It was after lunch that Walt saw the woman sitting on a lawn chair on his neighbor's patio as he was walking back to his garage. His neighbors were a young couple so she might have been a babysitter except for one thing. His neighbors were what some people called "DINKs", the acronym for Dual Income - No Kids. He didn't know them other than one introduction after they bought the house and moved in. They were Brad and Jamie Hergens. He'd not seen a sign that said the house was for sale so the woman wasn't a new owner.
The husband was a senior buyer for a company that made home appliances in both the US and in Europe. The wife was an assistant controller for the same company. Walt figured their income must be at least a quarter-million a year, because the asking price for the house had been six hundred thousand. His own house was valued at about four, but he and Betty had bought it thirty-five years before. They'd paid a hundred and fifty then because it was one of only two houses in the new suburb, and because mortgage interest rates were still pretty high the builder wasn't having much luck with the two hundred thousand he was asking for the house. He needed money in order to pay his construction loans so he knocked fifty thousand off the price. It was inflation over the years since that contributed to the increase, that and the lack of enough housing for the growing city of which the suburb was a part.
Walt thought of walking over to find out why the woman was there, but then figured it was none of his business. Judging by her salt and pepper hair, she was an older woman. She could have been a housekeeper taking a break or someone just visiting, though it seemed odd for her to be there by herself if she was either. Both his neighbors worked during the day. They left for their offices at eight and seldom got home before seven in the evening. He'd never let a housekeeper alone in his house even if he had one he trusted, and he didn't know why someone would come to visit in the middle of the week if the couple was there only at night.
She also hadn't seen him, and if he walked over to talk to her, he might scare her. Walt just kept walking until he came to the door of his garage. Once inside, he walked to the workbench and the plans for a new deck he'd left there the day before along with the building permit from the city. The deck that had come with the house was twenty-four feet long and extended out from the house by twelve feet. It was now over thirty years old, and was basically falling apart. He and Betty hadn't used it much for that reason, and he hadn't had time to replace it when he was working. Now that he was retired, he did.
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Walt had gone to college to become a mechanical engineer after a four-year hitch in the US Army. During that four years, he'd spent a year in Vietnam hoping he'd live through the next firefight. After a year there, he'd spent another year at Fort Dix as part of the Basic cadre. After that came a year and a half in Germany where he impatiently waited for his enlistment to end. He was tired of other people telling him what to do.
When he got out of the Army, he enrolled in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois, and graduated four years later. Along the way, he met a petite little brunette named Betty who worked as a secretary to the Dean of the mechanical engineering department. It was hard fitting their relationship in between his studies and the part-time job he had, but he'd decided early on that she was the one and she was in more than agreement.
Sherry was born two years after Walt and Betty were married and everything seemed to be going his way. For some reason he never really understood, Betty's doctor said it would be risky for her to have any more children, but other than that, life was good. Then, on October 15, 2007, Betty was coming home from grocery shopping. The coroner said she probably veered into the other lane of the highway because she had a minor heart attack. If she'd not been driving, the heart attack wouldn't have been fatal. As it was, she'd hit the delivery truck head on. Walt was sixty at the time and Betty was fifty-eight.
For the next five years, Walt kept working mostly so he'd have something to do with his time. By the time he turned sixty-five, he was comfortable living on his own again and was becoming dissatisfied with his job. The push in industry was to offshore as much manufacturing as possible in order to lower cost and maximize profits. Instead of directing the operations of manufacturing plants across the US, he was arranging for tooling and machinery to be shipped from those plants to plants in Asia and Mexico. He decided to retire.
Walt was smart enough to know that he couldn't just sit in his living room and watch television once he stopped working. He'd known a plant manager who'd done that. The man apparently had no hobbies or other outside interests. All he did was work. When the man retired, he lasted six months. His wife found him in his recliner one afternoon, dead of a heart attack.
So he'd have something to do with his time, Walt had returned to doing what he started out to do, that being designing and building things. Instead of designing and building machinery for industry, he started designing and building things for himself. Over that winter, he designed a new deck and drew up the plans for the building permit.
He had other projects in mind as well. Betty had always wanted a gazebo in the back yard, and Walt had always wanted a workshop to use for small projects when it was raining or during winter when it was too cold to work outside. He figured if he didn't replace the deck first, he'd end up falling through it someday, so as soon as the spring rains seemed to have stopped, he applied for a building permit, and once he had it, placed an order for the lumber he'd need.
The deck was about three feet off the ground to match the elevation of the house. It had taken a week to tear off the old deck and since he was sixty-six by then, the work was pretty tiring. He felt good about it though. His muscles might have been a little sore, but his days went by quickly.
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The day he'd seen the woman, he was in the process of setting the posts that would support the new deck. He'd returned the rented post hole auger the day before so he'd spent the morning carrying the new posts from the empty garage bay where Betty's car had sat to the house and lowering them into the holes. In the afternoon, he planned to mix the bags of concrete in the concrete mixer he'd bought and then fill the holes around the posts to anchor them in the ground.
Walt was working on the second post, using his post level to make sure it was plumb in both directions and then holding it there with boards attached to stakes in the ground. He nailed in the last nail and then heard a woman's voice behind him.
"I haven't seen a man work this hard since my Willie built a family room on our house."
He turned and saw the woman he'd seen next door standing there.
Walt hadn't really seen her the first time. He'd noticed her hair, but she had been facing mostly away from him at the time, so her hair was about all he could see. Now, up close, he did look.
She looked about his age, maybe a little older, but it was hard to tell. She didn't appear to be wearing much in the way of makeup, and most women used makeup to make themselves look younger. Walt knew she wasn't much younger though. She was wearing a T-shirt that fit well over breasts that looked a little lower than some, and her shorts, while pretty conservative, still showed him part of her thighs and her calves. Both were soft looking but with some little wrinkles in her pale skin, especially at her knees.
Walt returned the woman's smile.
"Well, it looks hard, but it's more about keeping everything lined up than actual work."
The woman smiled again and held out her hand.
"I'm Sandra Reynolds, Brad's mother, but Sandra sounds old so I go by Sandy. Who is this hardworking man I'm talking to?"
Walt took her hand and was surprised at how strong her grip was.
"Walt, Walt Jameson. I haven't seen you around before. Have you decided to live with them?"
"No, I'm just staying here and house-sitting. Brad got transferred to his company's office in Scotland and Jamie will work there too. His boss said he needed some international experience if he was going to get any higher. They'll be there for a year and weren't comfortable leaving their house with nobody there for that long or renting it to someone they didn't know. I didn't have anything better to do, and my daughter and her husband are probably happy I'm gone."
"You live with them?"
Sandy nodded.
"Yes, once our kids were gone and Willie died, I kept living in our house for the next six years, but once I turned sixty, my daughter was worried about me being alone. She thinks I'm too old to do that. Mandy and her husband own a duplex and their renter moved out. They didn't really need the money, so she talked me into renting my house and moving into the duplex. I've been there for three years, but I know it's been uncomfortable for Mandy to have me so close.
