She looked down at her hands.
“I am seventy-four years old,” she said. “My husband is gone eleven years. My son is gone twelve. I have Social Security and a little pension from the school cafeteria. Four hundred dollars just to look.” She shook her head. “So I called a number from a card on the bulletin board at the hardware store. It said, Small jobs. Fair prices. Sam.”
“He put those cards up everywhere,” I said faintly. “His boss used to tease him.”
“He came that same night. In the snow. He fixed the pipe. He fixed the drip in my bathtub also, which I didn’t ask him to do. He charged me thirty-five dollars.” She almost smiled. “I tried to give him more. He wouldn’t take it. He said, ‘You can pay me in coffee.’”
That sounded exactly like Sam. I put my hand over my mouth.
“He came back,” Marta said. “The next month. To check the pipe, he said. Then the month after. He fixed the porch step. He fixed the furnace filter. He put new batteries in my smoke alarms because he said the chirping would drive him crazy. He came maybe once, twice a month. For two years.”
“I didn’t know,” I whispered. “He never told me.”
“He said you would worry. He said you worried about everything. He said you would say he works too much.” She looked at me. “He talked about you all the time, Ruth. All the time. Your garden. Your terrible faucet. Your pot roast. How you cut roses with kitchen scissors.”
A sound came out of me. Half a laugh, half a sob.
“He brought me flowers sometimes,” Marta said. “From the grocery store. In that plastic. He said, ‘Every woman should get flowers.’ And he always said the same thing when he gave them to me.”
She didn’t have to tell me what he said. We both looked up at the card.
For the prettiest girl on the block.
