Dear Mr. Electrician: Do you ever spark up a romance when doing a service call at someones home?
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Answer: Yes. Sometimes personalities click together quickly and things take off in unplanned directions. Below is an old romance story of mine.
JOHNS OLD ROMANCE Part One: The Call
John had learned, in the decade since his divorce, that the best mornings were the quiet ones. Coffee black, truck loaded, schedule full. No arguments. No tension you could cut with a wire stripper. Just work — honest, satisfying, solvable work. Electricity, unlike marriage, followed rules. You treat it right, it treats you right.
He was parked outside a hardware supply house on a Tuesday when his phone buzzed with an unknown number.
“Johns Electric,” he answered, wedging the phone between his ear and shoulder.
“Yeah, hi — name’s Jack. Got your number from a guy at the chamber of commerce. I own a rental property out on Sycamore Lane, a ranch house, built in the sixties. My tenant’s been having some electrical problems. Outlets acting up, a lamp that keeps blinking out. Nothing dangerous, I hope, but I want it looked at.”
John pulled out his notepad. “What kind of problems exactly?”
“That’s the thing — my tenant knows more about it than I do. She works from home, so she’ll be there to let you in and walk you through it. Her name’s Doris. Smart woman, very particular about her space. She can explain it better than I can.”
“That’s fine,” John said. “I can get out there Thursday morning if that works.”
“Perfect. Fair warning — she, uh, works from home. I don’t know exactly what she does, but she keeps unusual hours. Just be professional.”
John almost smiled. In twenty years of contracting, he’d walked into stranger situations than a home office. “Always am,” he said.
He wrote down the address, ended the call, and forgot about it almost immediately. Thursday was two days away and he had a commercial job eating his attention.
He did not think about the name Doris again until he was standing in her driveway.
Part Two: The Driveway
Sycamore Lane was a quiet street of postwar ranch houses, most of them well-kept, with mature oaks throwing shade across clipped lawns. The house at the end was white with black shutters, a small concrete stoop, flower boxes in the windows. Nothing unusual. His trained eye swept the roof line, noted the meter base, the weatherhead — all looked original but serviceable.
He pulled his truck to the curb, grabbed his tool bag, and walked to the front door. He pressed the bell.
What happened next rearranged the morning.
The door opened, and John — who had wired substations, who had stared down building inspectors, who had not flinched at anything in years — went completely still.
She was tall. She had always been tall. Dark hair pinned up with a few strands loose around her face. High cheekbones, eyes the color of aged bourbon, a mouth that had once been capable of both extraordinary tenderness and weapons-grade cruelty, sometimes in the same afternoon. She was wearing a black leather corset, a short skirt that didn’t waste anyone’s time, sheer black stockings, and heels that put her nearly at eye level with him.
She looked, if anything, better than she had at thirty.
Doris looked at him for exactly two seconds before her expression shifted from professional welcome to something he couldn’t immediately classify — not quite shock, not quite amusement. Something in between, held carefully behind her eyes.
“John,” she said.
“Doris,” he said.
A beat of silence stretched between them like an old wire pulled too tight.
“Jack didn’t tell me,” she said.
“Jack didn’t tell me either.”
She studied him. He studied her. Somewhere inside the house, he became dimly aware of a sound he couldn’t quite identify — a quiet, muffled shuffling.
“You’d better come in,” Doris said, and stepped aside.
Part Three: The House
He had expected awkwardness. What he got instead was something more unsettling: Doris in full professional composure, as if she entertained ex-husbands on a Thursday morning with some regularity.
The living room was tastefully decorated — leather furniture, low lighting, heavy curtains that kept the sunlight to a minimum. On the far side of the room, he noticed a large cage. A very large cage. The kind you might find in a kennel, except this one had a man inside it. The man was middle-aged, soft around the middle, and wearing nothing but a contented expression and what appeared to be a dog collar. He glanced at John. John glanced back. The man looked away first.
John set his tool bag down slowly.
“Don’t mind Gerald,” Doris said, in the tone of someone explaining a houseplant. “He’s having a very good morning.”
“Good to know,” John said. He had wired enough of the world to know that people lived in all kinds of arrangements, and it was not his job to have opinions about it. He pulled out his notepad. “Walk me through the electrical problem.”
Something softened in her expression — respect, maybe, for the fact that he hadn’t tripped over himself. “In this room,” she said, moving toward the far wall with the particular authority of someone who was accustomed to being followed. “There’s an outlet behind the side table. When I plug a lamp into it, the bulb flickers — three, four times — then goes out entirely. I’ve tried different bulbs. Same result.”
“Same circuit? Any other outlets in the room acting up?”
“The one by the window has always felt weak to me. Devices charge slowly.”
He was already crouching by the side table, pulling it out from the wall. “How old is the wiring in the house, do you know?”
“Original,” she said. “Jack told me when I moved in. Sixty-something years old.”
“That tracks.” He looked up at her. “Panel’s in the basement?”
“Door’s in the kitchen. I’ll show you.”
She showed him. Gerald watched quietly from his cage, apparently content.
Part Four: The Work
The basement was clean and dry, which was a good sign. The main panel was a mid-century box, the kind that had been installed before anyone thought much about what the next six decades of electrical demand would look like. John removed the cover plate and examined the breakers, the neutral bar, the ground connections.
Years of vibration, temperature cycling, and the small indignities of time had done their usual work. Several connections had backed off slightly — not enough to be dangerous, but enough to cause exactly the kind of gremlins Doris was describing. He worked methodically, tightening each connection, checking the neutral bar, confirming the grounds were secure.
Doris stood at the bottom of the basement stairs and watched him.
“You’re good at that,” she said after a while.
“I’ve had practice.”
“You seem — settled. When we were married you always seemed like you were one bad month away from disaster.”
He didn’t look up from the panel. “I was. Took me a while to build the business up right. Couple of years after the divorce, things started clicking.” He paused. “You seem settled too. Different kind of settled than I would have expected.”
“Is that a comment on Gerald?”
“It’s an observation.” He glanced at her then. “You seem confident. You were always confident, but this is different. Like you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I am,” she said simply.
He finished in the basement, replaced the panel cover, and carried his bag back upstairs.
Part Five: The Outlets
The first outlet was easy to diagnose and easier to fix. Whoever had done the original work — some long-retired electrician working in a simpler era — had used the back-stab clips on the receptacle rather than the screw terminals. Back-stabbed connections were the source of more headaches than John could count: quick and convenient when new, unreliable over decades as the spring tension gradually gave up. He removed the receptacle, installed a new one, made clean connections on the screw terminals the way it should have been done the first time, and tucked it neatly back into the box.
The second outlet, on the same wall, told a more interesting story. When he opened it up, he found a wire on the back of the receptacle with the insulation burned — not dramatically, not dangerously, but burned: the dark, crackling discoloration of a connection that had been arcing for a long time. There was the culprit. A bad backstab connection creating heat, heat creating resistance, resistance causing the lamp to blink and eventually fail.
“Found your problem,” he called.
Doris appeared in the doorway. “That bad?”
“Not dangerous, but it needed to be caught.” He showed her the burned wire before he worked on it. “This is what was causing the flickering. The connection had been arcing — creating a little spark every time current passed through. Enough to make a lamp blink. Enough to eventually fail.”
She leaned in to look, closer than she needed to. He could smell her perfume — something dark and expensive that he didn’t recognize, which meant she’d developed new tastes since he’d known her. That seemed right.
“So what do you do with it?”
“Cut back past the damage, get to clean wire, and pigtail it correctly.” He worked as he talked — stripping the wire back, twisting in a short pigtail, capping it properly, installing a brand-new receptacle and making the connections with the respect they deserved. He closed the outlet up, ran a quick test. Clean. Solid. Done.
“Good as it’s going to get without rewiring the whole house,” he told her, “which you don’t need.”
“How do you know what I need?” she said, and there was enough old warmth and old edge in it simultaneously that for a moment they were both thirty years old again, standing in the kitchen of their first apartment, fighting about something that had mattered enormously and was now completely forgotten.
He looked at her steadily. “I know what the house needs,” he said.
She smiled — the real one, the one he had spent years trying to earn and then years trying to forget. “Fair,” she said.
Part Six: The Wine
He had meant to be gone by noon.
He went back to the basement, replaced the panel cover, confirmed everything was in order, and came upstairs to find Doris had changed out of her work outfit and into something that was still extremely Doris — dark, fitted, unselfconscious — and was opening a bottle of red wine.
Gerald had been released from his cage. He’d dressed, left a cash envelope on the side table with the air of a man leaving a tip at a four-star restaurant, and let himself out with a quiet “Thank you, Doris” and a brief, neutral nod at John on his way through.
John had nodded back.
Now he stood in the kitchen doorway watching his ex-wife work a corkscrew with the casual authority of someone who knew what she wanted and had no interest in pretending otherwise.
“You don’t have to offer me wine,” he said.
“I’m aware.” She poured two glasses and set one on the counter near him. “I’m offering you wine because I want to. You can take it or leave it.”
He took it.
They sat at her kitchen table, and for the first time in — he counted backwards — more than a decade, they talked without anger as the organizing principle. She told him about the work: how she’d stumbled into it after the divorce, during a period of reinvention, and found that it suited her in ways she’d never anticipated — the control, the clear agreements, the surprising intimacy of it, the very good money. She told him with the matter-of-fact directness of someone who had long since stopped caring about other people’s comfort with the subject.
He listened the way he had never quite learned to listen when they were young and married and convinced they each knew what the other meant before the sentence was finished.
“We were bad at that,” he said at one point. “The —” he gestured, searching for the word.
“Everything below the surface,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“We were twenty-nine,” she said. “We didn’t know what was below our own surfaces, let alone each other’s.”
The bottle was finished before either of them quite noticed.
Part Seven: The Morning
He woke to pale light coming through curtains he didn’t recognize.
It came back in the correct order: the wine, the conversation that had outlasted the wine, the moment somewhere in the late evening when ten years of careful distance had simply folded and they’d looked at each other with the clarity that comes either from wine or from truth or from both arriving at the same time.
He lay in Doris’s bed and looked at the ceiling.
From the other room he heard her voice — calm, professional, with the particular authority she seemed to have settled into so completely. “All right, David. Up we go.” A pause. The sound of a cage opening. Soft footsteps. The murmur of a man gathering himself, the quiet click of the front door.
John got up, used the bathroom, found his shirt.
Doris appeared in the bedroom doorway, shoes already on, something amused in her expression. “Coffee?”
“I’ve got a job at eight.”
“I have someone coming at ten.” She tilted her head. “Twenty minutes for coffee isn’t going to break either of our schedules.”
He followed her to the kitchen.
They drank their coffee standing up, at the counter, the way people do when they both have somewhere to be and neither one wants to be the first to leave.
“This doesn’t have to be a thing,” she said.
“No,” he agreed.
“But it could be,” she said. “If we were smarter about it this time.”
He thought about that. He thought about the man he’d been at twenty-nine — anxious, proud, unable to ask for what he wanted because he’d only half-understood what that was. He thought about the work he’d done since then, the steadiness he’d built, the long education in what he actually valued and what he’d only thought he valued.
He thought about an outlet that had been back-stabbed wrong for sixty years, causing small damage so gradually that no one had noticed until they looked closely.
“I think we’re smarter,” he said.
She studied him over the rim of her cup. “Wednesday,” she said. “I’m free Wednesday evening.”
“I’ll be here,” he said.
He picked up his tool bag, walked down her front steps, and climbed into his truck. The morning was cool and bright. He had a full day of work ahead and he was, for the first time in a long time, already looking forward to Wednesday.
He pulled away from the curb on Sycamore Lane, and for the first time in over ten years, he was glad an unknown number had called.
*End*
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