The Contractor

The sample boards were still on the sawhorse when I came in from court, three of them, labeled in his handwriting. Safe white. Safer white. The one that looked like nothing at all.

Sam had the radio on the windowsill, low, some afternoon show cracking through static. Plaster dust lay on the sill and on the backs of his hands. The crew was gone. He was measuring the gap where the old cabinets had been, the ones my ex had picked the year we bought the house and never let me open a catalog about.

“Counter,” he said, without looking up. “And a layout. I need both before I order.”

“The white,” I said. I always said the white.

He marked the stud and set the pencil behind his ear. “Which white.”

“The first one.”

He nodded the way he had nodded for three weeks. I stood in the doorway with my bag still on my shoulder and watched him write it down. Outside, a mower started two yards over. The kitchen smelled like cut drywall and the coffee he’d left in a paper cup on the only unbroken stretch of counter.

Week one he had asked me about the sink. I had pointed at the sample that matched the old one. Week two, the backsplash. I had touched the bold square twice, a deep green with a crackle in the glaze, and then I had picked the subway tile every house on the block already had. He had watched my hand come back from the green and had not said a word. That night I had stood in the dark kitchen and put my palm on the wall where the tile would go, and I had not known what I was apologizing for.

“Layout tomorrow,” he said now. “Island or no island. You keep saying you’ll sleep on it.”

“I will.”

“You’ve slept on it fourteen nights.”

“Then I’ll sleep on it a fifteenth.”

He looked at me then. Dust on his collar. Thirty-one, and he never spoke to me like I was a client who needed managing, and he never spoke to me like my age was a problem he was being polite about. He just waited.

“All right,” he said. “Fifteenth.”

I went upstairs and changed out of the suit. When I came back down he was gone, and the safe sample was still on top.

The next afternoon the crew was in. Two men pulling the last of the baseboards, a third running a shop vac that never quite won. I came home early because the judge had recessed, and Sam was at the sawhorse with a box I had not ordered.

He opened it when he saw me. The green tile. Four squares, wrapped in paper, the crackle catching the light off the bare bulb.

“You looked at it twice,” he said.

“I picked the other one.”

“You looked at this one like you meant it.”

The vac shut off. One of the men glanced over, then went back to the baseboard. I kept my voice down.

“Put it away.”

“Tell me you don’t want it and I will.”

“I don’t want a fight in my kitchen.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I set my bag on the floor. Dust puffed off the boards. The radio on the sill had drifted into a song I half knew, something with a guitar and no chorus yet.

“My ex hated color in a kitchen,” I said. “He said it dated. He said I’d get tired of it and he’d be the one living with it.”

“He’s not living with it.”

“I know that.”

“Do you.”

I looked at the tile. The green was not loud. It was the color of the glass in the back door when the sun hit it late. I had noticed that the second week and had not said so.

“It’s expensive,” I said.

“It’s in the budget you already approved. You approved the number. You just won’t spend it on anything you can see.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s accurate.”

One of the crew laughed at something in the hall. Sam didn’t turn. He held a square out, not pushing it into my hands, just holding it where I could take it or not.

“I want it,” I said.

The words came out smaller than I meant. I said them again, so he could hear them over the radio.

“I want the green.”

He set the square on the sawhorse, careful, the way he set levels. “Good.”

“Don’t look so pleased.”

“I’m not pleased. I’m relieved. I’ve been pricing the white like it was a decision.”

“It was a decision.”

“It was a habit.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “I like watching you decide. The real ones. You get this look, like you’re checking the door for somebody who isn’t coming.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. I picked up the tile and turned it so the crackle caught. My thumb left a print in the dust on the glaze.

“Backsplash,” I said. “Not the whole room. I’m not ready for the whole room.”

“Backsplash is a decision.” He wrote it on the board, under the whites, and drew a line through the whites. “Counter and layout still open.”

“Tomorrow.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“And I’ll say it again if I have to.”

He almost smiled. “All right, Helen.”

The crew packed out at five. I signed the daily sheet on the sawhorse, the way I had every day, client and not boss, his invoice, my house. The men said goodnight. The vac went into the van. The door shut. The radio kept on, a talk segment now, a woman describing a recipe I would never make in a room with no counters.

Sam was coiling an extension cord. He didn’t rush it.

“You can go,” I said. Then, before he could, “Or you can stay. I was going to make coffee. The machine still works. It’s the one thing he didn’t get a vote on, because it was already here.”

He looked at the cord in his hands. “Coffee.”

“If you want.”

“I want.” He set the cord on the floor, neat. “Counter and layout first, though. Ten minutes. Then coffee.”

I nodded, because nodding was easier than answering. He pulled two sample chips from his pocket and a scrap of paper with the room drawn on it, island and no island, both in pencil, both smudged.

“Quartz,” he said. “This one, or this one. And whether you want the island where the table was, or you want the wall run and the table stays.”

The light through the back door had gone flat and gold. Dust hung in it. I looked at the chips and the paper and felt the old freeze come up, the one that used to arrive whenever a catalog landed on the table and he reached for it first. My mouth went dry. My hands stayed at my sides.

“Helen.”

“I don’t know.”

“You knew the tile.”

“That was one thing.”

“This is two things. Pick one.”

I stared at the drawing until the lines blurred. The radio voice kept talking about salt. I could hear my own breath and the tick of the cooling shop vac in the hall, and I could not make a word come out that wasn’t a delay.

He didn’t fill it. He stood with the paper between us and waited, the way he had waited on the whites, except this time the waiting had a cost. The order. The week. Me.

I stepped in. Not to the paper. To him. My hand found his wrist, the one holding the samples, and I held on because the floor felt unreliable and he did not. Dust on his skin. Warm underneath.

He went still. “Helen.”

I kissed him.

He was right there, and I had been watching his mouth for days without calling it that. I put my other hand in his hair, short, gritty at the roots from the day’s work, and I kissed him like I had decided something, even if I hadn’t decided the quartz. He made a low sound and kissed me back. His free hand came up to my face, thumb along my cheek, careful and not careful. The samples bent between us. I didn’t care.

I kissed him again, surer, and he answered that one too. His mouth was warm. He tasted like the coffee from the paper cup, nothing else. I slid my hand from his hair to the side of his neck and felt him lean in, not taking it over, meeting me. His fingers found my wrist where I held him and pressed there.

The radio changed songs. A car passed on the street. I didn’t step back. I wanted the contact more than I wanted a sentence about counters, and for once I took the want before I had words for the rest of it.

He pulled back.

His hand left my face. He kept my wrist for one second more, then let that go too. His breathing was uneven. The pencil was still behind his ear. The green tile sat on the sawhorse behind him, four squares, mine, and not enough to explain this.

“I’m not a rebound,” he said.

The kitchen was quiet except for the radio. I stood with my hands empty and the layout still unpicked, and I did not have an answer yet.