The Estimate Will Be Delivered When the Estimate is Due

short fiction about marriage and home repair

Photo by Facundo Sosa on Unsplash

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Early, on a Monday morning, the contractor arrived to work on our front steps and porch. He’d been hired to replace the old cedar with better cedar. And we’d asked him to also give us an estimate on repairing our driveway. A long crack had appeared in the cement.

Shallow canyon, I called it.

Earthquake fault, my husband said.

We were also worried about our house's foundation. Everything seemed slightly atilt. There was an almost imperceptible sway. Walking through our home, we felt like we were living on a boat in a very mild storm.

The contractor had said that he didn’t do driveway and foundation work but that his brother did. So we’d asked the brother to take a look and give us an estimate. We had the money for the porch and steps—the woodwork—but we didn’t know if we could afford to repair the driveway and foundation. The cement of the thing. That's why we needed the estimate first. We had to consider our finances. We had to consider our priorities. We had to think of all the possible outcomes, large and small. Did we have the time and money necessary to get that additional work done on our home? Did we have the patience?

The house was new when we first moved in but it was falling apart after two decades of cohabitation and five years of marriage. The original builder had taken every shortcut imaginable, so we’d been learning, almost on a daily basis, that something was wrong with almost everything.

We found the contractor on the Internet—from one of those sites where you look for people to fix things. The guy we hired had 178 positive reviews and 3 negative ones. Considering the fact that angry people are far more likely to go public, it seemed to us that our contractor had to be a lightly-flawed angel. It was our personal algorithm: Go with the guy with the most positives. Not an original thought, I suppose, but it's what people do now. You didn't choose the guy you knew. You chose the guy most liked by the largest number of strangers.

“Hello again,” the contractor said when I opened the front door. "I am Ivan.”

“Yes,” I said. I remembered him from when he’d first come to inspect the stairs and porch. He had a light Russian accent. That wasn’t surprising. A fair number of Russian immigrants live in Seattle.

“This is my son, Nicolai,” he said. “And Dimitri, my nephew."

"Hey, fellows," I said and smiled. Funny how a smile is a sign of peace to other humans, but can be threatening to dogs.

"My brother come here in an hour," Ivan said. "And we work. We tear down the old and haul that away. Then lunch. Then we build the new porch and stairs."

“It’ll only take a day?” I asked.

“Yes, one day,” Ivan said. “Or maybe two. At most, three. But we work fast and good.”

"Cool,” I said. "So you need half the payment now, right?"

"Yes," Ivan said.

"Five thousand, yes?" I asked.

“Yes,” Ivan said.

Good cedar is expensive.

I wrote him a check, an archaic act in the Internet Age, I know, but I still love the feel of ink on paper. It makes the work feel like work. It makes the imaginary money feel like real money.

"Okay," Ivan said after he pocketed the check. "We begin work now. You have other path out of your house?"

"Yeah, two ways out," I said. "The stairs off the back deck. And through the garage."

“That’s good," Ivan said.

"Yes," I said. "If you need anything, I'll be right here. I took the day off work."

"Good," Ivan said again. Then he saluted me, smiled, and turned to his work. I laughed and closed the door.

As Ivan began his work on our house, I thought about how often we are required to trust strangers in order to make it through this life. I didn't know the three men who were going to tear apart our porch and stairs. And as I heard the electric tools start buzzing, I thought about the most dangerous place in the world: a public roadway. Think of how many people are killed in car accidents. Think of how many bad and impaired drivers are speeding down every road at every moment. Death machines everywhere. And we trust the people in control of those death machines.

Then I made a cup of coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and wondered if marriage was another kind of death machine. My husband had left our house earlier that morning with a full suitcase and said that he might not be coming back.

We’d gone to City Hall on the day that gay marriage became legal nationwide. Wearing the tuxedos that we'd purchased in anticipation of the Supreme Court ruling, we were Mr. Gay White Man and Mr. Gay Native American man. My husband and I don't look alike, of course. I’m pale and blue-eyed and he’s brown-skinned and black-haired. But, as slender men in matching black tuxedos, we were more symmetrical and photogenic than most other folks. Our interracial love also added a little electricity to the liberalism of the day. We’re also handsome and masculine, so we presented as conventional—even to the straight folks who were unsure about gay marriage. That was our bitter joke: If all gay men looked like us then maybe fewer straight men would want to punch us in the face. It's not true, of course, but that's why the joke is funny and that's why the joke is bitter.

So, yes, you probably saw us on the cover of our city's newspaper. And you might have seen us in the pages of Time and People and other national magazines. The photographer won a few awards for that photo. She thanked us in her acceptance speech when she won the biggest prize. And she sent us a framed copy of that photo and a shockingly large percentage of her prize money.

She wrote, If not for you...

We sent the money back and wrote, You are the artist, you are the eye...

But we did display the framed photo over our fireplace for a few years. And then we decided it was too vain, so we moved it to the hallway, and then to our bedroom, where it had leaned against a wall for years. We'd always meant to properly hang it on the wall opposite our bed.

So there that portrait sat. Its bottom edge had formed a divot in the carpet. I saw that image every day and chastised myself for my professional busyness and personal laziness. Year after year, day after day, after long hours of work, I’d arrived home to remember that I'd again forgotten to drop by the hardware store for the proper picture-hanging kit.

I could have ordered the kit from my employer.

"We should buy art shelves," my husband once suggested. "That way, we can change the art whenever we want. We can move the art around like we live in a museum."

"I'll buy art shelves then," I said.

But, of course, I never bought the art shelves. Well, that's not quite true. I bought one art shelf. To give it a try. To see if it worked. To see if I could install the thing properly. But the art shelf was still stored somewhere in the spare bedroom. The guest room. The junk room. The room of unopened boxes. The room of unaccomplished tasks and barely acknowledged regrets.

But don't get me wrong: I'm a hard worker. I toil for one of the big Internet companies. You've used our services. You can't avoid using us. You might be using our services right now—buying from some online Mom & Pop Shop that you didn't realize utilizes our commerce applications and storage farm to run their business.

My company is the oxygen and gravity of the world.

I earn 120K a year. I have a few stock options. I drive a Toyota Prius. I'm not wealthy. But I have more money than 99.9% of the other people on the planet. You know how capitalism works. It's not a secret.

My husband worked from home. He’s a sculptor. We’d built a studio in the backyard. But he hadn’t finished a piece in a long time. I knew there was such a thing as Writer's Block. I'd experienced that myself when working on presentation papers or meeting notes or creative advertising work. But I’d never once imagined a condition called Sculptor's Block. Or the even stranger condition that I referred only to myself as Partial Sculptor's Block.

My husband never stopped working with his clay. But he was only making hands. His studio was filled with dozens of clay hands. It would be rather eerie, I suppose, for a newcomer walking into his studio. But my husband didn't allow anybody into his studio. Not even me. I could only see those disembodied hands when I glanced through the windows. Okay, I did more than glance. I’d peer through the windows, study those hands, and wonder if he was ever going to finish a full sculpture again. From a distance, I wondered if any of those clay hands had been sculpted to resemble mine.

In the years before his artistic crisis, my husband had gained a regional following by creating life-sized sculptures of Native American warriors—ancient pre-Columbian bad-asses—who wielded modern-day weapons of war like machines guns and hand grenades and sniper rifles.

The critics and academics wrote and said things like the something-something-something of homoeroticism and masculine violence and the contemporary something-something about colonialism and ancient wisdom and peace and cultural appropriation and the something-something about penis and rifle and toxic masculinity and the something-something-something about redefining the concept of warrior something-something.

I’m not an academic or critic, so I accepted all of their theories as having truth and value beyond my understanding, but I could only see my husband's art as being gorgeous and powerful and fun. But does any artist ever want to be referred to as being fun? Does any Native American, or Native American artist like my husband, want to be fun? Fun is an adjective that is too close to unserious. And no artist wants to be thought of as unserious. After all, even a roller coaster architect wants to seriously scare the shit out of you.

But I don't know what my husband wanted his art to mean. I think perhaps that he didn't know, either. Or had forgotten. And maybe that's why he couldn't do anything but sculpt hands.

"Maybe you should just have a show of your hands," I said to him once. "Just fill the walls and floors with hands. That could be cool. I mean, it might say something about wanting.”

He didn't respond to me. He just walked away into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich. We never again talked about his art, and the absence of his art.

But, damn, listen to me. Here I am, a white collar tech worker, trying to understand the artist and his art. How arrogant am I? I couldn't possibly know what electricity was firing and not firing inside my husband's brain. That's a difficult thing to accept. After decades of being in love with him, I know my husband is still a stranger to me. That makes for great surprise and romance, certainly, but it also makes for confusion and loneliness.

That morning of the house repair, with his bag packed, my husband had looked me in the eye—a great feat for somebody as shy as he is—and said, "I have to go away for a while."

"Where are you going?" I asked. "How long will you be gone?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Are you leaving me for good?" I asked him.

"I don't know that, either," he said.

"Is there somebody else?" I asked. I wasn't the jealous type. And we'd both had affairs over the years. Some of those affairs had been pre-approved. Some had not. But neither of us had fallen in love with another man. Neither of us had left the other. Not until now.

"There's nobody," he said. "There's nothing. That's why I'm leaving. I need to search for something."

"Oh, great," I said. "You're leaving me for nothing and something. You’ve always been turned on by the vague."

I'd hoped to hurt his feelings with that snide remark. But he only smiled and nodded his head.

"I suppose you're right," he said. "I hope I'll find something specific.”

And then he walked out the door. And then Ivan arrived to fix our front steps and porch. And then he tore apart the old wood, packed it into the back of his truck, and drove away to dispose of it in the proper place. And then Andrei, the brother, came to inspect the driveway and foundation.

He worked inside and outside the house with an iPad, pencil and graph paper, laser level, calculator, and years of experience. After an hour, he gave me the estimates.

"Twenty-five thousand to fix the foundation," he said. "And four thousand to fix the driveway."

Unlike his brother, Andrei didn’t have any Russian accent at all. He must’ve come to the United States long before his brother did. I wondered how often that he’d asked Ivan to join him. Had he implored?

"We can't afford the foundation repair yet," I said.

"I'll just mark it down as a recommendation, then," he said. "Your house has only settled about half an inch to the northwest. You'll be okay for a while. But you're going to need to repair it in a few years."

"How many years, exactly?" I asked.

"Well, it's a matter of what you're comfortable with," he said. "My kitchen pitches about six inches. You can set a marble down on the floor beside my sink and it will roll all the way into the dining room."

Andrei smiled. He seemed comfortable with his madcap kitchen. And then I wondered why a guy who fixed houses didn't fix his own house. Or why he couldn't afford to fix his own house. Did he make enough money? Or did he have other priorities? I didn't want to invade his privacy by asking him such questions. Nobody can truly know what happens inside anybody else's home.

"Okay," I said. "How soon can you get started on the driveway?"

"We can start in three weeks," he said. "It’ll take three days to do the work."

So I gave him 50% of the estimate to put the driveway repair on his calendar. He thanked me for my business. I thanked him for his. And then he went away to inspect other people's houses.

I opened my front door and stared into the void where my stairs and porch had been. If I stepped out, I would’ve fallen fifteen feet into the dirt below. I wondered if a fifteen foot fall could kill a person. Only if a person landed on their head, I guessed. Otherwise, one could sprain an ankle, at best. Or break a leg, at worst. But I wasn't sure about the physics. I was only estimating the amount of damage one would sustain from that fall. How far would I have to physically fall in order to match the emotional damage to my soul? Is there any expert who can answer such a question? Is there a building contractor who also happens to be a priest?

I first saw my husband in St. Joseph's Catholic Church.

He was assisting with Eucharist. He was the wine guy. The person dispensing the metaphorical blood of Jesus. I don't know what they officially call that person. I've never been that detailed as a Catholic. But I noticed that my future husband was tall. His skin was brown. His hair and eyes were black.

Black as sin, I thought to myself and laughed at my Caucasian assumptions. After all, considering American history, there’s always a better chance that sin is white.

In any case, I made my way through the line, and stood in front of my future husband. He offered me the cup of wine and I whispered, "I don't drink."

And he whispered, "Just do the Sign of the Cross. And you're okay."

So I did that Eucharist mime and shuffled back to my pew. And then, after the service, I walked up to him as he talked to another man.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," he said.

That's how love begins. One person greets another person. They smile. They eventually get naked. They eventually reveal and keep secrets. They work hard and they fall in love in small and spectacular ways—and they fail in small and spectacular ways. Then they make it official and climb into the death machine of marriage. And then they careen through life—through that endless series of impossible curves and gorgeous straightaways. And then, one day, one of them either dies or one of them leaves.

The leaving can happen within minutes. Or it can happen over many years. There’s no expert who can make an accurate guess at that number.

My husband had left me. We’d lived together for twenty years before we were legally allowed to marry. We’d fought for that civil right. But, in fighting for gay marriage, I hadn’t realized that we’d also been fighting for gay divorce.

Perhaps, after all, the freedom to leave is more important than the freedom to stay.

A few weeks after all the work on our house was completed—though the foundation work would have to wait—my husband called me from somewhere on the road.

"I miss you," I said.

He said, "I’m getting accustomed to being lonesome."

I asked him if he was ever coming back.

And he said he didn't know.

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