Home Alone After Home Improvement

I sat at the kitchen table, opened my checkbook and smiled sadly at him.

I’d put this off for as long as I could, but by now he’d scraped, puttied and stuccoed everything in sight and it had come to this: I had to pay him.

He accepted the check, shook my hand and showed himself out. A moment later the door of his truck slammed and he was gone.

God, I thought. I miss my contractor.

My wife and I met Juan through friends. He’d built a meticulously detailed addition to their Southwestern adobe house. He was perfectly suited to build us an adobe office and guest house.

Juan was a yuppie homeowner’s dream. With his graying beard, wire rims and button-down dress shirts, he looked more like a professor than a contractor.

He had a cherubic smile, a Colombian accent that had stuck after 20 years in the States and the calm, can-do manner of an airline pilot. He inspired confidence.

Juan also never seemed to get dirty. I usually look like I’ve undergone a Hell’s Angels induction when I finish a home project, so I figured he had to be good.

He was always cheerful, but we could tell when Juan disliked a design idea: He’d nod and say, “huunh ,” his voice rising with his lack of conviction.

There came a cold, rainy day in early March when Juan showed up with his workers. That was the last day I got any work done for three months.

As a free-lance writer working alone at home, I’ve mastered the usual distractions. I can face down the refrigerator, the CD player and the latest issue of People and return to my computer.

But here was a new obstacle to productivity: other humans.

All day, as workmen hammered and sawed, I felt compelled to see what they were up to.

I lingered as they poured a foundation and laid adobes. I snapped pictures while they framed the roof, telling myself I was only seeing that the job got done right.

But it went deeper. I was hanging with Handy Guys, guys who could do things--guys who could make things. Their weathered faces spoke of a life lived outdoors, like men were supposed to.

One day 19-year-old Victor Jr., the youngest worker, confided that he hoped to attend college, saying: “I don’t want to be working for minimum wage the rest of my life.” So much for romantic illusions.

Juan and I sometimes drove around in his truck, having adventures. Once we ran out of gas on the interstate. Another time, I got to help unload a semi-trailer full of table tops for a Subway sandwich shop he was building.

And we talked. About his coming to America. About his father, who’d fled the Holocaust and started an auto import business in Colombia. About his sons, and his wife the lawyer, with whom he shared easy laughter.

It dawned on me that this was no mere business transaction. This was a relationship.

So I tried not to let him down.

I was proud the morning he surveyed the straight, even brick floor my wife and I had laid and said, “This looks really good!”

It felt like passing a test.

Now life is back to normal. I endure the peace and quiet and get my work done.

But lately we think the house needs a lighter stucco. The roof could use some new sheet metal too. And my wife wants to rebuild the bathroom and install a skylight. . . .

Juan, wherever you are, we need you.