Are they gone?
(extends eyeball on stalk from under covers)
It was just a bad dream, wasn’t it?
(cautiously peers over edge of blanket)
Oh.
Yeah, they’re gone. I think.
When we last saw our heroine, she was muttering “this is where we came in” — swabbing up a pond from the laundry room floor after the brand-new plumbing connections leaked, saturated an entire batt of insulation, and flooded the freshly painted laundry room floor. Don’t ask about the state of the paint job. At least they left the can with the remaining paint.
The contractor, reached by text, said blandly that he was sorry to hear that and would try to get the plumber over that day or next. Since “that day” was the Memorial Day Monday, I didn’t expect much. At least the laundry was clean. We went about our business, enjoying the heady pandemic-era adventure of driving a shit-ton of glass and cardboard recycling over to the collection point at the county Trades Center and settling down after dinner to watch something bizarre on streaming video (I think it was “Dead Boy Detectives” at that point; nifty series, everyone is either a ghost, gay — or both — psychic, or a magical being themselves; major props to the King of the Cats, channeling serious tomcat energy). As suits a spooky show on evening television, outside the heavens crackled and thundered. Water lashed the windows. A great clap of sundered air reuniting outside heralded a knock on the door.
There stood the plumber. At eight-thirty at night.
Mercifully he didn’t propose to attack the problem there and then, but affirmed that the valve he’d bought was defective (WHY DID YOU NOT RUN THE WASHER AND CHECK) and he’d be back in two days to fix it. He replaced the valve and cleaned up not one thing, and two guys showed up shortly afterward to dry the workspace with forced air from a Shop-Vac and close the wall up again, the two of them manifesting more brains than the entire rest of the team put together.
So it looked like we were done, a week past the latest end date we’d been offered. The contractor kept slipping in this-and-that charges for things that I remembered as being included — no one of them by itself enough to wrestle him over, especially since he used an estimating and invoicing program that stored every fucken thing in the cloud and made his previous estimates disappear. I could feel my telomeres frizzling and crisping as I tried to make it all add up, and began to relate to the heroines in Victorian novels — “he worrited her that much over the inheritance, sor, she fell into a brain fever and must take to her bed, wiv all her lovely hair cut off.” In the end we paid to make him fuck off.
The plumber’s channel-lock wrench, a massive blunt instrument that could fell a grown man with one blow, is still on the porch. I made a point of reminding them that he could pick it up. Coals of fire.
The moving men showed up last weekend to retrieve my entire basement room from the pod on the driveway. The guy in charge had his shit together and a good mask on; his sidekick, a skinny creature whose Rasta locks looked to weigh more than he did, had a KN95 on sideways with the metal nosepiece next to one ear. I don’t even know how.
Oh, and did I mention that during this entire exercise, the County has been digging up nearly every street on my speedwalking route, forcing unexpected detours around massive trenches surrounded by earth-moving machinery, flagmen in eye-scorching hi-vis livery, great pyramids of twelve-inch pipe, and Porta Potties, because water main extensions something something? Water. You can’t get away from it.
The pod itself went away yesterday. I can park my car in my own driveway again after two months. We can lift again after three weeks of fumes and commotion. It already feels as if it were just a nightmare, except for the fifty or so boxes down there, much of whose contents I expect to extrude. Shit piles up in basements because you’re sure you’re going to need it at some point but we have already put three sheet metal shelving units at the curb, to be spirited away by elves within the hour.
I have been sleeping nine hours a night. Every morning I feel as if I could sleep nine more.
Send pictures of your cats.
Sixteen Tons 
Sent!
Large wrenches are costly. If it doesn’t get picked up soon, just sell it on Craigslist. If the contractor complains, say it disappeared from the porch and you assumed he’d taken it. That would help offset the cost of your price overruns and/or serve as penalty for not meeting his schedule. At some point, incompetence needs to rebound on the incompetent.
Cat photo on the way.
I’d have done just that if the plumber — unimpressive as he was — weren’t an independent subcontractor with his own business who clearly buys his own tools. I’d be screwing the wrong guy.