"Construction sucks," Kurt said out loud.
Taking a deep breath after the call with the building department, he pulled into a fast food place's parking lot and called the customer from his truck. He had to tell them the inspection of their deck footings was rescheduled, and that the project was stalled until the city got out to the site. The lady of the house was, to put it mildly, displeased, and yelled at him, and all he could do was tell her it wasn't anything to do with him.
He thought, "Maybe you should have scheduled more than three weeks in advance of your daughter's backyard wedding, stupid." People just didn't plan.
Now his day was wasted. He made another call, thinking he could drive out to another site and do some prep work, but the family wasn't home, or at least wasn't answering their phone. It wasn't even noon.
Kurt looked around the parking lot, racking his brain, and finally called his buddy with a machine shop; he had a couple of tool repairs to do, things that had been pushed to the back burner, and he could use his buddy's array of specialty machines to fix a few things. The guy answered his phone, and told Kurt he could come by after three, when the shop wound down. So Kurt had three hours or so to kill.
He could eat, he supposed; but he looked at the gaudy sign hovering over his truck and decided not to eat a pile of junk food; since the divorce he'd been a pretty good boy, eating healthier and all that, and with the physical labor of deck building he was probably in the best shape of his life. Idly, he looked in the rear view mirror and looked at his face, that always had a somewhat battered look that outdoor people get, and the jagged nose that had just been broken too many times. Old. He was getting old, and the end of hard muscle work was coming soon. It was on its way.
He heard a screaming sound from outside the truck, and turned the key to buzz the window down. Popping his head out he found he'd parked next to a chain link fence, and on the other side was a city pool. The place with the crabby lady's deck was a fairly uppity suburb, and the pool had slides and all kinds of colorful play equipment mounted around. He watched the splashing crowd for a bit, initially killing time watching the kids, thinking of the pool where he'd grown up, which had been a tomb-like rectangular hole without even a diving board.
Then he was able to pick out some girls and women, and he started blandly watching some of them, the upper-class housewives and college girls home for the season. Some of the moms were fine, very fine indeed. He thought about the last time he'd gotten laid, and figured it had to be almost a year.
"I should take some classes or something," he said out loud. Yeah, go to the tech college and take a few classes for working Spanish or something useful to him. It might be a good place to meet some quality women, too, people with some ambition and a head on their shoulders.
He missed being married.
"Fuck this," he said, again out loud, and decided to get out of the 'burb and maybe have a few beers at his neighborhood bar, back in his real life. The hell with it.
After the usual pointless, frustrating drive, Kurt walked into his local watering hole and was surprised to see a young woman in the place talking to Tommy, the old barkeep and owner. Just the presence of anyone under the age of forty in the place was unusual, and the chick was not only young but decent-looking.
"She's got to be someone's relative," Kurt thought. "Got to be."
She was being bitchy. No, not exactly bitchy; she was angry, with a furious, frustrated behavior that young people get. He wondered how old she was. She looked really young, but he thought she had to be twenty-one, at least: she was drinking what looked like a beer. He watched her with his peripheral vision as he passed her, walking to a stool a reasonable distance away.
As he went by she made a face that made him wonder what her mother looked like; women often ended up resembling their mothers, from body language and facial expressions. She pushed out her chin, and her mouth seemed puffed out, but then she opened her lips and a gleam of metal revealed braces. Braces! How old (or young) was the girl? She was thin, but genetically, not workout thin or even particularly muscular or toned, she was just young and kind of skinny.
Her smallish, finely shaped head topped a long torso with a sinuous waist, with nice, smooth legs. Her pouting face was well-featured, with a turned-up nose and high cheekbones, and with heavy eyeliner and eyelash stuff her eyes looked huge. A long, brunette braid came down along her shoulder, and when she turned slightly another of the same revealed itself on the other side; her hair was in pigtails.
Her clothing was slightly down-market knockoffs of casual stylish stuff: a fake military cap with false pockets on the sides in olive drab, a black T-shirt with some white splattered logo in graffiti letters, and frayed jean shorts that managed to reveal the bottom of her ass cheeks. Kurt took a decently long look at that. Her shoes, canvas sneakers, looked like a tie-dye version of Keds or some such. She was young and kind of cute, and of more than average height.
He sat down a few spots away from her at the bar, and noted she was drinking a short draft beer of indifferent quality. She talked animatedly, and for a while he concentrated on the TV without really listening, instead catching the cadences of her voice. She was complaining about something, or perhaps everything, to the aged bartender. He caught the words 'mother' and 'school' in the rapid rapping of her monologue, which was only occasionally interrupted by placating comments from the barkeep. At a juncture during which the barkeep had to excuse himself to serve an elderly drunk at the end corner of the bar, Kurt looked her over again out of the corner of his eye: her leg was bouncing up and down, and her chin, a pointy child-sized chin, poked out pugnaciously as her mouth worked. It looked like she was grinding her teeth. He decided to get himself into the conversation through the barkeep.
