up off the tile. "Period appropriate. Sure. Call me when it goes. It'll go in January, they always go in January."

"It'll hold."

"It won't. And when it doesn't, I'll be honest with you, I'm booked solid till March. So maybe don't call me at eight in the morning acting like the toilet is my fault."

"It is partially your fault, your last inspection report said the guest wing line was fine."

"The guest wing line is fine. The toilet is a toilet. Toilets clog. That's their whole deal." He paused in the doorway, and for a second we just looked at each other, and something in the air did a thing I didn't have a category for. Then he shook his head like a horse shaking off flies and said, "Invoice is in the mail. Wipes, Cheryl."

"Wipes," I said, and he went down the stairs, and I stood there in room six resenting the tile, the toilet, the auger, and the fact that I watched him go.

The boiler died sixteen days later. In January. Obviously.

It died on a Thursday, at 6:40 in the evening, right in the middle of dinner service, because boilers have a sense of theater. I was in the kitchen arguing with Collin about the risotto when the ceiling over the prep station hiccuped, bulged, and opened up like a bad present.

Water came down through the light fixture. Not a trickle. A performance.

"Collin, turn off the..." I don't even know what I yelled. Something about valves. Collin yelled back something about valves being a myth. The dining room guests were doing that thing guests do, which is standing up in unison and filming with their phones, and I did the only responsible thing a lodge owner can do, which was walk calmly into the pantry and call Gabe Delgado at a volume that could not legally be described as calm.

"Cheryl. It's nine degrees out, what."

"The kitchen is flooding. Water through the ceiling, the floor's an inch deep and rising, and I have eleven guests eating halibut."

"Okay. Is there water coming out anywhere else?"

"I don't know, I've been standing here watching my kitchen drown."

"Shut off the main. Do you know where the main is?"

"Of course I know where the main is, I own the building."

"Great. Then shut it off and I don't need to be there for another..."

"Gabe, please."

There was a pause, and I heard him sigh the sigh of a man putting on his boots. "Fifteen minutes. Kill the main first. And don't touch the crawlspace pipe, it's probably the supply line and it'll be hot."

"The crawlspace?"

"Under the kitchen. The Victorian's original supply runs through there. Don't touch it."

He made it in twelve minutes, which I did not thank him for, because thanking him would have meant admitting I'd panicked. He came through the back door in a coat I could hear before I saw it, zipper and snow, and he didn't even take his gloves off, just looked at the kitchen, looked at me, and said, "Where'd you shut the main?"

"Laundry room."

"So the water on the floor is what was already loose. Good. Show me the crawlspace hatch."

"It's behind the prep station."

"Of course it is." He got down on his knees and pulled the hatch, and the space under there was maybe three feet of clearance between dirt and floor joists, lit by one bare bulb that Ray had installed sometime during the previous administration of the building, whenever that was. Gabe looked at it, looked at his own shoulders, and went in anyway, on his back, dragging his toolbox behind him like a sled.

I stood at the hatch like an idiot. Then I got down on my knees too, because apparently I was going to do this.

"You're coming in?" His voice came back muffled, bounced off dirt.

"You're in my crawlspace."

"It's your crawlspace, that's true. Hand me the light?"

I brought the trouble light down after him, which meant wedging myself into a gap between joists in a silk blouse, on my stomach, arms forward, which is a posture I want noted was not in my job description when I left Denver. The pipe above us was weeping from a joint, a slow ugly drip that had been going long enough to soak a whole corner of the ceiling.

"There it is," he said. "Sweated joint. Old solder, old pipe. It let go."

"Can you fix it?"

"Tonight, yes. But this is the third one this winter. This line's got maybe a year before the whole run goes soft." He was working as he talked, sleeves pushed up, and in the crawlspace there was nowhere to be that wasn't close to him. Our faces were maybe eight inches apart when he turned to hand me the old fitting. "Hold that. No, like that, don't drop it in the dirt."

"I wasn't going to drop it."

"You were absolutely going to drop it." He cut out the bad section and sweated in a new piece, and I held the light and watched flame and flux and his hands, and I will admit under no circumstances that I stopped