would take a week?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” Marcus the bailiff replies.
“And what did you say to me?”
“I said, ‘Take however long they told you it’d take, double it, and then double it again.’ ”
“So four weeks,” the judge says. “I did your math and I estimated the job would, at worst, take four weeks.”
The bailiff simply chuckles in response.
“But the project didn’t take four weeks. After the contractors ordered mismatched tiles and put in the wrong-size cabinets, my wife decided she didn’t like her initial choices because they weren’t ‘Spanish enough,’ whatever that means. So she had the contractors order different items. Then she liked what she picked, so we waited for them to be installed. You remember that, Marcus?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“This whole time, I don’t have a kitchen. I’ve got men in and out of my house every day, except for the days when they flat-out don’t show up. No call, no e-mail, no texts, they just flat-out don’t come. When I’d protest, they’d apologize and then not show up the next day. Seemed like they were intent on teaching me who really was boss.”
Marcus is nodding the whole time. “I remember those days.”
“Then, just as I thought we’d seen the light at the end of the tunnel, they broke a water main and flooded my basement. My finished basement. Ms. MacNamara, do you have any idea how long they were in my house?”
“Two months?” I guess.
“Try six. Six months. I lost my kitchen and my basement TV room for the better part of six months. I had to watch the World Series on the little TV my wife keeps in her sewing room. That was the year the White Sox were in the series. Instead of seeing the action on a sixty-inch plasma, I saw it all unfold on twelve inches of screen. Every pitch, every catch, every strikeout. Twelve inches.”
“I’m really sorry,” I tell him, for lack of anything else to say.
“I don’t believe you’re dangerous, Ms. MacNamara. I don’t believe this is something you’ll do again. I’m willing to take your extenuating circumstances and let you off with a warning, this one time. But if I see you in here again, I will not be so understanding. Do I make myself clear, Ms. MacNamara?”
“Crystal clear, Your Honor, and thank you so much.” Relief washes over me.
“One more thing, Ms. MacNamara. There is the matter of the tree.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You chopped down a tree that was more than four inches in circumference. I understand the circumstances surrounding your actions, but the city of Abington Cambs strictly enforces this ordinance, so there is a fine involved.”
Then the judge addresses the rest of the court. “The defendant, Mia MacNamara, is free on her own recognizance but will make restitution to the town of Abington Cambs in the amount of fifteen hundred dollars. Case dismissed.”
He bangs his gavel and I’m free to go.
As soon as I figure out where to get fifteen hundred dollars.
But I did finish my book while in jail.
So there’s that.
Chapter Eighteen. ALONE, HOME
“For what it’s worth, Kara’s not returning my calls, either,” Tracey tells me.
It’s been a week since I accidentally missed Kara’s come-to-Jesus meeting with her parents. In between my stays at the Abington Cambs jail, I’ve frantically tried to get hold of her so I can tell her how sorry I am. I even maxed out my credit card to send her an extravagant wine-and-flowers-and-chocolate care package, but I haven’t heard a peep back.
“I was going to go down to her place a few days ago and stake her out, but, you know, prison. I feel sick that she had to face her parents alone.”
“Mia, it wasn’t like you were trying to avoid her. This kind of thing happens.” She quickly amends that statement. “Wait, no. This kind of thing happens to you, I mean. No one else gets trapped by bathtubs. Anyway, Kara finally standing up to her folks may be exactly what she needed. I bet you inadvertently did her a favor.”
“If so, I sure wish I’d hear that from her,” I reply. “I’ll just add Kara to the list of things about which I’m panicking.”
“But you finished your book. Why are you stressed?”
“Apparently you forget I live in a barn.”
“Actually I kind of did. Are you ever sorry you decided to — cough
“Lately? Every minute of every day,” I mournfully reply.“Things are not great. Our nerves are shot and we’re both overreacting to everything. Like last night, when we tried to mount a cabinet? I thought we were going to spontaneously burst into divorce.”
We’re both unbelievably sick of carryout, delivery, and hot dogs, so we decided we’d try to tackle the kitchen. First, Mac tried to do the cabinet bases himself, but the floor’s so uneven that he ran out of shims trying to get them level. So he decided we should change courses and try to work on hanging the cabinets again.
When we attempted this last week, the whole incident ended in tears because Mac didn’t know we weren’t supposed to hang them with the doors on, and they were so heavy I kept dropping them. Realizing his mistake, he thought we could do it this time, particularly if we used a ladder to help balance the load.
To mount a cabinet on the wall, a strong person needs to stand underneath while someone with good dexterity anchors the cabinet to the wall.
As it turns out, I am neither.
First, we put me underneath the cabinet, with part of the weight being supported by a ladder, but mostly by me holding it up like Atlas tried to hold up the world, while Mac dicked around with anchors and drill bits. By the time he’d finally load up his drill, my arms would get wobbly and I’d have to set the cabinet down.
Since he didn’t learn last time exactly how much I can benchpress, he decided it would be smart to bolt some of the cabinets together, so I wasn’t just trying to hold up one — in some cases I was trying to do two or three.
Once we realized I didn’t have the endurance to hold cabinets up for the twenty minutes it would take to get them anchored, we swapped jobs and I had to work the power tools. Mac got all squawky that I was “countersinking!” or “not countersinking!” and ruining the anchor holes and stuff.
In the end, we got a couple of cabinets up, but it turns out Mac measured wrong and now we have to rip them back down and start again. The whole ordeal was a nightmare, and I feel like I’m at my breaking point.
“Do you need to vent?”
“Yes and no. Remember how I’ve always had a policy of not saying anything about Mac that I wouldn’t first say to Mac?” This is one of my rules for a happy marriage. I believe every time you bring someone else into a confidence that you don’t share with your spouse, it forms a wedge between you and your beloved. Problems should either be addressed directly or, as sometimes is the case with me, shoved down into a little ball where they’re hopefully forgotten.
“Of course.”
“I’m having trouble keeping it all in and tamping it down. We’re angry all the time now. I feel like if we could just get this damn house straightened out, we could get back on track. I know that’ll happen eventually — the skirmishes in Kyrgyzstan can’t go on forever — but I worry that in the interim, we’re going to let our anger build up so much that we’ll say stuff we can’t unsay. Because we both want to avoid this, we’re avoiding each other.”
“If you change your mind and decide you want to talk, I want to listen.”
“Thanks, honey. So what about you? How’d the date go last night?”
