Home: Part 19

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

March 1974

 
The first Saturday of spring. Kathy was gone for the day with her sister Holly, and I had just repaired a leaky faucet on the kitchen sink. The faucet had dripped for weeks, water hitting the porcelain just loudly enough to be audible when the apartment was quiet. I was sitting on the sofa admiring my work and remembering Shannon, the woman I had almost married, and how her father had been a plumber. He was short, burly. His hands and fingers were so thick that I often wondered how he managed to use them at all in his trade.

Shannon's hands were different: thin and delicate almost to the point that when we first met I was afraid to touch them though, later, kneading the muscles in my neck they were confident and strong. A dancer, she walked with a grace that had been defined by years of movement and exercise. Sometimes, from a distance, I would watch walk across a room and covet how her legs moved with what seemed to be so little effort.

Her father, Howard, never seemed to trust me in the half-decade Shannon and I were together. Though gruff with nearly everyone but his wife and daughter, he seemed to know that I was only temporary and not worth his investment. "You're not good with tools," he said once as I once helped him install a sink and toilet in the small house he rented to Shannon and me. It wasn't necessarily meant to be an insult, just a statement of apparent fact.

Shannon had just started teaching in the same elementary school that she had attended, her first classroom the same one she had been in as a girl. "It feels so much like home," she told me after her first day. 

I stared at the faucet I had just repaired and though that Howard might appreciate that I had developed enough to where I could use wrenches and pliers fairly confidently.