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“Okay. We’ll do it.”
Now it was my turn to ask some questions.
“What about you? How do you like your work at the agency?”
He took a deep breath. “Well, I love it. It’s a great job. But my hours are long, and I never seem to get to take a vacation. So that sort of sucks.”
He was looking at me like he wanted to say something else. Like he knew me in a way that was impossible considering we’d barely had one conversation, let alone discussed anything meaningful.
I stood up from my barstool. I wanted to get out before the alcohol had me spilling my guts. “Well, I gotta hit the road. It was great talking to you, Tanner. Thank you for the encouragement. It really means a lot.”
I wanted to shake his hand, but that seemed ridiculously formal. So, I reached up and gave him a mini-hug. I didn’t care if anyone saw. It was way better than a handshake anyway.
Chapter 6
WYATT
I’d never seen such a mess.
In all the years I’d worked as a plumber, with all the nastiness I’d had to fix, I had never seen a mess like the one that was Deer Plumbing’s financials.
On top of that, numbers were not really my strong suit, so that made things even worse. But I was determined to learn. I had to learn, now that Dad was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s.
I’d been backpacking somewhere on the other side of the world—I can’t remember exactly where—when I’d checked email and found an urgent message from my mother. Could I come home?
Was I in Thailand? Or was it Cambodia? Anyway.
I got the first flight home that I could. Dad had fallen and bumped his head. Mom wouldn’t usually have called me home for something like that. When you work in the trades like my dad did, you got hurt every once in a while. It was expected.
But he wasn’t getting better. They checked him for a brain injury, but all the tests came back negative.
That’s when our family doctor found Dad had Alzheimer’s.
He was the hub of our family, a real high-quality man, and my biggest supporter. To say it was devastating didn’t begin to describe it. I knew the road ahead was not going to be easy. And that included taking over the family business.
I’d tinkered in plumbing for as long as I could remember. But I hadn’t intended to do it as a career. After my travels, I’d planned to go back to college.
So much for that.
Now, I was dealing with unpaid tax bills from years gone by. Dad had not really been one to worry about the details. He just wanted to make sure his customers were taken care of. Hell, he didn’t really even care if they paid him or not, I realized as I faced a shoebox full of unpaid invoices.
My cell rang, and I saw it was my mother. “Mom.”
“Hi, honey. Are you still at work?”
“Yup. Just trying to sort out some of the finances.”
“Well, a call came in from a customer. Sounds like an emergency.”
“Okay. Text me the number, and I’ll call them right away.”
Yes. The bookkeeping could wait.
It was a straightforward house call. No hot water.
The poor homeowner… When I told her she was going to need a new hot water heater, she looked like she was going to cry. Although to be honest, almost every time I gave someone news like that, they looked like they were going to cry. Women, men, it didn’t matter. No one wanted to spend their hard-earned cash on something as utilitarian as a new hot water heater.
But hey, if you want hot water, you’ve got to have something to heat it with.
