Chapter Two: When the Handyman Takes a Widow for a Ride
and not in a fun way
Eric's shitty pandemic-era funeral held in a dingy old funeral home with a 10-person cap on attendees took place on December 4th, 2020.
The next day, we stood awkwardly around a little hole in the ground at the local cemetery while the funeral director struggled to make a production out of my oldest carrying Eric's box of ashes from a delivery van to the graveside. (Cremation isn't all that common in this area).
The day after that, we were finally alone. It was my second oldest's 17th birthday and everything was stupid and impossible.
Family had gone home, delivered meals and care packages were tapering off, and after a long, sleepless night crying, I got up to let Eric's German Shepherd, Molly out.
I found her lying by door that leads out to the garage. She was so confused. Her favorite person in the world had left eleven days prior and hadn't come back. She would continue to wait there for him for months.
I coaxed her through the kitchen and out the back door where I could hook her to a length of rubber-wrapped cord so she couldn't accidentally scare the neighbors by wandering around. We didn't have a fence and while lots of dogs roam around in the rural area in which we live, a lot of people are afraid of German Shepherds and automatically think they will bite off their legs.
I stood in the doorway, probably looking like an excellent candidate for a Jerry Springer episode. There are few photos of me during this horror film I found myself trapped in, but the few I have I definitely look like I'm about to throw some chairs across a stage and scream about months of overdue child support payments. Hand me a cigarette and knock out a tooth or two, and I would have been ready for my close up.
When the house was built, the back steps felt like an afterthought. Some peeling plywood and a couple of 2x4s made for a rickety descent into our acre of mud and weeds. Eric had torn it all out and had roughed in what was supposed to become the foundational pieces for a better designed small deck with stairs leading toward the concrete patio he and the big boys had poured.
That morning, while Molly sniffed around looking for a place to poop, my eyes blurred with tears. Crying wasn't anything new, but the sight of Eric's pencil marks on the wood, the table under the porch holding a little box of screws... I couldn't take it. I'd never been all that sentimental before, but now I wanted to save every scrap of him. I didn't want to change anything he'd touched.
My sad and lonely life flashed forward forty years and I saw myself trying to navigate the same unfinished steps, Eric's box of screws long since rusted and lost beneath a pile of junk laced with mouse holes and cobwebs. Inside, I would have piles of his hair I'd pulled from drains and baggies of his skin cells I'd combed from the mattress. The closet would still hold all of his clothes, moth-eaten and covered in a thick layer of dust.
I wasn't headed for Jerry Springer, I was headed for a really sad episode on Hoarders. This is how it happens, doesn't it? A previously fastidious cleaner tossing sentimental knicknacks and birthday cards with wild abandon loses the love of her life and suddenly she can't part with the bar of soap that last touched his hairy armpit.
I sunk to the floor, heedless of the flakes of snow blowing into the kitchen or Molly, now concerned, whining into my hair. I couldn't live like that. There was part of me that wanted to; that saw no purpose in ever powering up a vacuum ever again for fear of losing the last of Eric's DNA floating through the sunbeams. But the other part of me pulled out my phone and found the photo I'd taken at the library; a flyer advertising someone who could build decks and stairs.
I called him from the kitchen floor.
The handyman, we'll call him G, arrived in a white truck equipped with a reassuringly large toolbox in the back. I'd shoved a hat on and brushed my teeth, but was still braless beneath my parka and could only locate one bright orange Croc and one gray house slipper.
I asked him to please try to keep what had already been built, handing him the plans Eric had drawn up.
"Just cover it with decking," I said, waving vaguely at the half-finished stairs. "And, I guess," I added reluctantly, "replace the 2x4s with a real handrail." My heart ached at the thought of G tearing out the temporary handrail Eric had built. I squeezed my eyes shut, picturing that episode of Hoarders where the bereaved man ends up feeding ocean waves of rats. I didn't want to be the rat person. I didn't need to hold onto a couple of 2x4s. It would be fine. Besides, I'd always know the foundation of the deck & steps was made out of wood Eric had cut and placed.
G's eyes seemed to sparkle as he tilted his head in a sympathetic manner and asked, "You just go through a divorce or something?"
"No," I sniffed. "My husband died."
"Oh, I'm so sorry," said G, mentally recalculating his quote and adding the invisible, "vulnerable single lady tax."
Widow oops tally thus far:
I did not get any other quotes. I had never had to get quotes in my life. Eric had built, repaired, fixed, and designed everything. The fact that I'd taken a picture of a flyer, remembered I had a picture of a flyer, called the number on the flyer, and made myself 'presentable' enough to meet the man from the flyer was an Herculean effort from which I would need to recover for approximately sixteen years.
I did not, in this patriarchal world in which we live, ask a manly neighbor friend to come stand menacingly and imposingly nearby. I should have done. Better yet, I should have had a manly neighbor friend pretend to be my husband and handle the entire interaction and then tell me who else to call to compare rates. I hate that the world is like this, but it is.
I did not think to ask anyone to review the quote I was given. G said some numbers which seemed reasonable enough as far as my brain could comprehend numbers, which was very little. I gave him the go ahead.
I ignored red flags because I could not cope with said flags. On G's first day, he tore out everything Eric had done. Not just the handrail, but everything. He changed the direction of the stairs and made several other changes that went against our plans. He also lost Eric's hand drawn plans that I'd wanted back because they had his handwriting on them. I locked myself in my closet and cried.
I ignored further red flags because I felt I had made my bed and now must lie in it. G was supposedly the only licensed (?) Trex Deck installer in our area. My head full of pudding, I did nothing to follow up or check on any of the extremely trustworthy information I found on the printed flyer at the library. (Spoiler, the Trex company had never heard of him.) However, his workmanship was shoddy. The special screws they use to attach the decking were stripped in many areas and were not lying flush with the material. Step pieces were cut unevenly and raw wood remained exposed to the elements.
Despite this alarming list, I traipsed out to the backyard the day he finished (this time with matching slippers on, though still resembling a disheveled person on a wanted poster) and handed him a check. I don't remember how much it was, but was later told by knowledgeable manly neighborhood fellows that it was disgustingly too much.
That day, pudding brain asked G, "Do you happen to do fencing?"
G's eyes sparkled again as he surveyed my one-acre property. Looking back I can almost hear the cartoon cash register noises sing as he imagined himself dancing around with bags of money.
"Wood fence?" he asked.
"Vinyl, I think."
This time he sent his quote in an email so I had a paper trail.
I must have had a few functioning brain cells left because I girded my emotional loins and opened Eric's inbox to search for the fencing quotes he'd received the previous summer.
Opening Eric's inbox always made me cry. Look at all those messages. Look at the words he typed in the sent folder. I couldn't understand how someone could be here, sitting at the desk, writing stuff on the computer, and then BLAM, they'd never write another message again. Truthfully, it still blows my mind on the regular.
I printed out the quotes he'd received and highlighted the numbers to better help me retain them. I attempted to compare those figures with what G had sent. They looked really similar, even given the supply issues and price hikes we were experiencing during the pandemic.
I decided going with G would save me an energetic deficit; calling and meeting with other people felt as though it would put me in the hospital with a mental breakdown. I was incredulous I hadn't had one already.
Cue more red flags:
G had me call the fencing supply company and pay for the materials directly. I found this curious but wasn't sure if it wasn't within the realm of normal; again I hadn't ever had to hire anything out before. Later, I found out that this was because he had never done a fencing job before and had not been approved for a real wholesale account. They wouldn't sell to him until he was more established, but they would give me a bulk discount as the customer. I could have saved more on materials going with an established company, but I didn't know this.
Shoddy work again. He came to my house and installed two gates. One between the neighbor's fence and our shop and another between our shop and our house. Both gates were hung badly and dragged when they were opened.
G asked for more money. All of the other quotes Eric had received included materials + labor, and--for this article's sake and because I'm not about to look up all the dollars to verify--we'll say came to around 10k for white vinyl on a one-acre lot. G's quote was worded in a similar manner and came to 13k. Materials alone came to about 10K, so I assumed the remaining few thousand dollars was for labor. After G installed the skewampus gates, he asked for a couple thousand. I wrote him a check. When he returned to get to work on the fence posts, he again asked for another couple thousand which would have taken us over his quote. I asked him about this and he started getting really angry with me, stating that his original quote was for labor, not counting materials. Once I understood him, I realized that his complete quote looked more like $23,000 for a completed fence; more than double what everyone else had quoted.
At this point, feeling like an idiot, I involved more knowledgable friends who called their connections at fencing companies and I found myself in another backyard meeting in my bathrobe.
The very nice man at the reputable fencing company called the wholesale fencing supply place and had gotten all the tea. He'd also researched G and was ready to do crime on my behalf, a clearly struggling, pudding-addled widow who, he felt, G had taken advantage of.
The backyard revenge team had G blocked from picking up any further materials at the supply company, then picked up the materials themselves, securing them in my locked shop. G was fired, but showed up for a Jerry Springer-worthy showdown in the front yard in which he swore and screamed at my friends and kept trying to call and text me to come outside and give him more money.
Then, the reputable fencing company installed my fence at cost. I ended up paying more than I would have if I'd known to call them in the beginning, but I was still saved, damsel-in-distress style, from a worse financial disaster.
I really wish this chapter was more empowering, but sometimes we all need a little bit of rescuing, I suppose.
G drove by several times during installation to spit and scowl and flip the bird at us from his truck. I was so scared, I ordered a home security system and put up every single one of the corny "Protected by" signs in my yard.
Lessons learned: Eric protected me from a lot of unpleasantness. Also, don't hire people from flyers hanging on the communal cork board at the library without calling around for quotes to compare.
Tune in next time for chapter three: The Widow vs. Restoration Companies: A Comedy of Errors
p.s. If anyone in the East Idaho area needs fencing done, this is the company that rode in on white horses and fixed everything. My fence is lovely.