The Watering Bet

Barney mopped the archive floor on a Tuesday. He was twenty-two and liked his job fine. Dust, quiet, nobody bothering him.

So when his upstairs neighbor Deborah asked him to water her plants on the days she roofed houses, which was most of the month, he said yes. Nothing weird about it. He watered them at his own pace.

The problem was his schedule. He watered her ferns Tuesday morning instead of evening, right when Deborah came home early because the roofing crew lost a nail gun to a rain cloud.

She caught him inside her apartment with the watering can.

"Well, well," she said. "Look who's boring and domestic."

Barney was twenty-two and she was twenty-four and she stood there grinning at him in her work boots. "I was just keeping them alive," he said. "You asked."

"I asked you to not let them die. I didn't ask you to court them." She leaned on the doorframe. "You even talk to them?"

"No!"

"Ha. Liar. Boring men always talk to plants. It's the only conversation they can win."

Barney set the can down. "I'm not boring."

"Oh, this is great. Prove it!" She pointed at her truck parked at the curb. Then her face changed. "Wait. What the hell."

The front passenger tire was flat. Dead flat. She knelt by it and swore.

"Ran over something at the site," she muttered. "And I took the spare out last month to fit lumber in the bed. Great. Fantastic."

"So call a tow," Barney said.

Deborah stood up slow. She had sawdust on her forearm and a look he didn't trust at all.

"No," she said. "Here's better. Bet. You help me fix this flat with whatever's in your apartment. No tow truck. If you pull it off, I'll admit you're not boring. If you flop, you come to the county fair Saturday and be my date at the dunk tank booth. I'm working it for the fire department fundraiser."

"That's a dumb bet."

"That's a yes-or-no bet!"

Barney thought about it for maybe four seconds. He was not boring. Probably.

"Yes," he said.

They got the tire off the truck easy enough. The nail hole was small. Barney had duct tape and a bike pump, and he had watched a video about this exact thing at lunch once.

"You're sure about this?" Deborah asked, sitting on her stoop with a beer she wasn't drinking.

"Totally sure." He wrapped the tire's sidewall in three layers of tape, which the video had said was fine for a sidewall, which the video was wrong about. Then he pumped.

The tape bubble swelled like a diagram from a medical textbook. Deborah said, "Barney."

"Almost there."

"Barney, it's making a noise."

It went off like a gunshot. Tape shrapnel stuck to his shirt and the bike pump flew into the hedges and Barney sat down hard on the pavement with his ears ringing.

Deborah laughed so hard she slid off the stoop. "Oh my god. Your face. Your FACE!"

"You saw that, right? That was the tire's fault. Not mine."

"It absolutely exploded in your face, yes." She wiped her eyes. "Okay, you flopped. Fair Saturday. You're mine."

And that's how Barney ended up carrying boxes Saturday morning. Rex, the head librarian at the archive, had a pickup and offered a ride to the fairgrounds on one condition.

"Cabinet first," Rex said. "The filing cabinet from the microfiche room. It weighs as much as a dead horse and I need it in the new office by Monday."

"Fine," Deborah said. "But we're splitting the labor three ways."

The three of them wrestled that cabinet down the archive hallway for forty minutes. Rex steered, Barney pushed, Deborah did most of the actual lifting and made sure everyone knew it. Rex was twenty-eight and had the satisfied face of a man who had just conned two people into free moving labor.

"There," Rex said at last. "Now you owe me nothing and I owe you a ride. Perfect economy."

The fair was loud and smelled like fryer oil. Deborah won a stuffed giraffe at the ring-toss on her third set of five, because of course she did. She was good at everything and annoying about it.

"Here," she said, shoving the giraffe at Barney. "For the tire victim. Condolences to your ears."

"I still say the video was misleading."

"The video was wrong and you were gullible. Beautiful combination."

She steered him toward the dunk tank. The fire department had set it up in the grass by the midway, big green tank, a cage seat over the water. Sign-up sheet on a clipboard.

Deborah signed her own name.

"Wait," Barney said. "You're going IN the tank?"

"I'm the entertainment. I signed up weeks ago." She was already kicking off her boots. "You're the challenger. Five balls for five bucks. Sink me and I'll say the words."

"What words?"

"That you, Barney, are not boring. Out loud. To witnesses."

"And if I miss?"

"Then you carry the giraffe all day and buy me a funnel cake." She grinned and climbed the ladder. "Either way I win, honestly."

She settled onto the seat over the water in her shorts and a tank top, feet dangling. People started gathering. A couple kids pointed. Deborah waved like a beauty queen.

"Five bucks," the fire guy said.

Barney paid. He threw once, wild left. Threw again, short. The third ball clipped the edge of the target and did nothing.

"You're embarrassing us both," Deborah called down. "Put some shoulder into it, Rex tells me you've got arms."

"I load boxes of microfiche. It's not the same."

Fourth ball. Off the top of the target. The crowd made a sympathetic noise.

Barney breathed out. He thought about the tape explosion. About her laughing so hard she fell off her own stoop. About being called boring at his own doorway.

He threw the fifth one flat and hard.

The target dropped. The seat dropped. Deborah went straight into the water with a splash that got the front row wet, and the crowd cheered, and she came up sputtering and pushing wet hair off her face.

"OH," she said. "Okay. Wow. That was rude."

"Say the words," Barney said.