The Tile Job

I took the whole first week of June off, which for me is basically a miracle. I've been a senior loan officer at the regional bank for eleven years and I can count my week-long vacations on one hand. But my sister Juliet and I bought the Sandpiper Motel out on the Oregon coast last fall, and somebody had to stand around in a hard hat looking responsible.

That somebody was me.

The place is a real 1950s time capsule. Faded pink stucco, a bathhouse out back with a shower room that hadn't been touched since the sixties, half the parking lot still gravel. It smelled like salt and parking lot sealer when I pulled in Monday morning with my coffeepot and a suitcase in the back of my Honda.

I'm forty-four, by the way. Juliet is forty-two, married to a paramedic named Dev, two kids, and she's the one with actual vision. I'm the one with the spreadsheet. Together we're renovating the Sandpiper into a boutique rental before peak season kills us.

So I'm hauling my stuff past the dumpster when I hear the wet saw running behind the bathhouse. And a guy stands up from behind a stack of backer board and I swear my coffee nearly went down the storm drain.

"Skylar Hendricks?"

"Kenny? Kenny Archer?"

He had gray coming in at his temples now. A little thicker through the shoulders. But that grin? Same grin. Same one that had gotten me into trouble twenty-three years ago in Cancún, when we were both twenty-one and idiots on spring break.

"Oh my god," he said, wiping his hand on a rag and then not offering it, like he didn't know what to do with it. "Juliet never mentioned your contractor was me."

"She absolutely did not! She just said 'some tile guy named Archer.' I didn't even connect it. Archer Tile & Stone. I thought, huh, that's a common name."

"It's not a common name."

"It is not a common name!"

We stood there laughing like two people who hadn't shared a churro in over two decades. Which we had. Shared a churro. That's a weird thing to remember about a person.

"So," he said finally. "You're the bank half of this operation."

"And you're the tile half. Small world."

"Coastal world," he said. "I do most of my work between Newport and Cannon Beach. You?"

"Portland. Bank. Same job, same apartment, same everything." I heard myself and thought, wow, sell it a little harder, Skylar.

"Well," he said, and clapped his hands together like someone wrapping up a board meeting, "I'm redoing the bathhouse floor this week. You're here to supervise?"

"I'm here to work, actually. Juliet made me promise. She said if I sat in the office all week answering emails she'd come down here herself and hide my laptop."

"Smart sister."

"Scary sister. What do you need?"

He looked at me like he was deciding whether I was serious. I was serious. Mostly. My hands were already itching to do something, anything, because standing around while a man I once slow-danced with in a wet T-shirt contest crowd laid MY bathroom floor felt insane.

"You know how to cut tile?"

"I can learn."

"That's the right answer."

So that's how I ended up in cut-off jeans and one of Dev's old flannel shirts, sitting on a milk crate next to a wet saw, learning about spacers and back-buttering and why you never, ever rush the layout. Kenny talked the whole time, easy as anything, and I kept waiting for it to get weird again. It didn't.

"Do you remember," he said around eleven, snapping a chalk line across the subfloor, "the hotel in Cancún? The one with the pool bar?"

"The one where you tried to order a 'Cancún bomb' and the bartender had no idea what that was?"

"Because you invented it! You told him it was a local specialty and he wrote it down. He wrote it down, Skylar."

"I remember him writing it down. I don't remember what was in a Cancún bomb."

"Neither do I. Rum and something. We were twenty-one, nothing was in anything, it was just rum."

I laughed so hard I dropped a spacer. And here's the part I'm not proud of: I remembered that we ate that churro at a stand by the marina. I remembered he wore a straw hat the whole trip and lost it in the ocean on the last night. I remembered his roommate's name was Doug and Doug snored. I have to fill out loan documents with borrowers and forget their names in a week, but this guy? Churro, hat, Doug. Twenty-three years of storage, all still there.

I did not mention any of that. I mentioned the churro and the hat and let Doug stay my secret.

"What happened to Doug, anyway?" I asked.

"Married Doug's sister, believe it or not. Not because of Doug. Separate disaster. Divorced now, both of them still in my life, it's very efficient."

"What about you? Married?"

"Never. Close once. You?"

"Never. Dated a landscape architect for six months a couple years back. Totally amicable. He sends me a plant every Christmas."

"A plant."

"A fern. It's very mature and healthy and I hate it a little."

He was still laughing when the tile cutter slipped.

It was my fault, sort of. I handed him a piece and said something dumb at the exact wrong second and the snap cutter caught the edge of his left index finger. Not deep, but fingers bleed like they're auditioning for a movie.

"Shoot," I was up before I even decided to stand. "Kenny, oh my gosh, that's bleeding, that's actually bleeding."

"It's fine. It's a Tuesday for me. I've got a first aid kit in the van."

"I have one in my suitcase."

"You have a first aid kit in your suitcase?"

"I'm a banker, Kenny. I plan for disasters."

He held his hand out, palm up, finger dripping, and raised an eyebrow. "Show me this legendary kit."

So there we were, on the bathhouse steps, me digging through my suitcase past a flat iron and three books I wasn't going to read, while he dripped on the gravel and said "ow, ow" in this cheerful sing-song that made me laugh even while I was panicking.

"Antiseptic wipe? Check. Gauze? Check. Does anyone even still use these little butterfly bandages?"

"My mom did," he said, and then went quiet for a second.

"Sorry?"

"No, it's just, my mom carried the exact same brand. Sorry, weird thought. Go ahead."

I took his hand in both of mine and cleaned the cut. And okay, let me be real with you for a second. Holding a grown man's hand to put on a bandage is not a romantic event. It's first aid. People do it at job sites constantly. But his hand was warm and work-rough and my thumb sat right along the edge of his palm and I was aware of every single millimeter of that contact like the skin was turned up to full volume.

"You're good at this," he said, quieter than before.

"I'm good at paperwork. This is just a finger."

"You're good at this too, though."

I taped the gauze down and smoothed the edges with my thumb, twice, which was one more time than the job required, and we both stayed quiet about it. Then I let go and sat back on my heels and he flexed the finger and said "all better" and we both kind of exhaled at the same time, which was a whole thing I chose not to examine.

"Hungry?" he asked. "There's a taco truck two miles up the highway that will change your life."

"It's ten in the morning."

"It's vacation math. Tacos count as lunch if you skip breakfast."

"I skipped breakfast."

"There you go. Tacos it is."

He drove us in his work van, which smelled like sawdust and the world's strongest pine tree air freshener, and we argued the whole ride about whether the Sandpiper should do hexagon tile in the bathhouse or stick with the square stuff.

"Hexagon," he said. "Trust me."

"I trust the budget."

"The budget loves hexagon. Hexagon is efficient. Fewer cuts, fewer fingers lost."

"Yours is barely a scratch."

"Still. Think of the fingers, Skylar."

And I sat there in the passenger seat of a tile van, sun on my arm, arguing about polygons with a man I once bought matching fake sombreros with, and I thought: this is fine. This is a fun week and then I go home to Portland and my fern. No complications. I'm too old and too practical for complications.

The taco truck was excellent. But I'll get to that.

We worked through the afternoon and straight into the evening. That was not the plan. The plan was me supervising from a lawn chair with a spreadsheet, and instead I was on my knees spreading thinset with a notched trowel like I'd been doing it my whole life.

"You're a natural," Kenny said around six.

"I'm a mess is what I am. Look at this seam."

"That seam's fine. That seam has character."

"Tiles should not have character, Kenny. Tiles should have grout lines."

He laughed at that, the same laugh from the taco truck, and I noticed I was doing something I hadn't done in years, which was working with my hands until my back ached and liking it. At seven he called it. "Floor's set. We grout tomorrow. Tonight, pizza."

"There's no pizza place out here. There's a taco truck and a gas station."

"The gas station has a pizza menu taped to the register. It's a hidden gem."

"It's a microwave in disguise."

"Skylar. I have worked job sites for twenty years. I can smell a hidden gem."

The hidden gem turned out to be a frozen pizza the gas station guy put in an actual oven for us, plus two six-packs of the cheapest beer on the shelf. We sat on the bathhouse steps with the boxes balanced on our knees and the whole parking lot going purple around us, and it was honestly one of the better meals I've had, which says something sad about my calendar in Portland.

"So tell me about Doug's sister," I said, mostly to be a brat. "The disaster."

He took a swig of beer and looked out at the dumpster. "Renee. We got married young, twenty-six. I thought that was the entire arrangement, you know? You meet somebody, you marry them, you buy a tile saw together."

"You bought a tile saw together?"

"We bought three tile saws. That was part of the problem. She wanted me home more and I was always on a job. Then her dad got sick and I was always on a job and she started saying things like 'you'd notice if I left, wouldn't you, you'd notice the house would be quiet.' And I'd say of course I'd notice. Then she left and I noticed." He shrugged. "Divorce was final five years ago. She's remarried to a guy who sells boats. He's actually fine. He's nice to her. That annoyed me for a year and then it didn't."

"That's a whole marriage in ninety seconds."

"I've had practice telling it. It's a good story at parties. Everybody's ex is a monster except mine, mine just wanted a husband who was home."

"Was she wrong to want that?"

"Nope. That's the annoying part." He turned the beer bottle in his fingers. "So now I do jobs like this, one client at a time, I set my own schedule, I drive home most nights. I'm fifty percent less successful and ninety percent happier. That's the arithmetic."

"You did the math on that?"

"I'm a contractor, not an animal."

And I keep circling back to this. He said all of it easy, no bitterness, no sales pitch, and I sat there on a cold step with gas station beer thinking, this man learned something from his mess, and I have spent eleven years at a bank learning nothing except how to leave work by 5:45. I was having feelings about a man I'd known for one day. Two days, if you count Cancún, which apparently we did now.

We talked until the beer was gone and the lot was fully dark. Then headlights swept in, and a car I did not recognize pulled up next to my Honda.

"Oh no," I said.

"Oh no what?"

"That's Juliet."

He stood up, brushed off his jeans, and put on what I can only describe as a Professional Face. Juliet got out of the driver's seat and a tall guy unfolded from the passenger side, and I did the introductions while dying a little. "Juliet, this is Kenny Archer, Archer Tile and Stone. Kenny, my sister Juliet. And that's Markus, he works at the bank with me, he's filling in as property manager on weekends."

"Markus Glenn," Markus said, shaking Kenny's hand. "So you're the tile guy. We've been paying tile guy rates for three weeks of tile guy delays."

"Markus," I said.

"No, no, I'm kidding. Mostly. That floor's been torn