Melanie Harvey

If he’d known what was about to go down, Henry Clark wouldn’t have bothered with the garbage disposal that morning. Or maybe he would have.

Mrs. Cotton stood in the kitchen, watching him. “Can you fix it?”

Henry had been raised with his older brother by a single mom in apartment complexes that were ninety-nine percent black and a hundred percent poor. When something broke, you called the landlord. He ignored you, and you learned to live with it.

“Mmm,” Henry said. He shifted, caught an acidic whiff from a bottle under the sink, and something light and fuzzy spun through his brain.

He heard her footsteps leaving the kitchen and immediately climbed out of the cabinet to flip the switch over the sink. Not even a hum. It was his first disposal, and he’d checked the circuit breaker, which exhausted his ideas of how to fix it.

By the time he returned to the cabinet, her footsteps sounded on the tile again, but this time, the light cast a shadow near the bottom of the disposal. He twisted his neck, saw a hole, and in the hole, a button. A red button—often a warning sign. No label on it, that would be too lucky, but Henry was desperate, so he pushed it.

Nothing happened.

“I hate to bother you,” she said.

“It’s no problem, Ma’am,” he said, even though the disposal was becoming a huge problem.

“I have something else to show you, too.”

Henry crawled out, seeing as all he could do under the sink was get high from the furniture polish. Because it was there, he flipped the switch again. The disposal ground to life.

“You did it!”

Henry often wondered if her enthusiasm at his success meant she was as surprised as he was. He shut off the disposal and stretched his thirty-five year old back. “That other thing?”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Cotton said, a thin, blue-veined hand pressed to her paper-white cheek. “It wasn’t so bad earlier, but I thought I’d better check on it while you were here.”

She held herself perfectly straight as she led the way down the short hallway. When he first met her, he’d thought she was in her sixties. He’d been short by a decade. Power walking, she’d told him, and lots of vegetables—did Henry eat vegetables?

Henry did, and over the past four years found himself doing the heavy lifting in a backyard garden to produce them. He’d never taken free food for granted.

“It only started dripping a week ago,” she said. “Not much, you see, so I didn’t want to trouble you, but then just this morning it started…well, you should look.”

Mrs. Cotton turned into a yellow bathroom filled with fluffy rugs and towels. Henry glanced at the sink because he thought he heard water running, but the tap was off. She pulled back the seashell print shower curtain and stepped aside. Water streamed from the hot and cold water faucets, from the knob that switched the water from the shower to the tub spout, and from the showerhead itself.

“Oh.” Henry knelt and twisted the faucets. The torrent didn’t slow. “That is a problem.”

The sort of problem Henry would call the landlord about.

Unfortunately, he was the landlord.

“Can you fix it?”

“Oh. Sure. I’m gonna need to, um …” Henry examined the tiled wall. He’d never changed shower faucets before, but now that he considered them, they seemed pretty well sealed up in there. And sadly lacking red buttons to push. “Yeah … um …”

Mrs. Cotton glanced at the hammer and screwdriver in his hand. “I guess you’ll need more tools,” she said.

“That’s right,” Henry agreed quickly. “I will definitely need more tools.”

* * *

Henry crossed the front porch he shared with Mrs. Cotton and pushed open his own front door, praying the Home Improvement Encyclopedia would rescue him just one more time.

“Oh, good. You’re home.”

Henry dealt with Neil Daughtry’s cheerful greeting the same way he dealt with Neil in general: he ignored him and crossed to the bookshelf.

Neil perched on the arm of the faded couch in the living room. It was Henry’s living room, despite Neil’s six month residence. Sort of like the Iraq war, he’d let Neil sleep there a couple nights, without a firm exit strategy in place.

“I found something,” Neil said.

“The meaning of life?”

“Better.”

Henry flipped the heavy book open to “Showers,” which explained how to build a shower, but failed to explain how to fix one once it was built. He turned to “Faucets,” momentarily energized by the heading Repairing a Faucet, but the few short paragraphs neglected to tell him how to access the faucet to repair it. It wasn’t technically false advertising, but he felt irritated nonetheless.

Neil remained where he was, his right knee jiggling, probably impatient for Henry to ask what was better than the meaning of life. Henry didn’t ask. If Neil said he found something, he meant he found something that wasn’t nailed down. Too tightly.

When Henry closed the book, Neil said, “You’re not gonna believe it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Henry replied. “I’m fairly gullible.”

Neil’s brow wrinkled as he accessed his vocabulary. Henry returned the worthless book to the shelf and reached for another in his ever-growing collection.

“It’s platinum,” Neil said.

“Mmm hmm.”

“I’m serious, Henry. Real platinum jewelry, just sitting there.”

“And nobody owns it?”

Neil shrugged. “Well, somebody owns it.”

“Not you, though.”

Neil shrugged again. “Not yet.”

“Mmm hmm.” Henry flipped the pages and found what he was looking for.

“They’re at the art museum downtown. Some famous jewelry artist, his stuff, just sitting out there in the open. Only one guy really watching them, too.”

“So why not pick up a few and walk out with them?”

“Exactly.”

“Well,” Henry said. “I think you should go for it.”

“Really?”

“Like you said, it’s just sitting there.”

“Some kind of display. Where people can try it on, pretend they’re rap stars.”

“Seems like they’re asking for it then.”

Neil smacked his palm down on the coffee table. “Exactly!”

The first time Henry met Neil, he’d thought that, with any luck, Neil might be a not-too-bigoted white guy. He’d learned in hours that Neil was a not-too-bright white guy, and annoying to boot. Mostly because of this word—Exactly!— that he used to agree with things Henry didn’t mean the least bit seriously.

“Well, good luck with that then,” Henry said, and returned to his studying. From what this book’s more helpful diagram showed, a shower would have an access panel in the room behind it. He stuck an old envelope in the book to hold his place and shooed Neil out of the way to check into this. Behind Henry’s bathroom was his second bedroom, which he used for storage. All the space in the house was full of apartments, two up, and two down.

“So I talked to Freddy about it,” Neil said.

Henry sucked in a breath. “Freddy Cabrese?”

Neil nodded.

“You know Freddy Cabrese?”

Neil shrugged. “Sure.”

Freddy was, among many other things, a fence who Henry hadn’t seen in more than ten years. And he wasn’t going to see him, either. Henry exhaled a long breath before he moved some boxes so he could stick his head inside the closet. Not that he expected his closet to match the book’s diagram.

“Freddy said he would be interested,” Neil said. “Definitely interested.”

But there really was a piece of plywood nailed to the closet wall. The plywood came off easily with the claw hammer, and he sat back on his heels to examine the pipes and his diagram. Looked pretty much the same, so he was fairly confident he wouldn’t embarrass himself looking for some non-existent hole in Mrs. Cotton’s closet.

The cot Neil had moved in along with his body gave a loud squeak when Neil sat down. He’d made some noise about how Henry could at least move the lawnmower out of here, but Henry wasn’t trying to make him comfortable. If Neil wanted more space, it was available for rent all over the city.

“Freddy thinks it’s definitely a two—but probably three—person job.”

Henry checked the diagram again. There would be the mandatory trip to Home Depot, but he’d known that was coming. “You should talk to Bass.”

“Bass?” Neil asked. “You mean Mickey Basswood?”

“Or you could fish a real one out of the Olentangy River.”

Neil fell silent long enough for Henry to start a list on the back of the envelope.

“Why Mickey Basswood?” Neil finally asked.

“Because of the shoplifting.”

“The shop … oh! That’s what it really is, just shoplifting. Exactly!”

Henry tightened his grip on his pen. “Well, he’s never been caught.”

“Not even once?”

Henry made a mental note not to yield to the temptation to buy the cheapest faucets. “He lifted a fully dressed mannequin from the old downtown Lazarus on a bet, walked it right onto the number two bus on High Street.”

“Nice. Well, that’s three then.”

Neil wasn’t the sharpest tool in the spare room, but Henry was sure he could count to two. “Come again?”

“Me and Bass and you.”

“Excuse me?”

Neil looked at him blankly. Henry looked back.

Finally, Neil said, “I thought you were interested.”

Henry shook his head.

“What? You sounded interested.”

“Me interested would sound more like, ‘Man, Neil that sounds tight. Count me in!’”

Neil thought for a moment, probably trying to remember if Henry had said anything like that. “But we been discussing the job all this time!”

Henry reached for the hammer to nail back the plywood panel on his closet. “No, you been discussing the job,” he said over the pounding. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to fix leaky shower faucets.”

He stood up, worked out the kink in his knee that no amount of gym time seemed to help, stowed the hammer in the toolbox, and headed out of the bedroom.

“Well, that’s a problem then,” Neil said.

“Nah, you’ll find somebody else.”

“But I kinda told Freddy …”

Henry’s gut tightened. “You told Freddy what?”

Neil was wiry and strong, but he was still a mousy guy with a darting look, like he might scurry into a corner to dodge any trouble. Especially right now.

“What did you tell Freddy?”

“He kinda wants to see you today.”

He shouldn’t have closed that hammer up in the toolbox. “Say again?”

Neil shrank back on the cot. “I thought you were interested.”

Henry spun around, with no destination in mind except away from the spare room, Neil, and the claw end of his hammer. Freddy Cabrese wanted to see him.

He slammed the plumbing book down on the kitchen table. Freddy Cabrese wanted to see him. Unless Freddy had changed significantly in the last ten years —and Henry didn’t believe most people ever changed much — he could not call Freddy and say sorry, man, but I’m too busy repairing a shower. You refused Freddy, you did it in person.

If only he could recall hearing of anyone who’d ever refused Freddy at all.

Henry gritted his teeth. “No way in hell I’m driving my car all the way out there!”

“No, man, no. We’ll take mine.”

“Not with the gas at these prices.”

“I said I’ll drive, okay? And I’ll take you to the store after to get your pipes.”

“Faucets.”

“Yeah, right, faucets. He said one o’clock, it’s twelve-thirty now.”

* * *

Henry sank down in the cracked upholstery on Neil’s front seat, stared out the window, and waited for Neil to start complaining about driving. He lasted until they hit the freeway.

“You know, it’s not like you don’t drive out to the airport every day. Reynoldsburg’s not much farther than that.”

“First of all, my job is at the airport. So I get paid to go out there.”

“You gonna get paid for this. Much better, too. I mean, we do this, you can put a Jacuzzi in your own bathroom instead of faucets in Miss Daisy’s. And don’t tell me black people don’t buy Jacuzzis. You know Jay-Z has a Jacuzzi.”

Henry didn’t know any such thing. Next Neil would say was there was probably a Jacuzzi in the White House, and Henry was probably supposed to know that, too.

As if he could possibly care. What he cared about was finding a way to get out of this mess the dimwit behind the steering wheel had dragged him into.

“I think this could be a good thing for you, Henry.”

“Well, if you think so.” Henry flipped the visor down. The sun was making a rare April appearance.

“Yeah, I do. If you don’t mind my saying, I’m thinking maybe your job at the car rental place isn’t impressing the ladies too much.”

“I don’t have a job at the car rental place,” Henry said. “I’m the assistant manager of the car rental place. And I do mind you saying.”

Neil held up his hands in surrender. The car listed into the next lane.

“This is an improvement. Getting killed on the way.”

Neil grabbed the wheel. “I’m just saying, when a girl asks what you do, is ‘assistant manager’ getting the response you looking for?”

Henry stared out the window at the freeway traffic, trying and failing to keep from looking at the courthouse on the southern edge of the downtown skyline. Today started out a good day. For three months, Wednesdays were always good. He’d seen plenty of impulse joiners come and go at the gym, but this girl had stuck. She hadn’t asked what he did, because he’d never said a word to her, not even to find out her name.

Now he could say he might be planning a job that could send him back to prison.

“Neil, you know what the worst day of my life was?”

Neil grinned. “Today?”

“Today’s the second worst. The first was when the DRC made you my damn cellmate.”