It’s Sucky Story Sunday – Ray Bradbury said you couldn’t write 52 Bad Stories. Challenge Accepted! This is week 3.

The Pipe Philosopher

Walter Jennings rang the doorbell and waited for an answer. The wooden porch creaked as he shifted his toolbox from one hand to the other. He heard quick, quiet steps come to the door and it opened. A slight, middle-aged woman looked at him from baseball cap to workboot and back up again, the way a woman checks out another woman at a cocktail party. 

     “Yes?” she asked.

     “I’m the plumber. You called about the leaky commode.”

     The woman stared at his feet. “You must have the wrong house. No one here called a plumber.”

     Walter looked down at the work order to double check the address. Another woman came to the door, from the back of the house. She was looked older than the first.

     “I called the plumber. I’m tired of washing towels and throw rugs. Come in, it’s right this way.” She motioned to Walter and started towards the bathroom. He removed his ball cap and followed.

     “Martha, I can not believe you would call a plumber, today of all days!” 

     The taller woman turned back. “Mary, it needed to be fixed. We’re going to have a house full of people in three or four days. We’ll need both bathrooms to be working. I’ll have enough to worry about then, may as well fix the toilet today.” She turned and headed back down the hall to the bathroom. Mary sighed and turned into the front room. Walter looked in as he walked past. The centerpiece of the large, sunlit room was not an entertainment center, but a hospital bed with a sleeping elderly man.  A younger man and a woman sat near the bed, watching carefully as a nurse in fruit patterned surgical scrubs used an eye dropper to put liquid from a small brown bottle into the patient’s mouth. Walter recognized the brown bottle. Hospice nurses had given his wife morphine from an identical bottle during the last days of her war with ovarian cancer.

     “I can come back another day,” Walter called after Martha.

     “Nonsense. You’re here, the toilet’s broken. Let’s just take care of business, OK?” Martha said.

     Walter followed her into the bathroom. It was a small, crowded with fixtures. A puddle of water was escaping the toweled dam under the tank. Martha left, mumbling something about the kitchen if she was needed. Walter looked the tank over. It was old, at least four cracks had already been patched. The patching material was crumbling with age. He left his toolbox on the sink and walked back to the kitchen.

     Martha was at the counter, her back to the doorway. Walter could hear she was trying not to cry.

     “The tank’ll need replacing, ma’am,” he said. “I can get one that’s a close match and have it done in an hour and a half.”

     Martha turned and faced Walter. She had a chef knife in one hand and a butchered onion half in the other. Tears dripped from her cheek to the tile floor. “A close match? Couldn’t it match exactly? We have to put the house on the market next week, it should match exactly, don’t you think?”

     “Well, ma’am, it’s a old fixture. Maybe original to the house. I’d have to replace the whole commode for a perfect match.” 

     “Just replace the whole thing then.”

     “OK, White again, or some other color?”

     “White’s fine

     “Standard or elongated?”

     “Damn it, just a plain white toilet, like what’s in there. Is this too hard for you?”

     Walter inhaled. “Ma’am, the toilet’s easy. But I’m a plumber, not one of those bathroom designers. I can’t know your mind.”

     “Fix it. You people get paid by the hour, right? Hurry and fix it and leave.”

     Walter went to the front door, passing the living room again. The nurse was now sitting on a sofa, reading a thick novel. The young man and woman were still sitting close to the bed, speaking softly. In the corner was a small TV showing an “I Love Lucy” re-run. Mary was sitting on the floor, helping two small children with their play-dough creations. Walter walked out the door. The air felt cleaner out on the porch. He took a deep breath. Throughout his life, he worked with smells, from all human functions, but none of those odors prepared him for the stench of cancer, of death. Choking and heavy, it attaches itself like a leech to victim, friends, and furnishings. After Ann died, Walter had to get rid of the furniture in the room where she spent her last days. Otherwise, the dog would be on the couch howling until he was physically removed to the yard.

This old man’s house reeked of the same smell.

     An hour later, Walter returned with a new American Standard Cadet II. The young man noticed Walter lugging a box up to the door and held the door open for him. Walter thanked him, turned down his offer of help, and went back for the other box. Each time he passed the living room, Walter held his breath, trying not to get the cancer smell inside his nose. Now the smell was competing with a bad chicken casserole.

     Walter removed the broken toilet, leaving a hole on the floor where it had sat. When Walter returned from taking the old fixture outside, the two preschoolers had discovered the hole and were about to drop in a toy fish. Walter stopped them just in time.

     “Our Great grandpa said that when you flush, it goes back to the ocean,” the little boy said, “Flounder wants to go home to his mommy.”

     “Well, the problem is, the water gets treated, so that the dirty parts don’t hurt the fish in the sea. Flounder could get hurt by the treatment plant.”

     “Oh. I see.” The little boy clutched the orange rubber fish.

     “Great-Grandpa got cancer ‘cuz he smoked too many cigarettes, but don’t worry, you can’t catch it from him,” the little girl assured Walter.

     “Thanks. I’m glad you told me that,” Walter smiled and began setting the new toilet onto the prepared gasket. The children watched. Walter never could understand the fascination children had with commodes.

     “He’s probably going to die today,” the little boy said.

     “What do you think about that?” 

     “It’s good, because he won’t hurt anymore and he’ll see Jesus in Heaven. It’s bad, because Grandma won’t have a daddy anymore. She’ll be sad.”

     The young woman from the living room appeared and told the children to come have some lunch on the patio. She started to apologize for them, but Walter waved her off. He finished the job, turned the water back on and flushed ten times, searching for stray water drips. He cleaned up and packed his tools. Then he walked into the kitchen, where Martha was fussing with a crockpot. 

     “All done. I left the wet towels in the bathtub.”

     “Fine,” said Martha, “Do I have to pay for the hour you were gone to get the toilet?”

     “No ma’am. No charge today.”

     “Oh, don’t feel sorry for us. We don’t need your pity. Trust me, we can pay the bill…”

     “Why are you here?” Walter interrupted.

     “It’s my father, he’s dying, I think you figured that out.”

     “But why are you here? In the kitchen?”

     “There’ll be a ton of people here in a few days, they’ll need meals, and…”

     “You’re not from these parts, are you?”

     “Michigan. Why?”

     “Because around here, the minute the ink dries on the death certificate, the casseroles and cakes start arriving, faster than the relatives.”

     “And you know this because…”

     “That’s what happened when my wife died. But see, I was like you. I was worried about things that didn’t mean anything. I was worried about paying the bills and working double shifts. I worked weekends because I thought I was taking care of my family. But bills don’t mean anything. Money don’t mean anything. Even time don’t mean anything. Shoot, only reason there’s a clock at all is so the nurse knows when it’s time for more morphine. Being there, that’s what means something. That’s what counts. Just being there.”

     “He doesn’t know if I’m there or not.”

     “He might, might not, doesn’t matter. You’ll know you’re there. That matters. They’ll know and that means something. They’re the ones you’ll have to live with when this is all over. They won’t remember meals, they’ll remember you weren’t there. My own kids may never forgive me for that.”

     Martha looked at the tile floor, then walked back to the crockpot on the counter. Reading a recipe card, she began to measure out a teaspoon full of salt. “Thank you. Have a good day.”

 Walter shrugged his shoulders, picked up his toolbox, and headed out the door. As he paused on the porch to adjust his ball cap, he saw Martha through the window. She wandered into the living room and sank on the sofa next to the nurse.

     Walter got into his truck and picked up his cell phone to call the dispatcher.

     “Edna, this is Walter. I’m done at the Lamar house. I’m going to take an hour and have lunch at my grandson’s school over on Elm. I think it’s chicken nugget day.”