Just Like Dostoyevsky - Barry Rachin (early readers .txt) 📗

can’t do it,” she sobbed. “The water hit me full force in the eye. I may need a doctor.”
“If you could dial my telephone number, you can shut the water. Right is tight. Left is loose.”
“Right is tight. Left is -”
“Counterclockwise. Just turn the water off then go check the pipe. I’ll stay on the line.”
Crying, gagging, stumbling and tripping over her soggy nylons, she groped her way into the basement and fumbled with the shut off valve. “Right is tight, right is tight, right is ...” The last quarter turn was when she heard the flow choke and gradually shut down. Total silence. The water was off.
In the kitchen, a lake mirrored the fixtures on the ceiling but the deluge was over. “I shut the water,” Sylvia spoke more evenly now. “Except for the lake in my kitchen, everything’s under control.”
“What’s the matter with your eye?” More than a hint of concern crept into his voice.
Sylvia blinked several times and gazed about the room. “My eye’s okay.”
“I’m leaving now,” Danny said and hung up the phone.
While she was changing into dry clothes, Becky came home. “What happened?”
“Pipe broke. Danny O’Rourke’s coming over.”
“How are we going to get all that water up?”
“Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

Twenty minutes later, Danny O’Rourke arrived with plumbing tools and a 10-gallon wet-vac. He vacuumed up the water, then checked under the sink. “Nothing wrong with the shut-off valve,” he said, lugging the wet-vac back out to the truck. “Copper fitting gave way, that’s all.”
She followed him into the street. “I knew enough to shut the main water supply,” Sylvia blustered. “When the water hit me in the face, I got momentarily, disoriented.” She suddenly grabbed his wrist with both her hands. “That much I did know.”
“Yes, these things happen.” Danny located a propane tank. “Have Becky open the outside faucets to drain the line.”
Why drain the line? Wasn’t it sufficient to have the water shut down and pipes dry? It was easier to learn the Cyrillic alphabet than deal with these domestic calamities. “Yes, of course,” she said and immediately felt silly.
Back in the soggy kitchen, Danny lit the gas torch and fanned the flame over the pipe. When it glowed bright orange, he clamped a vise grip on the upper stem and pulled the joint apart. Running a sausage-shaped, metal brush back and forth inside the coupling, he cleaned the copper tubing with cloth-backed, emery paper.
“What’s that for?” Sylvia asked. He was brushing a clear paste inside the joint and on the polished outer surface of the pipe.
“Flux,” he replied without bothering to look up. The metal glistened with the wet paste. “It keeps the metal from oxidizing and draws the solder into the joint for a water-tight seal.” He relit the torch, adjusted the flame to a compact, blue wedge and placed it against the metal. A minute passed. Touching a strand of solder to the metal, the silver wire dissolved in a moist blur disappearing into the faucet coupling. When the excess bubbled up over the edge, Danny pulled the strand away, flicking the torch off. “All done. Good as new.”


“My husband works for a printing firm,” Marina, the interpreter, said. They were walking in the garden of the Monastery of Saint Peter the Great. “The other day a man came into the office and requested a quote on 50,000 copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” She took a draft from an unfiltered cigarette and blew the air out forcefully through her mouth. “My husband says, ‘I don’t print anti-Semitic shit!’, and the man holds up a thick wad of rubles and says, ‘I pay cash for the job.’”
Sylvia pulled her collar up tight around her throat. April in Moscow felt more like March back home. “And?”
Marina grimaced. “My husband says, ‘Go to hell!’. The man closes his brief case and says, ‘Better yet, I’ll go down the street to your competitor.’”


Becky reentered the kitchen and squatted on her haunches next to the sink. She was dressed in a tank top, leather sandals and cut-off jeans. “After what just happened, “ Sylvia mused, “I wouldn’t care if she were naked from the waist up.” She went down into the basement and turned the main water supply back on. The joint held. Danny collected his tools and took them out to the truck.
“Ask him out.” Becky put her nose in her mother’s face. “If you don’t I will.”
“Danny O’Rourke’s a perfectly nice man - a saint, maybe - but he will never be your step-father.”
“Intellectual snob! Hypocrite!”
Sylvia kissed her daughter on the tip of the nose, deftly stepped around her and went out to the curb. “How much do I owe you?”
“Thirty should do it.”
“A plumber would charge twice as much.”
He was leaning into the cab of the truck, one hand on the steering column. “I’m a mason, not a licensed plumber.” He swung up onto the seat and began rummaging in the glove compartment. Dropping back down to the ground, he handed Sylvia a wrinkled picture postcard. “Glendalough, in the Wicklow Mountains.”
Sylvia glanced at the card. The ruins of several churches with crumbling steeples lay nestled in a flowery, tree-shrouded valley; a wide lake loomed in the background. “There aren’t any homes visible in the picture.”
“They’re scattered throughout the countryside. There’s no central village to speak of.” He pushed the shaggy cap back on his head. “When you look at this, perhaps you’ll understand why I’m not so clever with words.”
Sylvia handed him back the card and stared at the parched, late-summer lawn. “Cleverness with words isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” An anonymous woodpecker in one of the Scotch pines that bordered the property was hammering away at the porous wood. The rhythmic clatter petered out then, after a short lull, the woodpecker resumed his frenetic labor. “My trip to Russia last year was a nightmare.”
“But I thought -”
“I know what I said. It was crap.”

Fifteen minutes later, Becky glanced out the bay window. Her mother had moved away from the pickup truck and was standing near the mended wall, yakking away nonstop. Danny was leaning against a slim hazel tree, his hands plunged in his pockets, eyes bent to earth.
Becky went upstairs, took a shower and washed her hair. An hour later she went to the window. Her mother had edged a few steps closer to the mason who had removed his hat and was inspecting the brim. “Strange!” Becky muttered.
When the mason finally drove off, Sylvia wandered back indoors. “Mr. O'Rourke will be joining us for supper Friday night.” Her voice sounded strangely high-pitched, affected.
“A date!” Becky grinned idiotically.
“Not a date, per se,” Sylvia hedged. “Just an invite to dinner. Don’t you dare read anything more into it than that!”
“No, of course not,” Becky said in a voice equally counterfeit.

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Publication Date: 06-13-2010

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