The Water Tank Waltz

The power went out at 7:40 on a Thursday evening in August. I know because I was checking the score on my phone when the whole cul-de-sac went dark, and then my phone died about ten minutes later because I never charge it. I'm Reggie, fifty-four years old, sales rep for industrial supplies, and there I sat on my own porch in the dark like a man waiting for a bus that stopped running in the nineties.

The heat was the kind that sits on you. Upstate New Robinson gets a week or two of it every summer and every summer I act surprised. My shirt was stuck to my back. The fridge would start warming around midnight and everything in the freezer would go soft, and I sat there doing that math instead of doing anything about it, because I don't own a generator. I keep saying I'll buy one. Three years I've been saying it.

Three years. That number meant something else too, though I wasn't ready to connect them yet. Three years since I'd been with anybody. My last relationship ended when I was fifty-one, amicable as a handshake, Wilma moved to Arizona and I helped her pack the truck and it was finished. Since then, nothing. A few dates that went nowhere. A lot of nights on this same porch, though usually with the porch light on.

I had a warm beer in my hand because the fridge was losing the fight and I figured I'd better drink the evidence. Sweat ran down behind my ears. Somewhere down the street the Delgados were playing a battery radio, some oldies station. A dog barked twice and quit. The neighborhood consisted of one dog and a radio.

I thought about the dry spell the way you think about a leaky faucet. Not all the time, just when the house got quiet. Three years is a long time. I wasn't desperate about it, or I told myself I wasn't. I just missed it. Missed having somebody to tell the dumb parts of my day to. Mostly I told them to my cat, and my cat is a liar and a freeloader and does not appreciate sales anecdotes.

Then I heard the clang.

It came from the row of attached garages at the end of the court, the ones with the shared water tank on top. Metal on metal, then a pause, then another clang, like somebody dragging something heavy across a roof. I set the beer down and walked over, because what else was I doing.

The ladder is bolted to the back wall of the garages. It's rusted and it wobbles and the HOA has been meaning to deal with it since before I moved in. I went up it anyway, slow, testing each rung, and when my head came level with the roofline I saw her.

Stella Greer. Thirty-seven, lives three doors down from me, tailor, works out of her front room mostly. She'd hauled a rolled-up rug up there, a big Turkish thing, and she was unrolling it next to the water tank with a needle stuck in her collar like a rose.

"Reggie," she called. "Come up. I need hands."

"Is the roof load rated for two of us?" I asked.

"The roof doesn't care what you weigh. Come up before I lose the light."

The moon was doing some work but not much. I climbed over the edge and stood there catching my breath like an old man, which, fine. She was sitting cross-legged with the rug half rolled out in front of her, and she'd brought up a flat cushion and a thermos and a little sewing kit that opened like a tackle box.

"Reading material?" I said, nodding at the rug.

"It's a Persian knockoff with a moth hole the size of a quarter in the fringe. I figured if I'm going to sweat to death up here I might as well get something done. Grab that end. Walk it out slow."

I grabbed the end and walked it out. And here is where I ruined the corner. There's a bolt sticking up near the tank base, a lag bolt with a washer on it, and my toolbox, which I'd had in my hand from tinkering with the porch light and carried up without thinking. The strap caught the corner of the rug and I took a step and heard the tear before I felt anything.

"Oh no," Stella said. "Oh, you beautiful idiot!"

"It's my fault. I'll fix it. I'm handy, I have proven it just now by breaking it."

She laughed at that, a real one, and patted the rug next to her. I sat down. Up close she smelled like thread and sunscreen and something warm I couldn't name. She had the torn corner in her lap in about four seconds, examining it with her thumbs.

"Three-thread selvage. You did me a favor, this corner was garbage anyway. The whole binding needs redoing." She looked over at me. "Make yourself useful and hold the other end while I redo it."

"I can hold things," I said. "I also have whiskey," and I produced the flask from my cargo shorts, because a man who doesn't own a generator does own a flask, that's just how it balances out.

We passed it back and forth. Warm whiskey is a crime but it was that kind of night. She took small sips and worked the needle and I watched her hands, which are quick and stained blue at the knuckle from marking chalk.

"That blazer you wore to the block party," she said. "The polyester one. I could fix that too, but only if I'm allowed to burn it after."

"It's a good blazer."

"It's a fire hazard with buttons. It has the drape of a garbage bag. I've thought about it more than once."

"It got me through two trade shows," I said. "And one client tried to pay me in fishing lures once, because of that blazer. He decided I looked like someone who fishes. I don't fish. I sat in his kitchen for forty minutes holding a tackle box I didn't want and the deal didn't close."

"That's terrible."

"He gave me the lures anyway. I still have them. I use the box for screws."

She laughed again and threaded a new length of binding. "My last boyfriend left because I kept borrowing his measuring tape. That's the honest reason. Not a fight, not another woman. The tape."

"You're joking."

"I am not. I'd take it and forget to give it back, and he'd come over and find his tape in my kit and he took it personally. Said he couldn't compete with a tool." She shrugged. "His loss. The tape stays with me."

I told her about a date from years ago, the one where I knocked a napkin into the candle at an Italian place and patted it out with my bare hand and the whole table of twelve next to us applauded. She laughed so hard she had to set the needle down.

"So we're both damaged goods," she said.

"Used but functional. Like the ladder on this building."

She reached over and refilled my sip from the flask, her fingers brushing mine, and neither of us moved away, and the night went quiet the way it does right before something changes. She looked at the rug, then at me.

"Reggie. It's a hundred degrees up here and the whole neighborhood is dark and you're the only person on this street who doesn't gossip. Ask me what I'm thinking."

I had a guess. My mouth went dry anyway.

I didn't ask. What I did was open my mouth and then close it again, which