I got ready for my date with Mike
with Erica sitting on my closet island watching me. “You should really wear red lipstick with
that dress,” she advised me.
I wrinkled my nose. “You know I hate red lipstick,” I
complained.
“You hate all lipstick,” she pointed
out. “Just put some on. If you hate it, take it off. Easy!”
So I put some on. And I hated it
and promptly took it off while Erica rolled her eyes and sighed
dramatically.
Erica left shortly before 7. Mike had insisted on picking me up, even
though I had warned him I wasn’t interested in anything remotely serious. He opened my car door, opened the restaurant
door, and even pulled my chair out for me.
Unused to this, I felt a little awkward but appreciated the
gesture.
Once we got settled, I realized he
knew a lot more about me than I did about him.
I asked him a few basic questions, and the conversation quickly got
rolling. As it turned out, Mike actually
wasn’t boring at all. I could see how he
could come off that way, compared to Kelly and her husband, Darrin, who were
both on the boisterous side. But Mike
was smart, witty, and had a great dry sense of humor that I loved. His random one-liners had tears rolling down
my cheeks more than once during the meal.
I’m pretty sure our server thought we were insane, but I didn’t care at
all.
After dinner, we moved to the
restaurant’s bar area and sat for awhile longer, talking for what felt like
maybe an hour, but was probably more.
Finally, Mike said, “I should probably be a proper gentleman and get you
home.”
“I guess, if being a gentleman is
important to you,” I replied with a shrug and a raised eyebrow. He laughed and dropped some cash on the bar
for our drinks, then held out a hand to help me off the barstool.
When we got back to my house, I
invited him inside. “I’d really love see
the place with furniture in it,” he said, smirking at me, “but I have an open
house in the morning and if I don’t go home now I’m going to be really sorry. In fact, I probably already will be really
sorry.” He leaned forward and gently but
deliberately pressed his lips to my cheek.
“I will take you up on that offer next time though, if it still stands.”
“That’s awfully presumptuous of
you,” I replied. “You assume that there
will be a next time.”
“No,” he corrected me. “I hope
there will be a next time.”
I grinned. “I’d like there to be a next time.”
Reluctantly, we said goodnight and
I headed inside. I went straight up to
my room and washed my face, brushed my teeth, and changed into my pajamas. Then I remembered I had a load of laundry in
the washer that needed to go in the dryer before I had to re-wash it.
I went down into the basement to
switch it. I opened the door to the
utility room and immediately stepped in a puddle. “Goddamn it!” I yelped, flipping on the
lights. I looked down and saw a
half-inch of standing water covering most of the utility room floor. My first assumption was the washer, but it
seemed to be coming from the water heater.
“Oh shit,” I groaned. “Oh shit,
oh shit, oh shit.” I stood there
helplessly for almost a minute before I turned off the light, stepped out of
the room, and shut the door firmly. I
ran upstairs, pulling off my wet sock as I went, and grabbed my phone. Without thinking of the time, I called my
parents.
The phone rang 5 times, and then
their voicemail picked up. I hung up and
dialed again. This time, on the third
ring, my dad answered, sounding sleepy and worried. “Jenna?
Jenna, what’s wrong?”
“My water heater is leaking,” I
said, suddenly feeling a little silly.
My dad was silent for several
seconds, then I heard muffled talking.
“Jesus Christ, Jenna, we thought something was wrong. Do you know what time it is?”
“No, I don’t,” I admitted
ruefully. I pulled my phone away from my
head and saw it was almost 1am. “Oh my
god, I am so sorry,” I told them. “I
just saw the water and panicked. I’m so
sorry, go back to bed.”
I heard my dad take a deep breath,
then he said, “How bad is it?”
“There’s about a half-inch of water
covering most of the utility room floor.”
“Is your water heater gas or
electric?”
“I…” I paused. I had no idea. This was a thing I should know. “I don’t know.”
“Okay, well if it’s gas, it should
have an on/off switch or lever or something on the actual heater
somewhere. You need to turn that
off. If it’s electric, you need to flip
the breaker for it to turn off the power to it.”
I ran back downstairs and tugged
off my other sock before stepping into the puddle. “I don’t see a switch on it,” I
reported.
“Open your breaker box,” my dad
instructed. I did, and of course nothing
was labeled. I told him this. “You’ll have to try them until you find the
one for the heater.”
“How will I know?”
“Jenna, this is really hard when
I’m not there and have never seen your set up.
Is there someone there that can help you? Or can you look up one of those YouTuber
videos or something?”
“I don’t know,” I said
hopelessly. I was near tears. My dad tried to help me troubleshoot for a
few more minutes, but we both became increasingly frustrated by my fumbling
around and his inability to see the problem.
Meanwhile, the water kept coming.
Finally, dejected, I accepted his good luck wish and hung up. Then I called the only person I knew who
would be awake at this hour.
“Jenna?” I had never been so
relieved to hear Kevin’s voice. At
least, not in the last several months.
It meant not only was he awake, but he also wasn’t at work.
“Hi,” I started. “I’m sorry to call so late, but my water
heater is leaking pretty badly and my dad couldn’t help me over the phone, and
I have no idea what to do. And I didn’t
know who else to call.”
I heard him sigh heavily, and then
he said, “Give me the address.” I did,
and for the first time since I’d moved out, he knew where I lived. “I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” he assured me
before we hung up.
Of course, 20 minutes passed, then
30. Then 45. Finally, nearly an hour after we’d hung up,
there was a knock at the door. He came
in without apology for his lateness, but I wasn’t complaining. It was 2 in the morning and he was here to
help me. “Jenna, this is where you
live?” he asked. “This is…”
“It’s fine,” I snapped back. “I didn’t ask you to come here to judge my
house and my neighborhood. I asked you
to come help me. So please, help first
and lecture later.”
“Okay,” he said, holding up his
hands in surrender. “Where’s this water
heater?”
I led him down into the basement
and opened the utility room door. I
flipped the light on and he surveyed the mess.
“Well, at least your floor is concrete,” he muttered. He stepped carefully into the room and then
asked the same question my dad had. “Is
this gas or electric?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted, "but I think it's electric."
He turned and looked me, and sighed
again. “Maybe you should just go
upstairs. I’ll call you if I need you.” I was more than happy to comply, and I went
upstairs. I stayed there through his
swearing, through the kitchen lights briefly shutting off and then going back
on, and through a huge crash that concerned me greatly. But if there was one thing I’d learned in the
10 years I’d spent with him, it was that all those things meant it was far
better for me to stay put unless directed otherwise.
30 minutes later, he came
upstairs. “You’re going to need a new
water heater,” he informed me. “I’ve got
the power to it off and the water shut off.
That will be all your water, so you might want to try to get someone
here tomorrow if you can. Also,” he
continued, fixing me with the condescending look he wore so well, “you should
take some time to figure out your breaker switches and label them.”
“Okay,” I said, despondent.
“You need to learn some basic
maintenance and make a collection of numbers to call if something like this
happens again. I also saw that your water
softener is almost empty, and I didn’t see any salt for it.”
“Salt?” I asked, completely
confused. I clearly wasn’t cut out for
home ownership.
“Oh, Jenna,” he muttered. “What were you thinking, buying a house?” Good question.
“Thanks for coming over,” I said,
hoping he’d get the hint and get out of here.
“You’re welcome. But I can’t do this for you every time
something happens. And you know, this
isn’t a very good neighborhood. You
should think about getting a security system, or something.”
Pushed to my breaking point, my
mouth was open because I could stop myself, and I muttered, “What do you care
about my safety?”
His eyes narrowed and he rubbed his
hand over his short hair. “Believe it or
not, Jenna, I care about you a great deal.
I know I’ve been pretty shitty at showing it, but if something happened
to you because of where you live…and you live here because of what I did--”
“You’d blame yourself?” I snapped,
incredulous. “This is about you, isn’t
it? It has nothing to do with my safety,
and everything to do with how bad you’d feel about how the choices you made indirectly
caused something bad to happen to me.”
There was venom in my voice as I spat the words out, no longer concerned
about being polite.
He laughed bitterly. “I see very little has changed in the last
couple months. Goodnight, Jenna.” He walked towards the door, pretending—as
always—that he was right and I was wrong.
That he was the adult and I was the child. That he was the kind and benevolent helper,
and I was an ungrateful brat. In that
moment, I hated him more than I ever had.