Love for a Deaf Rebel - Derrick King (top 100 novels .txt) 📗

class="western">“The inspector didn’t even have to go inside to see this fault! Why didn’t he do his job?”

“Good question. Where’s the attic hatch?”

We went into the bedroom. Ross took my flashlight, climbed the ladder, and disappeared into the attic. He reappeared a few minutes later.

“Frank’s vented the septic, the range hood, and bathroom into your attic! And he nailed your ceiling boards straight to the trusses! Because he didn’t use strapping, your wallboards have that gap at the top, and your ceiling is never goin’ to be flat. And he used half-inch wallboard for the ceiling, not five-eighths ceiling board. You’re stuck with it now. Get Franco to spray your ceiling with spackle. Your home will look like a Greek restaurant, but you won’t see the waves in the ceiling.”

We walked down to the basement, and Ross roared with laughter. “Where’d he get that water tank? From a trailer?” He traced the pipes with the flashlight beam. “Your pipes run through the attic! They’re gonna freeze! They’ll wreck the house if you’re not home to shut off the water. He built a time bomb.”

“I watched him do it. I didn’t know it was wrong.”

“It smells worse down here than in your attic. Dig that up,” he said, pointing to the septic pipe. I dug it up. Ross pointed at a hole in the foundation behind the drainpipe and shouted. “The bastard’s cut off your foundation drain! He’s used that drainpipe for your septic, so rainwater drains into your basement! The other foundation drainpipes flow into your septic tank, so rainwater will flush sewage into your disposal field and ruin it.”

We walked outside again. Ross pointed to the mound behind the house. He told me to dig, but I hardly had to dig to uncover the fiberglass septic tank. “Your tank is tilted twenty degrees! You need to dig it up and put it down straight and connect it to the right pipe.” He traced the flashlight beam along a line of plastic pipes scattered down the slope from the house to the garden. “Frank didn’t glue your septic pipes. Sewage is pouring down the hillside. You know what? I’d say your house isn’t fit to live in.”

“How much to make it fit to live in?”

“Ten or twenty grand. You’ll have to dig up and tear down and buy new things and put things back. You can’t reuse anything except the septic tank. I won’t do it. I don’t want to get involved. Sue the bastard. It’s a good thing you only hired Frank for half your house.”

I don’t think Pearl ever looked at me the same way again. I wrote down the defects. The bank needed another appraisal before it would make its final advance, so Frank had a few more weekends to finish whatever he might deign to finish.

The final appraisal for the bank was issued. Frank’s most expensive defects were not obvious, so the appraisal was high enough for me to draw the rest of the mortgage.

On Sunday afternoon, Frank and his son installed windowsills. At the end of the day, Frank asked for the balance of the contract price. I asked them to finish the rest of the work before they asked for the rest of the money. Frank replied that the Certificate of Occupancy was proof that the work was complete, so they would do no more work and had to be paid in full. They gathered all their tools and left.

I went to see Clifford, a lawyer, the next day. He said, “You shouldn’t have signed this. It’s with a shell company, so you can’t sue him. It doesn’t say the work must comply with building codes or that materials must be new. It doesn’t give a completion date. It doesn’t give any remedies when something goes wrong. The only deliverable is a Certificate of Occupancy, so just by getting one, you’ve accepted completion. You can’t let him come this far and then announce it’s all no good. Pay him now, and get it over with.”

Pearl and I had dinner at the Snuggler and discussed this disaster. If we gave Frank the rest of the money, we would have no money to repair his work. The more we talked, the more furious we became. We knew Clifford was right, but we ignored his advice. We drove home. I telephoned Frank and told him we expected him to finish his work. Frank said nothing.

An hour later, Frank arrived with his wife, both sons, and his baby. We sat around the table. With a smile, Frank said that his work was complete because we had moved in six weeks ago, we had received a Certificate of Occupancy, and we must have received an appraisal of the value his work added to our house. He demanded to be paid in full.

I reminded Frank that he and his wife had asked us not to move in because he was behind schedule. I asked them to walk around the house to agree on the defects before we agreed on the amount. He refused, so I reported the defects Ross had identified.

Frank’s reply to every defect was “you wanted it like that” or “you accepted that” or “the inspector approved that” or “that was your responsibility.”

Pearl wrote notes to Mrs. Schutt, who refused to look at them.

I told him a contractor estimated the cost of completion to be $10,000 to $20,000. I asked Frank if he planned to finish the work.

He said, “Are you saying you are not allowing me to finish? Are you saying I can’t come back?”

I said that we expected him to finish the work, and we were not going to pay him for unfinished work. I wrote a check for $14,000, which was the $24,000 contract price less a holdback of $10,000. Frank took the check and stood to leave. Mrs. Schutt tried to take Pearl’s notepaper, but Pearl held it. They left without another word.

That night, the sound of the water dripping from the bedroom skylight onto our plastic bed sheet kept me awake.

In the morning, I called Clifford and updated him.

“You’ve just eliminated any incentive for Frank to work. Because homeowners use quality as an excuse not to pay, the law is biased in favor of builders, and Frank knows this. He’ll lien your house and use a collection agency. He’ll stop working, but he won’t stop collecting. Stop your check!”

I rushed to the bank, but I was too late; Frank must have deposited it as soon as the bank opened. Frank had let us down through shoddy work, but I had to live with the pain of letting Pearl down through shoddy decision-making.

Until the stalemate was resolved, Pearl and I avoided touching any part of the house for which Frank was responsible—which was most of it. Meanwhile, we improved the property and the barn.

On a weekend morning, outdoors, I picked up my electric saw. The weather was getting warmer, so I didn’t wear gloves. I felt my hand tingle. I wet a fingertip and touched the saw. Electricity shot up my arm! I drove to the Building Centre to buy a tester. When I plugged it into the outlet, the red UNGROUNDED lamp glowed.

Pearl and I tested the other outlets. All were ungrounded; the wiring of the whole house was unsafe! I opened the electric panel—there was no ground wire. I searched outside for the ground rod, and I felt sick to realize that this basic safety component had never been installed and that the house had passed inspection without it. All the inspector had to do was plug a tester into any outlet, but he had done nothing. Frank had put us at risk of electrocution to save himself an hour’s work, but because he had told me to tell the inspector that I had done the work, I couldn’t report it now. The scam was perfect.

I installed a ground rod and connected it. The tester reported the outlets were safe.

“I checked our property registration today at the Land Title Office. There are three liens on our property title, from Astra Trading Company, Dick’s Building Supplies, and Frank’s son—for unpaid wages!”

“Bullshit. What next?”

“They expire after one year. We need to preserve his work for one year, so if he sues us we will still have the evidence of what he did. We will fix his work only where necessary.”

“We’re stuck! We can’t go forward and finish the house. We can’t go back and change builders. We must win!”

“Yes. We need that $10,000 from Frank to repair his work.”

“So … no kids yet,” signed Pearl with a sigh.

“A year is not long, and we both know it would be wrong to bring a baby into this mess. But we will not waste that year. We can landscape and finish the barn and fence. First, we must get the septic system reinstalled.”

“And change the locks so Frank can’t get in.”

Because I worked for a bank, I could access Frank’s credit record, which I should have done before signing his contract. I found he never paid his bills on time. Leo checked Frank’s police record for me. He had no criminal record but dozens of unpaid parking fines.

I made an appointment with Bowen’s drainage specialist and rented a pump to drain the septic tank. Once again, we lived like hillbillies, using the outhouse and showering outdoors in cold water.

The specialist reported the tank was sitting on a rock, and the rock had broken through it, so it was seeping sewage into the soil. The specialist hoisted the tank with his backhoe and washed it. I repaired the foundation drain that Frank had damaged. The specialist patched the tank, dug a new hole with his backhoe, reinterred the tank, and connected it to the correct pipe. Now we had running water again.

I noticed that the water pump was starting and stopping, indicating a leak in the plumbing. Pearl held the lamp while I crawled into the crawlspace and checked the air pressure in the water tank. It was low. Using Pearl’s scuba tank, I added air—and heard it gurgling into the pipes. The water tank Frank had supplied was broken and unrepairable. I installed a new tank and saved Frank’s for evidence.

Working as a team, it took us a month of evenings and weekends to repair the ceiling edges. We couldn’t afford to replace the walls as Ross had suggested, so we patched the ceiling edges by inserting strips of drywall in the gaps at the tops of the walls and by attaching strapping to the ceiling edges in the attic. The work was so dusty that when we pulled off our respirators and goggles, we looked like raccoons.

The ceiling repairs had to be meticulously planned and executed because, when one of us was in the attic, communication stopped. Even a dropped screw halted work. When I was below, I could flash the light to get Pearl’s attention, and Pearl could bang on a ceiling truss to get mine. But when Pearl was below, there was no way for me to get her attention, so Pearl did most of the miserable attic work.

I made a photo album of Frank’s work and took it to Dick’s Building Supplies. The manager was appalled by the photos and passed them around to his staff. He said, “This is the worst craftsmanship I’ve ever seen. I’ll remove our lien and recover our debt from Frank. And that’s the end of his discount.”

Pearl was reassigned to an earlier shift by the post office. Now I drove Pearl to the ferry, did the morning chores, and left an hour later than she did. At night, Pearl arrived home first, did the evening chores, prepared dinner, and picked me up in the truck an hour later. Our joint commutes stopped, and distance began to creep into our relationship.

We bought two tons of hay from Fernie’s farm, where Ralph had lived. It was more than we needed to feed one horse, two goats, and four sheep over the winter, but our prospects for boarding another horse looked good. Alan, Rose, Pearl, and I spent a day at hard labor loading the hay onto our blue truck, three overloaded truckloads of it, and hoisting each bale into our hayloft using a block-and-tackle.

Pearl and I drove to the General Store for groceries. Pearl browsed the notices on the bulletin board outside. “Look at this: free kittens. We’ll keep them in the barn. They’ll get milk and have friends. A barn is cat heaven.” We drove to see the litter and adopted both kittens.

When I came home on the ferry, Pearl wasn’t at the terminal to greet me. I waited until most cars had disembarked, and then I hitchhiked