Handyman

1 Tuesday, April 21 "Just tell me one thing." Ethelda was bent over the plans she was drafting for Dr. Jason Solomon Golding's office remodel, her pencil poised in the air. She looked right at home at the secretary's desk, though Jake knew better than to tease her about it. "What on God's green earth," she asked him, "is a psychologist going to do with a hot tub this size, and smack in the middle of his office?" Jake shrugged. "Not our job to ask," he said, and went into the doctor's inner office to finish measuring. "Maybe he likes the open concept," he called over his shoulder. "Uh-hunh," Ethelda answered back. Jake thought it was strange, too. The doctor's present arrangement of L-shaped waiting room, reception desk, and small half bath with walled-off inner office seemed perfectly adequate to him, though Ethelda, with her designer's eye, said the architect could have done more to maximize the view. But who knew what went on in these guys' heads? These celebrity therapist types were odd ducks, all of them, and from what Bob Metzger had told him, this guy was the king of nutcases--always coming up with some new way to bilk people out of their cash--his latest offering being some sort of birth therapy where you got into a hot tub and pretended you were being born again. Jake shook his head, incredulous at the idea of people paying money for such a thing. He went back to work measuring the room that would not exist in a week or so when the doctor's plan was implemented, and opted not to share what little he knew about the hot tub with Ethelda. She would have an opinion, and the ensuing discussion would probably last all the way back to Petaluma, and the truth was, he didn't really care what Dr. Golding was going to do with his hot tub. In fact, he didn't even really want this job, and was tempted to put the bid high enough to ensure they wouldn't get it. Petaluma was a long way from San Francisco, a good thirty minutes if he drove and forty-five or so if Ethelda took the wheel. He'd done the estimate only because Bob Metzger was a good customer and had asked him to, but there were plenty of jobs closer to home. He thought about the people he knew who got on the bus at four a.m. to be in San Francisco by eight for the start of the business day, and concluded again that they were crazy. Jake was even sorry they'd agreed to do the estimate, regardless of the fact that the money was better in the city than it would be for the same job anywhere north of Marin County. Golding was already proving to be a pain, leaving phone messages and sending faxes, trying to get them to hurry things along. Well, he'd give the guy his estimate. Today. Five more minutes and they'd be on their way, Jake told himself. And then, with any luck, he and Ethelda would never see this place again. His Stanley steel measuring tape snapped back from its twenty-five-foot extension, giving that satisfying little schwaap that he loved, and he bent over to note the last measurement on his chart, actually a page in a frayed three-and-a-half-by-five-inch spiral notebook he carried in his pocket. A door opened and closed. He looked up, thinking it was Ethelda, but it was not Ethelda he saw coming through the doorway of Golding's office. It was someone else--a small woman, a girl Jake would have called her if he hadn't learned not to--and he could tell with just one glance that she had been crying hard, and recently. Her face was mottled--little red splotches all the way down her neck to her chest. Her nose was bright red, and she stabbed at it savagely with a crumpled-up tissue. He remembered the little cloudbursts his sister, Shelley, would treat them to from time to time when they were growing up, but this was nothing like those. Even he, a failure where everything about women was concerned, knew this woman had been doing a different kind of crying. HNichols, Linda is the author of 'Handyman' with ISBN 9780440235422 and ISBN 0440235421.