The Handyman's Dream Read Free Page A

shock!”
    Ed waited. She didn’t say anything more. “Is that all?”
    “Isn’t that enough? I want you to come over and make sure it isn’t defective. The last thing I need is to get electrocuted.”
    Mrs. West lived in mortal fear of electrocution. You’d think someone had once threatened to send her to the chair, Ed often thought.
    “Okay. I’ll be over later this afternoon.”
    “Ed Stephens, you know very well that I get my hair done every Wednesday afternoon at four. You need to come over now.”
    “Now?”
    “Yes, now. It’s so dark with all this rain I need to turn a light on in here. Goodness me, I depend on you to take care of these things for me. What would your mother say?”
    Aw, crud, Ed thought. It wasn’t beyond Mrs. West to call his mother and complain, so he knew he had no choice. Norma already thought he was acting oddly, so he didn’t want to give her any more ammunition.
    “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” he said, and sighed.
    Ed shrugged his jacket on and headed out the back door. Once in his truck he went out of his way to drive down his own street, looking for the mailman. Sure enough, Mailman Rick was just a block away from his house. Ed slowed down, watching him walk with that casual, easy stride. Oh, he is so sexy. Ed almost drove into the curb, his eyes on the mailman. He jerked his eyes, and the steering wheel, back to the left. Oh, well. Surely he’d see him tomorrow, and under no circumstances would he answer the goddamned phone.
    That night Ed restlessly paced off the rooms of his house, from the kitchen, through the living room, and into the bedroom at the back of the house. He even went upstairs, something he seldom did, as he used the one big room on the second floor mostly for storage. He sat down on the battered brown hassock from his boyhood room in his parents’ house. He gazed at the odds and ends scattered around the room with the sloped ceilings, and pondered his life and the silly plan he had to meet the new mailman.
    He wasn’t at all sure why the idea of having a boyfriend, or a lover, had taken such a serious hold on him. Oh, he’d always hoped he’d meet someone nice someday, but he didn’t carry on about it, the way Glen or some other guys he knew did. Despite his fondness for all the romantic songs he heard on the radio and played over and over again on his stereo, he’d been more content all these years to simply dream about a wonderful guy, the Dream Man he’d conjured up while still in his teens. His practical nature being what it was, he never really thought he’d meet the Dream Man, who was just something to think about in the lonelier hours when Ed had nothing better to think about. He’d always assumed that some day he would meet a nice guy, and hopefully something good, and maybe even permanent, would grow between them.
    That had all changed the moment he first saw Rick. The new mailman simply was the Dream Man, and for the first time Ed allowed himself to believe that a Dream Man—if not Rick, then some other guy—actually existed. Ed, who’d always made the best of what life had offered him, suddenly began to believe that maybe, just maybe, dreams sometimes come true.
    He stood up and began pacing the room, dodging the boxes he’d moved from his parents’ house to his. He paused at a box of his father’s things, given to him by his mother after Tim Stephens’s death. He rummaged idly through the items in the box—a bowling trophy, an old photo album, the Alistair MacLean books his father had enjoyed reading—and thought about his parents’ marriage. Despite their personality clash—Norma, autocratic and sharp-tongued, and Tim, gentle and easygoing—it had been a good marriage.
    Ed had never really thought of himself as getting married, as straight people did. He didn’t know if he carried a residue of shame over being gay that kept him from thinking about such a relationship between two men, or if he’d simply never met a