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 On Monday, we will bid farewell to our contractor, who has been a force of nature, and a force of change in our lives.


Drifting off to sleep, recently, my husband said, "What will we talk about when the contractor leaves?" And it's a question I had pondered, too.

A note about non-fiction. No one wants to read an un-funny litany of complaints. The impact of that sort of piece is to make the reader side with the alleged villain. (When a neighbor of Sylvia Plath's wrote a long rant about Plath, critics said, "Plath sounds fine. It's the writer who sounds like a turd.")

My contractor--let's call him E--has certain charming moments of insanity. He actually has a crazed look in his eye, at all times. When he needed access to an obscure window in our house, he slapped a thin, rickety plank to the exterior wall, high in the air, then hovered uneasily on that plank. Weeks later, we asked E to move the ladder that was sitting uselessly under the plank, and E moved it, but left the plank itself, because he hadn't budgeted any time for the task. On the rare occasions when he is here, E sits near my infant and berates workers via cell-phone call--an act of multi-tasking--and then he is off, he is a puff of smoke. ("Be right back. I need to stop by Home Depot.")

It takes two to tango. My spouse and I were warned about this guy, and we had many opportunities to fire him, but I believe that E's personal drama is weirdly addictive. It is breathtaking to tell him he is three months off-schedule, and to note that he doesn't even feign regret, or a sense of personal responsibility. ("I think we can all agree it's the painter's fault.") At times, I've felt that E is the ghost of all of my own most-unprofessional moments--my own lapses, haunting me. He is karma, in human form.

I've learned this stuff is universal. It is in the nature of contractors to overpromise and under-deliver. People refer to their big house projects, and people shudder: "It shook the foundations of our marriage." There is even a new novel on this subject--"The Turnout"--in which a shitty contractor becomes the center of a Billy Wilder-ish noir plot. Home renovation leads to murder.

We have a saying here in the suburbs: "A plan is merely a guess."

I'm struggling to learn this--everyday.
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