Waterproofing by Abe Margel

Waterproofing by Abe Margel

Whenever my cousin Eric was mentioned the adjective sleazebag always came to mind.

It was obvious he was successful. He drove a black BMW, had a cottage in Muskoka and, according to rumour, a mistress. Not always an easy man to like, he could be arrogant and at times aggressive. A prosperous businessman he owned Greater Toronto Electrical Services.

At family gatherings he’d be amiable for a while but then slip into boasting about his car, boat, chalet and how he’d gotten the better of a business deal, outwitted a competitor. There were even occasions he’d tell us of how he bribed someone, as if corrupting a person was something to be proud of.

I recall one of his visits to our house when I was a teenager.

“You have to lay on the charm, take the construction foreman, superintendent, or project manager or maybe all three, out for lunch, or give them a new laptop, or even a free trip to Vegas. It depends on how big a contract is at stake.”

A burly man, he slowly ran his fingers through his thick brown hair. Our late grandfather’s gold and onyx signet ring was prominent on his left index finger. On his wrist he wore a gold and black Omega watch he’d bought to match the ring.

“That doesn’t mean I cut corners on the job. No way. Everything is done to code, whether it’s new construction or renovations.”

I couldn’t believe him.

“I’ve got daughters but you Simon, you’ll be through with high school soon so you should come in with me, train as an electrician.”

“Dad wants me and Trudy to take over the deli.”

“Nah, there’s no profit in the deli. It’s a lot of work and at the end of the day you don’t have much to show for it. Electrician is a good profession. As an electrician you get to move around. You have to use your head, figure out why things don’t work right, understand which wire goes where. It never gets boring. You finish a project and you move on to the next.”

He waved a hand at me. “It’s not all roses though, Simon. You better be careful not to fall off a ladder or get electrocuted. But it pays really well.”

At business he was all business. He rarely praised the work of any of the eight electricians he employed. He was constantly on their backs reminding them to do their jobs quickly. Perfection was an unnecessary luxury.

Time is money, was an aphorism he never tired of repeating.

He was eight years my senior. When I was growing up he largely ignored me. After my dad died he must have felt sorry for my sister Trudy and me, even though we were no longer children, and he began stopping by our family’s deli to say hello.

Trudy and I always cringed when he showed up at the restaurant. He would not keep his hands to himself and pestered our waitresses, especially pretty Doris.

“I can’t go on working here,” Doris said, “if Eric keeps showing up, looking at me like he does, standing too close, even patting my ass. I’m married and even if I wasn’t, he wouldn’t be on my dance card.”

I told her I understood and would talk to him.

“You better make it clear he’s to mind his manners around the rest of the staff too,” my wife Jenny said.

His being a relative I wanted to be diplomatic but at the same time put him on notice. I spoke with him the next time he came in for a meal. “Before he died my dad asked you to stay away from our staff and now I’m telling you not to bother Doris or the other waitresses. Don’t come to the deli unless you want to eat and only eat.”

“What, I never did anything to them,” he said lifting his hands, palms up, into the air as if astonished.

“For God’s sake, you’re married and got kids. Act like an adult.”

But when it came to women he had his own rules.

“He’s a pig,” my dad once said to me. “He runs after anything in a skirt. Years ago he even got beat up by an angry husband but it taught him nothing. I pity his wife.”

After I lectured him, Eric decided to eat elsewhere for a few months but later resumed his visits. Doris was still working at our restaurant.

& & &

My dad was only five feet five inches tall but weighed two hundred pounds. He also worked sixty hours a week. When he inherited my grandfather’s deli he expanded it into the two stores next door, fixed up the décor and advertised. Business grew wonderfully. That’s when he dropped dead. My mother had no interest in taking over the restaurant. She worked as an optician and was not willing to give it up.

It took three generations but our restaurant and its large lot on the corner of Dufferin Street and Maagaard Avenue became valuable. This windfall had nothing to do with the meals we sold. In 2019 Stall and Parker Developments Ltd. came knocking.

The smoked-glass door swung open. From across the street the sounds of hammering and the squeal of machinery came from the skyscraper going up, up.

“Are you Simon Hersh, the owner of this place?” said a short man in a gray suit and matching tie. His sweaty face reminded me of an owl, round and predatory. He took a deep breath. The aromas of corned beef, dill pickles and potato salad were everywhere. A little smile danced on his lips as he surveyed the place. It was a large eatery with three adjoining rooms capable of comfortably seating a hundred and fifty patrons. At the front just past the entrance, a long counter served customers who wanted take out.

“Co-owner,” I said. “My sister Trudy owns the other half. Why?”

“Hi, I’m Stan Parker.” He thrust out his plump hand and we shook. Doing a half turn he scanned the room. “Nice place you got here.”

It was a Friday afternoon and the regulars had shown up. At one table sat three middle-aged women gossiping. As usual they’d ordered pastrami sandwiches and coleslaw followed by large slices of chocolate cake. Near them two octogenarian men sat leaning over a little square table playing checkers and drinking espresso.

In a booth sat Art, a guy I’d known since high school. He was well-dressed in a crisp blazer and expensive blue jeans. With him were two men I didn’t recognize, a wiry fellow wearing silver-framed glasses and a bald old man in a wrinkled windbreaker and dress pants. They were having an animated conversation but stopped when they noticed Stan Parker look their way. After he turned back to me, they resumed their discussion only not as loud.

When we were kids, Art and I hung out until he got arrested for shoplifting and my parents persuaded me to spend less time with him. Now he was married and ran a paving business.

“Where can we talk in private?” Stan Parker said.

At the back in the cluttered office he told me wanted to buy our restaurant.

 “This is a good location so we’re making a generous offer,” he said, “millions.”

“I’ll have to talk to my sister and wife about it.”

“Of course. I’ll phone you early next week so we can get the ball rolling.”

After Parker left, I noticed Art’s group had been joined by a brawny man with curly blond hair and a blond mustache. He was in his mid-thirties and wore khaki pants and a checkered shirt.

Just then my cousin Eric walked in. As he headed for the counter Art jumped up from his seat and approached him. He invited Eric to join the others in the booth. They had only just sat down when I heard raised voices. The chatter in the deli stopped abruptly. Both Eric and the blond haired guy in the checkered shirt were now standing, leaning in toward each other, their faces filled with rage. Eric raised a fist but before he could do anything the other man gave him a shove forcing him to stagger backwards. I rushed over.

“Hey, quiet down you guys,” I said, doing my best to sound authoritative but frightened they might turn on me. “One or both of you has to leave.” I pointed first to Eric then to the other man.

“To hell with it,” Eric said as he turned around and headed out the door.

The two octogenarians quickly dropped a few dollars on their table and left just as new customers entered the restaurant. Everything settled down.

Doris went over to the booth and brought the guy in thein the checkered shirt a large bowl of chicken soup. Then she leaned over and kissed him.

She turned toward me, a grin on her lovely face. “I can see you don’t recognize him. Come along.” She led me back to the booth. “Simon, you remember Fred, my husband.”

“Yes. We met years ago. You had a beard then?”

“Yeah, that was me.”

Fred was in the process of handing the other men his business card and gave me one as well. It read Long Creek Concrete Mixing. A red and black line drawing of a mixer truck covered half the card.

I wondered what the dispute was between Eric and Fred and what Doris’ husband was doing talking to Art but I kept these questions to myself.

“You never know,” he said with a forced grin, “when you’ll need a load of concrete.”

His thick protruding neck muscles, the threatening glint in his cold blue eyes, the way his chin thrust forward when he spoke, made it clear to me this was not a man you wanted to get into an argument with.

“If you say so,” I replied, not convinced. I shoved the card into my pocket and hurried away to bring menus to a table with three, just arrived, customers. During the week when it was usually less busy we kept part of the eatery cordoned off, otherwise we’d have been running all over the place to serve the few customers who appeared.

The deli was a good business and supported both Trudy’s and my family but it involved long hours and hard work. Our spouses worked in the eatery alongside us.

Graham, Trudy’s husband, preferred to stay in the kitchen and cook. He was a taciturn, skinny guy who had majored in sociology at McGill. He smiled a lot but wasn’t one for small talk except when it came to hockey.

“The Leafs need more players with heart. Kadri and Johnsson are great but they aren’t getting all the ice time they should. Babcock is asleep at the wheel. A better coach would make all the difference.”

At one point Graham suggested we open a second restaurant in Pickering.

“The area doesn’t have a downtown but Pickering Town Centre would be a fine location,” he said. “It’s just crying out for a deli like ours.”

But it wasn’t to be. Money walked into our restaurant in the form of Stall and Parker Developments Ltd. with a very lucrative offer and the four of us suddenly found we had comfortably retired.

The eatery and the large lot it sat on sold for fourteen million dollars. I was fifty-one and Jenny forty-eight.

“We’re now free to enjoy life,” she said sounding giddy. “I want to visit France, China and Israel. And now we can stay at the best hotels.”

After Trudy and I signed the final sales papers I walked into the lot behind the deli. The only things back there were a green dumpster and Oliver’s tent. Oliver had shown up three years earlier and no matter how hard I tried to help him he refused. His was a sad story. He’d once had a steady job and a wife but his drinking ruined his life. Ending up on the pavement and penniless, he eventually stopped boozing but got used to an unencumbered life on the street, at least that’s what he claimed.

“No, no, I love my freedom,” he said. “I don’t like living between four walls. Too much responsibility, paying bills, cleaning, not disturbing the neighbours.”

His approaching eviction wasn’t news to him.

“You can’t stop progress,” he laughed, shaking his gray head. “It was bound to happen. There’s a spot not far from here behind the Seven Eleven I’ve been keeping as a backup so I’ll be alright. Anyway this neighbourhood has gone downhill. Just yesterday I had to break up a fight right where you’re standing.”

“A fight?”

“Two idiots, your cousin Eric and some big blond guy were having it out, throwing punches, screaming about a girl called Doris. I got them to stop. If I had a phone I might have called the cops.”

“God, that sounds terrible.” I shook my head. “The blond guy was probably Fred, Doris our waitress’ husband. Anyone hurt?”

“No, it didn’t look like it.”

“Good. At least it ended okay.” Long pause. “You know as of Monday we’re closed, so here,” I said as I slipped him five twenty dollar bills. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

Jenny and I consulted a fee-only financial planner, someone we knew from our restaurant business. She was an older woman and wasn’t about to allow us to squander our recent windfall.

“Blue chip stocks, ETFs and bonds,” she said to Jenny and me, “only sound investments. You want to give to charity and relatives, good, but you can’t be foolish about how much you provide or you’ll soon be broke.”

That did not mean we became too thrifty. The first thing I did was get rid of my twelve-year-old Civic and lease a red Lexus sedan. Jenny settled on a silver Volvo SUV.

“I know it’s big,” she said, sounding defensive, “but it gives me room in case I need to drive the kids somewhere.” The kids, however, didn’t live at home anymore. Both our sons were out of the house and had good jobs after graduating from university.

Now that we could afford it, we chose to move out of our sixty-year-old ranch-style house into a bigger, newer home.

We selected an area not too far from where we were living, near Sheppard and Bathurst. The uptown neighbourhood was quiet, had mature trees, a community centre and a large strip mall nearby. You could even hear the birds sing, there was so little traffic.

Jenny and I asked a real-estate agent we’d known for years to find a bungalow on a good size lot in the area. We intended to tear down an old house and replace it with a structure of about three-thousand five hundred square feet. There were other homes of that size and bigger being built in the area already.

“Hey,” my cousin Eric said with a toothy smile, “you’re lucky you’ve got me for a relative, somebody you can trust. I’m an electrician. I know construction. I’ve worked with real-estate agents, plumbers, bricklayers, architects, contractors, you name it. Leave it to me. I’ll connect you to the right people.”

Hearing him I had the urge to run but didn’t. He was family, otherwise Jenny and I would not have had anything to do with him.

“Yeah, I know he’s a jerk,” Jenny said. “It’s an open secret he cheats on Liba, always has. Still, I like her and don’t want us to be responsible for a split in the family.” Liba had grown up across the street from Trudy and me. She’d been a lonely, latchkey kid, her parents were constantly away at work so she spent a lot of time at our place and in some ways she was a big sister to us.  

“Fine,” I said, “he can make a profit but I’m not having him steal us blind, overcharge us for the construction.”

A small house on Hounslow Avenue was knocked down to make way for our monster home. But before they could start to pour the concrete foundation Covid 19 struck. We hid out in our house, watched TV, read and ordered in groceries. The hole in the ground we owned on Hounslow collected rainwater. If we’d continued running the deli we’d have gone broke. The Covid plague took over everyone’s lives. People we knew got sick. An elderly neighbour of ours died as did an uncle of mine in Cincinnati. It was a scary time.

Then the vaccines arrived. Slowly people began to take up their old lives. In November 2022 Jenny and I flew down to Miami Beach where we rented a condo for the winter. We’d never even been to Florida before. Palm trees, wide boulevards, a wonderful view of the ocean, it was paradise to us. 

In 2023 with Covid under control, life had mostly returned to normal.

In June there was a family wedding in Montreal Jenny and I attended. Eric was there but his wife Liba was not. They had separated. He wasn’t alone however. On his arm was a new girlfriend, a beautiful woman half his age in a red dress and pearl earrings. That didn’t stop him. As he got drunk he tried to chat up other young women and invited them to dance.

That fall they finally poured the concrete basement of what was to be our new house.  It was then Eric disappeared.

“He’s gone,” Liba said over the phone to me. “Wednesday he was supposed to come by with papers and money. I couldn’t find him. He didn’t answer his phone and no one I know has seen him, not even his lawyer. I waited till Friday morning and finally I phoned the police. They weren’t really interested until Monday when he still hadn’t been heard from. Now it’s Tuesday and his pickup is covered in dust parked in Scarborough in front of the last construction site he was working at.” She began to cry. “That bastard. Where is he? I’ve been calling everyone I could think of who might know where he is, so now I’m calling you.”

“Yes, we heard from Trudy about his being gone but I wouldn’t be surprised if he just took off with some woman,” I immediately regretted my words. “I can’t help you Liba. I’m so sorry.”

“He’d hang out at the deli sometimes before it closed down,” she said. “Is there anyone from there, from those days who might have some information?”

“I don’t think so. Anyway it’s not as if I took down the phone numbers of all the people he talked to. It’s been five years since the restaurant closed. We haven’t been in contact with any of the customers or staff since then.”

Eventually police showed up at our door to ask questions but Jenny and I knew nothing.

“Enemies? No I don’t think he had enemies,” I said to the police officer, a woman in her early forties. Why should I be the one to tell her about the hostility he’d provoked in his employees and business competitors? Anyway she’d no doubt already heard everything from others. But I had to say something.

“Well maybe a jealous boyfriend or husband.” I shrugged. “He ran after women constantly. But if you told him to back off he did. He wasn’t looking for trouble, at least not from what I saw. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s found a woman and ran off for a while. He’ll be back when he’s calmed down, once his feet are back on the ground.” But I wasn’t really sure he would be back.

“Eric’s probably taken off with his mistress for Mexico,” Graham said when we had him and Trudy over for lunch. “Everyone knows he’s spent more time in bed with her than with Liba.”  This was a new girlfriend, a young woman from Quebec City. “Liba told us he cleaned out his company’s bank account, over three hundred thousand dollars.”

“The cops were here yesterday asking questions,” Jenny said, “two detectives like in the movies only one was a middle-aged woman and the other a balding guy. We couldn’t help them but they told us the girlfriend is living in Toronto and hadn’t heard from him either.”

On July 16, 2024 the sky grew dark and the heavens opened up. It seemed as if Niagara Falls had made a detour onto our street.

We’d been living in our new palace for a year and a half. The house was a modernist white brick and glass cube with a rose garden in back and marigolds and petunias in front. An architect Eric recommended designed the home. I loved it but Jenny was less enthusiastic. Inside, the furnishings were straight out of some futuristic movie, chrome, glass, and leather imported from Norway and Italy. The two exceptions were in the master bedroom and basement. Jenny insisted on more traditional furniture of oak and maple in those areas.

“The rest of the house looks like some ad for a flooring company,” she said soon after we moved in. “Even the kitchen is cold and uninviting.”

“You’ll get used to it,” I said.

Jenny and I stood in the living room dry and safe looking out a plate glass window at the display of lightning and torrents of rain. We both held tumblers of brandy and ice as we gazed at the flowers in our front garden being pounded into the earth. But it wasn’t just our neighbourhood. Large swaths of the city were flooded.

“I’m going down to watch TV,” Jenny said as she placed her tumbler on an end table. “Coming with?”

“In a few minutes. I can’t stop staring at the rain.”

Moments later Jenny came running up the stairs. “Water, there’s water all over the basement floor. Come quick.”

While it wasn’t exactly a great flood nevertheless one corner in the largest room was wet. By the time the storm had passed the basement was soaked wall to wall. In the morning the insurance had a company come to dry out the place using huge fans.

“It’s a new house,” I said to the head of the crew. “It shouldn’t be leaking like this.”

“You’ve got a crack in the wall. Actually two cracks.” A very tall man with an eastern European accent said. “Look, see over here and over here.” With a thick callused finger he pointed at the fractures in the concrete.

“New house? It should be under warranty. The insurance will likely pay for the restoration but I don’t think it’ll pay to fix whatever caused the damage. You or the house warranty people will have to foot the bill. But call your insurance to make sure.”

I phoned my lawyer instead.

 “I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Water damage to a new house shouldn’t happen. Either your home insurance or more likely the corporation that warrantees new home builds in Ontario, Tarion, should make it right.”

A few days later large men with shovels were digging down the outside wall of my basement. It was very demanding work on a hot day and I stayed out of their way except to offer them cold drinks.

Hours passed, when suddenly someone was at my door ringing insistently.

“Come quick, man,” said one of the workers, a sturdy black fellow with dreadlocks.

“What is it?”

“Oh, man you won’t believe it. Come now!”

Seven feet down pressed against the house’s concrete wall lay a half exposed rotting body.

“I know him,” I said. Looking up at me, his curly blond hair and mustache sprinkled with dirt was Fred, Doris’ husband.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Abe Margel 2024