“No. And I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Does Shane know?”
I shake my head vigorously. “No. No way.”
Tim looks again at the door of my house, his eyes growing wilder by the second. “Christ, he even looks like Shane.”
“I know.” I bite my lip. “He does look like him, but he’s not anything like Shane. He’s a really good kid.”
“Oh God.”
His reaction is about what I expected it to be. Tim never liked Shane, even before all the terrible things he did. I should have known he would react this way. But it’s still hard to watch. Sometimes people do exactly what you think they’re going to do, and they still manage to disappoint you.
“Look…” Tim takes a step back. “I think maybe I should go. This was… a bad idea.”
He’s not thinking anymore about how when we’re married, we’re going to build a giant two-story dog house in the backyard. Which is fine. A dog house that big wasn’t practical, anyway.
Tim is about to take off when Josh bursts out of the house. He looks slightly breathless, and his lips are covered in cookie crumbs. “Mom!” he says. “The kitchen sink is broken.”
Oh, great. This evening is just getting better and better. “Are you sure?”
Josh nods solemnly. “Yeah. When I turn the water on, it only comes out slow or really fast and I got water all over me!”
I miss my old apartment in Queens. We had a landlord and a super, and if something was broken, all I had to do was call them. I suppose I have to figure out a way to fix the sink myself.
“Tim?” I better ask him before he makes a run for it. “You don’t know a plumber I can call, do you?”
Tim looks over at the house, frowning slightly. “If you want, I can take a look.”
“Do you know how to fix a sink?”
“Maybe. I’ve gotten pretty decent at fixing things around the house.”
I’m not about to turn him down. Plumbers are expensive, and while my parents left me this house, they didn’t leave me much money after taxes took its share. “Okay, thanks.”
Tim follows me into the house. It’s weird because he’s been in this house hundreds if not thousands of times, but not for a long time, and not since the two of us have grown up. I never swapped out most of the furniture my parents had, but it’s not the same furniture from when we were kids. It looks different, but the same. Sort of like Tim himself.
“Do you have a toolkit?”
I think for a moment. “My dad kept one in the garage.”
“I’ll get it!” Josh says.
Tim and I stand there awkwardly while Josh runs to the garage to grab my father’s toolbox. Fortunately, he doesn’t take long. He comes back a minute later, lugging a black toolbox that looks like it weighs more than he does.
“All right,” Tim says. “Let’s do this.” He looks down at Josh, who is watching him with big eyes. “I don’t know if I can handle this by myself. Do you think you could help me?”
“Yeah!”
He seems even more excited about fixing the sink than he was about cookies.
_____
I spend the first five minutes watching Tim and Josh anxiously, but then I realize how boring it is to watch two people fix a sink, so I go to the living room to read. There’s a lot of loud banging and intermittent running water, and at one point, I swear I hear both of them laughing.
About an hour later, Tim comes out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his blue jeans. Josh follows a second later. “Mom, we fixed it! Mr. Reese fixed the sink!”