Elise Lanier - Treading Lightly

So now she walked in the mornings. Currently, she was alternately screaming “Brad Pitt” and “Tom Cruise” at a woman with a foot-tall, bouffant hairdo from Idaho who had just given the answer “Fred Astaire” to the question: Name a famous actor. Who did she think they polled? One hundred people from a nursing home? When her husband, wearing a light blue polyester suit, said “Charlie Chaplin” she decided to take her second bathroom break. “Will Smith, Russell Crowe, Keanu Reeves, Mel Gibson,” she muttered to herself as she walked to the bathroom. “Or, if you wanted slightly older—which it seems you do—how about Robert DeNiro, Paul Newman, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood!” she huffed.

Upon her return, she climbed onto the treadmill and started again, disgusted by the couple who obviously lived under a rock in Idaho. Suddenly she heard a terrible clunk and was almost thrown from the treadmill when the walking tread came undone and the front bar that held the tread part in place arced up and lifted on the right side—perpendicular to the walking platform.

“Hmm. That can’t be good.” Not good at all. Now what the hell was she going to do?

She tried stepping on the bar to push it back in place, but it didn’t budge. It just stood there, poking out, the tread all wavy and askew.

“Damn it! This sucks,” she muttered as she got off, no longer thinking about how badly the Idahoans were playing, which had been all consuming mere seconds ago.

Not knowing what else to do, she thought of her maintenance man.

Throwing on some clothes, she steadied herself for the trip down to the building’s basement.

The basement was where the tenants kept their stuff in small, partitioned cages. In their particular compound, Craig kept an assortment of sporting goods and miscellaneous stuff he’d collected that she’d insisted were not to be kept in the apartment. Her particular donation to their assigned pen was her clothes from the off-season, stored in large, rectangular containers.

She hated going to the basement. Her self-assigned, floor-specific claustrophobia always made her overactive imagination envision the entire building collapsing on top of her with her not being able to get out. Needless to say, just hitting the B button in the elevator brought feelings of suffocation for her.

This wasn’t the only outlandish visualization she had. She had lots of peculiar Janine-induced mental pictures. Quite a few were rather inspirational. But as unlikely as they all probably were, they freaked her out nonetheless. If the basement brought impressions of asphyxiation, the sub-basement brought more atrocious visions of terror. For below the dreaded basement…was the sub-basement. The sub-basement was a totally creepy, dark, dank place where the building’s maintenance man, Mr. Franklin—a friendly enough old coot—could usually be found. Rumor had it that his office was there, but she’d always had a sneaking suspicion that the strange old man lived down there, too.

Janine shivered with fear and repulsion as the elevator doors opened to that floor.

“Mr. Franklin?” she called, a slight echo following her words.

Taking a few steps into the sub-basement, she could smell the mold, and hated the look of the rusty, exposed pipes traversing over her head. The ceiling was low, as though the building had already settled or had a mini-collapse, squashing the space originally designed. Was that water she heard dripping? Maybe the pipes had already broken with the pressure of the building that was surely starting to collapse.

The sooner she got out of there, the better. “Are you down here, Mr. Franklin?” She heard the panic in her voice, but was too creeped out to disguise it. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop picturing the rats that were probably scampering around her feet at that very moment. The Black Plague started here, I’m sure.

“May I help you, ma’am?” A young man appeared out of nowhere, scaring her to the point where what little was left of her hair almost stood on end. He wiped his hands on the dirty rag hanging from his shoulder.

“I’m looking for Mr. Franklin.”

“I’m he. I mean him. I’m him. Mr. Franklin.”

She stared at him. “Unless you’ve taken some kind of youth elixir, had hair plugs, and dyed whatever little tufts were already there from gray to black—you’re not Mr. Franklin.”

He laughed. “Oh. You must be referring to my grandfather. Gramps retired to Florida.”

“He did? When did that happen?”

“Eight months ago.”

“Oh.” Shows how observant I am.

“I’m Mr. Franklin, too, but I think that sounds so officious, don’t you? Please, call me Ben.”

“Okay, Ben,” she said, trying to recall if she’d ever heard a maintenance man use the word officious before. She might not acknowledge their presence—or lack thereof—but she did notice their speech patterns and chosen vocabulary. Her job made that a habit and a necessity. “So, Mr. Franklin, I mean, Ben.” She stopped speaking. Something was off, amiss, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “Wait a minute. Your name is Ben Franklin?”

“Ironic, huh?” His smile was lopsided.

“Well, yes.”

“I’ve yet to invent anything useful, although I’ve spent my lifetime trying to come up with something.”

She felt sorry for him. “Most of the good things are already invented.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said with a huff, looking totally dejected.

“Keep at it, Ben Franklin. You’ll think of something.”

“Thanks.” He grimaced. “It’s a hard name to live up to.”

“I’d imagine so. It must feel like a curse for someone in your line of work.”

“Yeah. Welcome to my world.” His head hung low for about three seconds before snapping up with new life. “So, how can I help you, Miss Uh…”

“Ruvacado. Janine Ruvacado. Fifteen D.”

“Fifteen D.” He thought for a few moments. “Oh, you must be Craig’s mom.”

She smiled. Everyone knew Craig. “Yup. That’s me. Craig’s mom.”

“He’s a great kid. He was one of my first customers when I got here. I changed out some worn skateboard wheels for him.”

Her smile widened. “Yes, his skateboard. He loves that thing.”

“It’s a beauty!”

She’d gotten it for him when the money was still pouring in. It’s a good thing she bought it when she did, because now she couldn’t even afford the replacement parts for it. “Thanks.”

“So what can I do for you, Craig’s mom from Fifteen D?”

“Janine, please. Well, I seem to have broken my treadmill.”

He looked from her left side to her right, then twisted his neck as if peering behind her. “I don’t see it here, so I guess it’s still up in the apartment. Want me to take a look at it?”

“I thought you’d never ask. Your grandfather was a real love. He’d always fix anything that went wrong around here, even if it wasn’t building related.”

“Yeah, Gramps is a fixing wiz. If he can’t fix something, it can’t be fixed.”

She laughed. “Yes, it was his motto. ‘If I can’t fix it, no one can,’ he used to say.”

“Some may take that as being cocky, but with Gramps it was true,” Ben Franklin said seriously.

Biting the smile that wanted to creep across her face, she replied with equal seriousness, “Yes, I know. He fixed many a broken thing for me.”

Ben nodded, solemnly.

They walked to the elevator and Janine sighed with relief as they got in and started for the “surface” floors. Her sigh wasn’t lost on Ben.

“Glad to be out of there?”

“Yes!” Then she realized she might have been rude. “I’m sorry. How did you guess?”

“Besides the look on your face as we entered the elevator?”