Page 9 of August
“Okay. Thank you,” Elisa said.
“No problem. I’ll let you get to dinner now.”
“Do you want to stay?”
“For dinner?” Myra asked.
“Sorry; that must have sounded weird,” Elisa replied, shaking her head at herself. “Like I said, you’re my neighbor but also possibly my contractor, so…”
“Not tonight. I need to get home. But maybe another time?” Myra said with a smile that she hoped told Elisa that she meant it.
“Yeah, okay,” Elisa replied.
CHAPTER 4
Elisa rolled over in bed and took a deep breath. When she checked the clock, she discovered that it was just after six. Remembering what it had been like having two kids under the age of seven, she laughed a little because they’d never let her sleep this late back then. Adele had always been an early riser prior to her teen years, so even though Archie slept later most mornings now, when he had been younger, before the hormones really kicked in, he’d been right behind his sister. No matter what Elisa had tried to keep them in bed beyond seven in the morning, they’d never done it. Well, maybe once, when they’d stayed out after midnight for a family Christmas party, but they had still woken her up at eight, so that wasn’t exactly sleeping in.
Elisa lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling, which had a brown stain in the right corner. The roof was leaking in that spot, but the water hadn’t yet made its way onto the pale-blue carpet in her bedroom. She was keeping a bucket under the stain just in case, but that made her realize that Myra hadn’t checked out the roof the previous night.
“She probably just wanted to run out of here because your children were acting like entitled brats,” she said to herself.
She’d have to ask Myra to come back to do an estimate on the roof damage as well or get someone else out if Myra didn’t have the time or didn’t want to risk running into the twins again. It was nice, though, waking up this early and not hearing one of them in the shower or their footsteps on the creaking floorboards. Elisa knew those would have to wait to get fixed until she found a job and could afford it, but for now, she would focus on the fact that she had the house to herself for at least the morning since the kids had stayed out late and would drive back late, too, no doubt. She predicted they would raid their father’s fridge for lunch and snacksbefore they hit the road instead of attacking hers when they arrived. Actually, they’d probably just do both.
As Elisa got up and dressed for her morning run, which she’d only started doing the previous week, she thought about her many missteps with them. Should she have stayed in the guest house until they were both gone and settled at school before she moved? That might have made it easier for them to have the summer with their friends, but she had been miserable in that guest house. Her ex-husband had been very vocal about his desire for her to stay there, but not because he wanted them to get back together. He just liked having a wife there to take care of certain things. While Elisa hadn’t been getting his clothes dry-cleaned or cleaning the house anymore, she had still been cooking meals for the kids, which he had also benefited from. She had still been there to occupy the kids with a parent they could talk to and get permission from, who could take them shopping or do the shopping for them. She supposed that several years prior to their divorce, she had become more his housekeeper than anything else. Even his attempts at sex had dried up prior to her asking for the separation, and Elisa had become more of an employee than a wife, but she had still stayed because of her children.
When she slipped out the door, she glanced at Myra’s house. The truck Elisa normally hadn’t paid much attention to but knew was usually parked there wasn’t there right now, indicating that Myra was probably already working. How she hadn’t noticed the logo on the side of the truck before when she had seen it nearly every day was beyond her, but it only proved the theory that people rarely paid attention to things unless those things pertained to them in some capacity. Elisa hadn’t worked out in years, so she’d been trying to run a mile in the humidity and heat of a New Orleans summer every day this week to get her stamina up. She couldn’t afford a gym or even gym equipment, so until she found herself a job and saved up, she would be running outside at least a few days a week. It was part of her starting-over plan. She didn’t think she had put on a ton of weight since the divorce and felt likeshe looked attractive enough, but this was about her health and helping her with her stress level.
Part of her divorce agreement meant that she had been able to stay on her ex-husband’s health benefits until she got herself a new job with benefits of her own, and his benefits were amazing, so after moving to New Orleans, she’d started therapy and went once a week to talk about the divorce, the kids, and trying to make a new life for herself here. Her therapist had been the one to suggest working out as a way to get some good hormones moving through her body, but it was easy forherto say; her therapist wasn’t the one dripping with sweat after only half a mile down the road.
After showering and making herself some coffee, she turned on her computer and pulled up the various job sites she frequented to see what might be available for her. She had never finished college, which she regretted to this day, and unfortunately, many jobs still required college degrees, so she typically didn’t apply for those so as not to waste her time. Finding a couple of vacancies, she bookmarked them, wrote separate cover letters for each of them before applying, and just as she had finished that, the front door opened, and the kids came barreling through it, already arguing about something.
???
“I took a look,” Myra said as she walked inside through the back door.
“And? How bad?”
“You’ve got three leaks that I can see, but those spots can be patched, and you don’t have to redo the whole roof.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Yeah. And it’s work I can have one of my guys do. The shingles might be a problem, though. Matching them exactly might be tough, and those are obviously weathered, so you’ll have a mismatch up there until you redo the whole roof in a few years. I think you can get at least three more years if you do that; more or less, depending on the weather.”
“I don’t care about mismatching shingles if it means I don’t have to pay for a whole new roof right now,” Elisa said. “And thank you for taking a look. I completely forgot about it last night when you were here, and my kids were probably so annoying; you just wanted to get out of here.”
Myra chuckled a little and said, “Nah. Like I told you, I have a big family. I’m used to it. Want to sit down and talk about the new estimate? I can give you a rough one for the roof, but I’ll know more when I get to my computer later.”
“Sure,” Elisa said, excited to have another adult other than Gwen join her at her kitchen table for the first time.
When Myra pulled out a piece of paper from her clipboard and slid it over to her, Elisa looked down at it and saw the amount, which was scary but not terrifying. She reminded herself that she had been expecting this and that she had to do it, or the house would start to fall apart.
“So, I’d estimate the roof side of things would add on an extra couple of grand to that, but that depends on how bad the leaks are once we get in there and really take a look. If it’s a quick patch and a few shingles per leak, it’ll be way less. One leak seems like it just started recently.”
“The bedroom one, yeah. That started a few weeks ago, really.”
“Okay. Well, that should be a quick repair and would lower that estimate, but like I said, I’ll know more once I get my computer and get you the real number, and then, when we get in there and see the damage better. I’ll make sure to tell you the options along the way, so if we can quick-patch something but not do the full repair just yet because you want to go cheaper right now, we can. It just means you’ll have less time with the roof before you’ll have to do more work on it.”
“Right,” Elisa said. “Do you want something to drink?”
