People were usually embarrassed when I arrived, as if a broken heater were a personal failing. I tried to make it unembarrassing. I explained what I had found in plain language, I showed them the part if they wanted to see it, and I left the place cleaner than I found it, which is a low bar in a utility room and one I was proud to clear. A few of them offered coffee. I usually said yes, and then forgot to drink it while I wrote up the invoice. Cold coffee, it turned out, was not just a morning habit. It was a professional condition.
Chapter 4
Celeste Whitaker came to see me on a Tuesday afternoon.
I heard her car before I saw her, or rather I heard the absence of the usual sounds: no rattling muffler, no gravel spray, no radio leaking through a half-open window. Her crossover was spotless and white, and it pulled into the drive with the careful precision of someone who parks the same way every time. She got out carrying a burgundy folder, held against her chest like a badge, and walked toward the workshop in shoes that crunched on the gravel with every step.
She was in her late forties, perfectly dressed, and smiling in the way people smile when they have decided in advance that a conversation is going to go well. She had been president of the homeowners association for eight months. I knew that the way you know things in a small neighborhood: not because anyone had formally told you, but because it had come up at the mailboxes, at the hall, and in the newsletter that I did not receive as a matter of course but somehow read anyway.
She stopped a polite distance away and looked at me, then at the workshop, then back at me, as if she were sorting me into a category.
"Are you the maintenance contractor working out of here?" she asked.
"I own the place," I said.
She blinked. "In Cedar Hollow?"
"Not exactly," I said.
"We're all neighbors here, Mr. Avery," she said, and her smile did not waver. "Neighbors help each other maintain standards."
"Standards," I said.
It was not a question. It was the word, set down on the gravel between us to see what it would do. She glanced toward the back of the lot, where the tank sat behind the arborvitae, visible from several properties but not completely hidden. I had planted those trees myself, years earlier, and they had grown into a decent screen. A decent screen is not the same as an invisible one, and Celeste's eyes found the white shape between the branches without any difficulty at all.
"I can plant another row," I said.
"That won't solve the problem," she said.
"What problem?" I asked.
"Appearance," she said.
"Does it violate anything?" I asked.
"We're still reviewing that," she said.
"So there isn't a violation."
"Not yet," she said.
I nodded, because there was not much else to do with an answer like that. She held the folder a little tighter. The smile stayed where it was, practiced and pleasant, and I had the distinct feeling that she was not used to people answering her questions with shorter questions of their own.
"I'm only asking that you work with us," she said.
I looked at the tank, then at her, then at the gravel, which seemed like the safest place to look. I had not raised my voice. I had not argued. I had simply answered, and the answers had not been the ones she expected. She waited a moment longer, as if giving me room to reconsider, and then she turned back toward her spotless car, shoes crunching all the way.
She paused with her hand on the car door, and for a second I thought she might come back with one more question, one more piece of paper from the folder, one more version of the same request dressed up differently. She did not. She opened the door, set the folder on the passenger seat with a care that suggested it contained something fragile, and looked back at the house, the workshop, and the trees, as if she were taking a final inventory. Her smile was still in place. It was a good smile, practiced and even, and it gave away nothing about whether she thought the visit had gone well or badly. I suspected, from the set of her shoulders, that she thought it had gone well enough to be followed up, which is a different thing from going well.
The car started without a sound I could hear from where I stood. Gravel shifted politely under its tires. I watched it go, white and spotless against the green of the street, and I thought about how little of the conversation had actually been about the tank itself. It had been about categories: contractor or owner, member or not quite, neighbor or problem. I had answered the category questions as honestly as I knew how, and the answers had not fit the folder. That did not surprise me. Folders are made before visits, and visits have a way of complicating them.