12:00 PM
The day of the eclipse, the plumber came to dig up the yard. Apparently, the sewage pipe caught water like an outstretched hand. One day, the pipe would break, and it would be really bad, only it hadn’t broken yet.
It was a father-son business, but only the son came. He was in his thirties with short, cropped hair, clothed in stiff blue jeans and cowboy boots. The white truck he brought bore a chained-down piece of machinery. When I went to the door, he seemed surprised to see me, although we’d spoken before. He stuck out his hand.
“Remind me of your name,” he said. I told him.
“I usually never forget a name,” he said. “But I’d know you anywhere.” I watched him rub his palm back and forth on his jeaned thigh.
I imagined him entering our house during his last visit, when our hot water heater had busted, the way it’d taken two men to carry it out the front door and slam it inside the white truck parked in front of my house. I imagined him using my hand towels while I was in the study working, opening the cabinet over the toilet that held my menstrual cup, my husband’s extra razors, and the bobby-bins I used to clean the wax from my ears.
The plumber stood facing the flowerpots on the front porch instead of me, dark sunglasses on his face.
***
12:15 PM
My husband and I weren’t completely sure what the sewage problem was, although it’d been explained to us too many times for us not to understand. The problem, whatever it was, was deep in the ground. Everyone we talked with about the issue was concerned, so naturally, we were concerned, too. When the plumber came a few weeks prior to run the camera down the sewer pipe, he’d brought me outside, where he knelt by a small rudimentary screen. See that? he’d asked. That’s the belly. I squinted. The only hunger I knew was my own.
***
12:28 PM
The plumber sat in the excavator, which was hooked to the white truck by a trailer. He swiveled the arm and body of the machine with a control wielded in one hand, then moved the excavator off the trailer and across the driveway. As he neared the window of my study, I glimpsed a rubber wedding band on his finger.
***
12:45 PM
I went outside. I sat in a small chair in the front yard that no one ever used. I was trying not to look at the sun. The world was half-lit half-dark, like being underwater. The plumber came around the side of the house and gave me a wave. There was something about him that reminded me of my ex-boyfriend, someone I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Maybe it was the way he moved his hands when he spoke, that self-assured manner, the way he explained things clearly and deliberately (and was that a hint of condescension?). The plumber, like my ex-boyfriend, had a way of speaking that felt both true and false. They believed what they said. Other people believed them, too.
Darkness began to fall, dots on paper. I could hear my work phone ringing from inside the house.
***
12:55 PM
I kept thinking about the plumber’s hands. There was something hot about the fact that he worked with his hands. It meant he was capable, but capable of what I wasn’t sure.
***
1:15 PM
I wondered if my husband was in his cubicle or in the small courtyard located between his company’s buildings. Was he looking up or down?
***
1:20 PM
I went around the side of the house. The darkness crouched, hinting at tunnels in the yard. A figure stood on a mound of red dirt. I could barely make out the crisscross of wires — cable, electric, internet — and beneath that, flashes of shell-white PVC pipe.
“Take a look at this,” the plumber said from somewhere in the near dark.
I didn’t want to see the broken damaged thing, the thing that had gone wrong.
***
1:30 PM
The father of the father-son business arrived. His name didn’t match the name of the company on the truck. He parked at the base of the driveway and walked up by flashlight.
***
1:33 PM
“I think that eclipse thing is happening,” a voice said.
***
1:40 PM
The headlamps worn by the father and son plumbers made them look like a pair of lumbering cyclops. I knew they could see me completely, which left me feeling oddly exposed. I moved over to them, trying not to fall into the yard’s cavities. I wondered if it would be so bad, to fall inside one of the passageways. There was a part of me that wanted to crawl the tunnels like an insect and see where they led.
The pair of them were completely indistinguishable in the dark. They could be anyone: envoys of a father-son plumbing business, nightmarish creatures, or my ex-boyfriend and his own father.
The headlamps flashed off. The night in the middle of the day closed around me like a fist.
A pair of cardboard glasses filled my hand. I wasn’t sure where to look, and there wasn’t much to see, so I peered through the flimsy film. The sun was dark except for a pulsing ring of gold.
Keep looking, I told myself. You’ll probably never see such a perfect thing again.
But I couldn’t stare forever. After a minute, I went back inside, and the growl of their machines started again.
Amanda Hays Blasko’s work has appeared in a variety of journals, including storySouth, The Tahoma Literary Review, West Trade Review, and Hawaii Pacific Review. Find her at amandahaysblasko.com.
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