Chapter 4

Mark did make the drive to the consignment store the following week and was glad he did that. He purchased a dark leather sofa along with a matching chair, a dining room table with six matching chairs, and two headboards for the bedrooms. He also arranged with them to take his old furniture for a nominal fee. There still were some minor things he could do inside and the outside of his house needed painting along with shutters installed but for the most part, he was done with the inside and he was satisfied with what he had accomplished.

Mark started dating Donna. She was a nice person and he enjoyed being with her. They did engage in some heaving petting but she nicely resisted them engaging in the ultimate act of intimacy. For that to happen he thought he would need to marry her and while he liked her he didn’t love her. That being the case he no longer dated her but they did stay friends.

One day at work there was a knock on his office door at the center and looking up he saw Emily. She said she had become a member here and she presented him with a homemade apple pie. He thanked her for doing that. It turned out that once a week she would give him an apple pie. He asked her for her recipe and she gave that to him as well.

During spring break his house and the garage were painted and the shutters installed. At the food store, he ran into Sally Dodge. She mentioned that she had driven by his house and she liked what he had done to it. He invited her when she had time to stop by and see the interior work he had done. She did that the next day and was impressed by how he had fixed up the interior. She said she thought she could sell this house for considerably more than what Mark had paid.

In handing Mark and apple pie one day Emily asked Mark if he knew of a handyman she could hire.

“What’s the problem?” said Mark.

“There are several problems at my home but the major one now is that the garage door won’t open.”

“With tomorrow being Saturday how about if I stop by early and see what the problems are and what I can do. I do consider myself to be somewhat handy.”

“You would do that for me?”

“Sure, no problem and it is the least I could do for all the apple pies you have given me.”

Mark after putting some tools in his car did go to Emily’s Saturday morning as he said he would. She pointed out what her problems were as to a light fixture, faucet leaking, water closet leaking, garbage disposal, and the garage door not opening.

He thought he could fix all of these items and told her in his opinion the electric garage door opener needed to be replaced. He could hear the opener working and could hear a grinding sound that to him sounded like the gears inside were stripped. Disconnecting the opener from the garage door he thought the effort needed to lift the door was too much and the springs needed to be adjusted. He could replace the opener but Emily needed to call the garage door people as he didn’t have the tools to adjust the springs which in his opinion was dangerous and not a thing for a novice person like him to do.

Telling her would be back he was on his way to the Home Depot store to purchase the items necessary to do the repairs.

Coming back to her home he fixed the other items before he tackled the garage door opener. Replacing a faucet cartridge, freeing the garbage disposal after removing a spoon that had lodged in there with some long neck pliers and installing a repair kit in the water closet didn’t take much time. It took some time to replace the ceiling light in the walk-in closet with a LED light and to surprise Emily he installed a motion-activated switch which turned on the light.

Replacing the electric garage door opener took the most time. He first had to remove the old one and assemble the new one. The mounting brackets that were already there he used which helped quite a bit. After he mounted the new garage door opener he set the codes and handed the controls to Emily but told her not to use it until the springs were adjusted or she could be facing the same problem again.

Doing these repairs did take up much of the day. Emily insisted he stay for an early dinner. She had made lasagna which was quite tasty. The apple pie ala-mode was delicious.

When they were finished eating Emily said, “You have done so much for me I wish I could do more for you.”

“You do enough with those apple pies you give me.”

“That gives me something to do but I wish I still could do more.”

Mark was quiet for a while but then he said. “Maybe you can. You said you taught English composition when you were teaching didn’t you?”

“Yes I did, why are you asking?”

“Before moving here for something to do in the evenings while watching television I wrote a few what I considered to be erotic stories and posted them on the net. The readers rated the stories and some of them sent me comments. The ratings were such that they were discouraging me from writing any more stories. One set of comments told me I needed an editor to correct some grammatical mistakes. Another set of comments said they like my stories and wished they were longer. Most of the readers didn’t rate my stories or send me comments. Thinking about what was said I decided to stop writing those stories but write a longer story which I did. Maybe you could be my editor and correct my mistakes.”

“That would give me something to do. How long is this story and what is it about?”

“My M/S word program says it is three hundred and twenty-four pages long. The story’s main character is an experienced FBI agent who is injured in a terrorist bombing. He lets it be known during an interview that the bombing wouldn’t have happened if Congress had done something about their open borders immigration policies. That gets the attention of a multi-billionaire who in public is a strong liberal but in private is an arch-conservative.”

“The split between the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate is one to two senators at most. Through a good-looking female intermediary, our hero is approached and offered a job to find out unsavory things or to create situations to entrap four Senators, both male and female from each side of the aisle to where they can be blackmailed to introduce or vote on legislation as the billionaire directs. That is not difficult to do because of their inflated egos and these eight Senators breaking from their party at times come to be known as “The Mavericks” which is the title of this story. It develops that the Senators in doing that enhance themselves favorably in the eyes of the voting public and the media. The main character is monetarily rewarded handsomely for doing this. There are other things involved but that is the main theme of the story. What do you think?”