case—leaving him to raise a teenage daughter mostly on his own. Which, truth be told, was a relief at the time. Was a godsend to that house.
He stood looking at the toilet, the tiles. Eileen standing just behind him in the small bathroom, her face framed in the vanity mirror.
“You know what I’m gonna find when I lift this toilet?” he said.
“A leprechaun?”
“No, a two-dollar gasket about this thick that’s not even squashed. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”
She was watching him in the mirror, the hand he raised to demonstrate thickness, and when he met her eyes he saw what was still there, if he wanted it—just a note, a reminder, just in case. She’d been the first, after Meredith moved out. Four years without a woman’s touch, including the last two years of marriage, unless you counted a woman’s fists as touching, a wife’s crazy little blows at two in the morning—your fault, always your fault that she was drunk. That she was sleeping with another man.
He’d not been looking for it, not missing it; he had his work, his business, a sixteen-year-old daughter to raise. But Eileen had Brad’s money to spend: new water heater downstairs, new kitchen sink upstairs, new fixtures in the master bath . . . until finally there was no other reason to come over but one.
You can park in the driveway, Gordon. There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. Is there?
People talk, Eileen.
So let them talk.
What he meant was: they’d talked about Meredith. They’d talked about Brad Lindeman, and now they would talk about Gordon and Eileen, the two cheated-on leftovers running into each other’s arms, for Christ’s sake.
He looked at the toilet again and said, “Shouldn’t be more than an hour, give or take,” and Eileen told him to take his time. She offered him coffee, a beer? but he thanked her no, he’d best get to it, and she smiled at him in the mirror and left him to it.
The old wax ring came up with the toilet and peeled easily from the porcelain—greasy black but otherwise not much altered from its original shape and thickness, which was one-half inch, as predicted. He replaced it with a Harvey’s No-Seep #5, walked the bowl back into place, felt the wax compressing under it, tightened down the nuts, reconnected the water line and stood watching the tank fill, then watched the water flush down.
He checked his watch. One hour, soup to nuts.
He climbed the snowy risers to the driveway and got his tools stowed away. The stars were out, bright and thick. The temperature had dropped ten, fifteen degrees.
At the front door he stomped his boots and let himself in, then stood on the small rug waiting for her to appear. She’d turned on the lamps in the living room. A light in the kitchen. The house was full of furniture, as if she was expecting a big crowd any second. She and Brad had never had any kids. There’d been a miscarriage or two, people said. Anyway it was now the house of a woman in her fifties who lived alone. Everything in its place.
He took a step and poked his head into the kitchen. “Eileen?”
A TV playing somewhere. Not downstairs, and not in the living room. The only other set he knew of was in the bedroom. He said her name again, louder. He didn’t want to cross the carpet in his boots but he would not take them off. He pawed the soles once more over the rug and crossed the living room and took the two steps up to the landing where the master bedroom was. The smell there was partly her perfume and partly some other scent that was in her skin, in her hair, that made you think of the back of a supermarket where boxes of fruit were stacked and waiting. Or maybe it was because she day-managed the supermarket that made you think that. Anyway the smell was there . . . stronger when she unzipped her dress, when she stepped out of the dress in the lamplight, years ago, and stepped into your arms.
He would not stay the night, he’d told her back then, because of his daughter. Because of what she’d gone through with her mother, and Eileen understood. But then one night when Holly had gone up to her mother’s for the weekend—Meredith sober then, supposedly, and living with some new man who was not the banker but a contractor with