A Small Favor to Ask
A Leelanau / Myron Tuttle Short Story
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“Hello?”
“Myron, it’s Jeannie, Ronny’s…”
“I’d recognize your voice anywhere, Jeannie, how are you?”
“Good, good, how’s the big city treating you?”
“It’s ok, you know, not everything I thought, or feared for that matter, but it’s ok.”
“Oh, that’s good Myron, gosh we miss you, and Aggie, too, of course.”
“Well, we all miss Aggie.”
“Yeah, we sure do. Look, I don’t want to keep you long, but I have a small favor to ask.”
“Ok.”
“Ronny’s got another wild idea, again.”
“Uh-oh, what’s he up to now?”
“Well you remember the little house my grandparents lived in when they got old. It was a one and half story behind the barn there?”
“Sure, I remember it.”
“Well, Ronny turned the first floor into a shop after the grandparents died, and then after our oldest daughter Cathy graduated he redid the second floor, adding another bathroom and, well he made it into an apartment so the kids could live there while they did whatever, local college or trade school, and they had a small measure of you know independence.”
“Right, I remember all this, in fact I helped Ronny as a second set of hands along with your boys on the project, they were kind of young though.”
“Yep, yep, I remember. Well, suddenly Ronny got it into his head to put this out on the internet as an overnight rental, a b and b even. He’s all excited about the windfall of cash about to come our way. I’m worried about the avalanche of work about to come my way. He thinks I’m going to make these people breakfast, clean up whatever mess they make, wash their dishes, wash, dry and fold all the towels and linen. Hell, I’m 73 Myron, I’ve got no energy to run a hotel and restaurant. Ronny’s gone mad!”
Jeannie finished her tirade and sat down next to her kitchen table. Myron took the lull in the conversation to put the phone on speaker and find a beer in the back of the refrigerator, or icebox as he called it. He was smiling broadly, and strangely the report he just heard made him homesick for the first time. He thought for a moment that it had already been 6 weeks at least since he moved to the city and this was really the first time he thought about the place he was born and had lived for 72 years. There was just so much he had to learn and manage about the new place, his new work at the hospital, new friends. To hear an old voice and think about his old friend, a man he knew since before kindergarten, was enough to make him drop his head in loneliness and despair. How could he have gone this long and not called Ronny?
“You still there, Myron?”
“Sure, sure, Jeannie.” And then after another long moment, “I’m you know just not sure how I can help you out here. You know what he’s like, once he gets an idea.”
“You’re not kidding. So here’s what I was thinking. Look, Ronny asked me to do the writeup for the internet, describing the place. He can barely write his own name, you know. And I remembered that you used to write those funny little columns for the student newspaper in high school, maybe, well, maybe you could put together a short description of the apartment on the second floor of that old place for me?”
“But I don’t understand? How would that help you?”
“Well, you know, just write it so no one in their right mind would ever consider coming here for a weekend or even a night. Cathy said she’d help me setup our little page on the site, too, and make it look as bad as it sounds.”
“Well, I guess I could give it a try.”
“Do you know how to do email? Cathy said it would be best if you could type it up on an email and send it to her.”
“Email, huh, well I think my son Jay has email, I’ve heard him mention it before.”
“Oh, that would be great Myron. Cathy told me to tell you this secret code, too, it’s cathy1969atmail.com. Just give that to Jay and he’ll know what to do.”
Myron wrote down the secret code and put it on the refrigerator so he wouldn’t forget about it.
“OK, well I’ll see what I can do, Jeannie, and you take care ok?”
“You too Myron, bye.”
“Hello?”
“Hey Dad, it’s Jason.”
“Hi Jay, how’s it going?”
“You know, you’re the only person in the world who still calls me Jay?”
“I feel blessed. What do you need?”
“Are you busy, or something?”
“You know it’s not like I was sitting here in the dark waiting for you to call, I have some friends over, the chicken wings were just delivered and the game is on.”
“You had chicken wings delivered?”
“Yeah, Jay, they do that here in the big city, weisenheimer, now what do you need? (Muffled, “Hey, leave me a few you bastards.”)
“Yeah, it’s just a small favor to ask. Ron and Jeannie’s daughter Cathy called and they said you were going to send something you’d written or something?”
“Right, come on over tomorrow on your way home and we’ll go over it together, ok?.”
“Yeah, Ok Dad, enjoy the game.”
“Will do, bye.”
Myron hung up the phone, and remembered Jeannie’s request on the icebox door . He hurried back to the game with a new beer in hand and wings in his eyes.
“Hello?”
“Hi Myron, it’s Cathy, Ron and Jeannie’s daughter.”
“Sure, I have a slight recollection, what’s up?
“Oh, I hope I’m not disturbing you?”
“Well, it’s first and goal from the 7…”
“Oh, right the playoffs, I didn’t know you were a fan?”
“How can I be of assistance?”
“Be of assistance? Is this Myron Tuttle?”
“C’mon, now Cathy, spill it, please!”
“Ok, Ok, I just have a small favor to ask. The description can only be 1500 characters.”
“I have no idea what that means. Nor do I really…”
“It just means that you have to count all the letters and the spaces between words and the punctuation, too.”
“Oh, that’s all? Well, I feel lucky today, maybe I’ll play the lottery.”
Myron hung up the phone and hurried back to the game.
“Helllooo?”
“Hi Dad, it’s Lena.”
“Well, hello Lena, what’s up?”
“Oh not too much, how are you?”
“Good, it’s halftime so my friend Bertie and I are making queso, trying to get it done before the second half.”
“Wow, queso, I didn’t know you liked queso?”
“What’s not to like? Anyway, how can I help? We’re just adding the cheese now.”
“Um, ok, well, I just had a small favor to ask?”
(Muffled: “No, Bertie, we add the chiles at the end, along with some of their juice.”)
“What exactly?”
“Well, did you talk to Ronny’s daughter Cathy? She said you were going to do something for Jeannie, but now you reneged or something…”
“I didn’t neg or reneg. I’m simply trying to watch a football game, I’ll get to it when I get to it, and I have a small favor to ask; please call her back before she calls me again. It’s kickoff. Bye!”
“Bye.”
The next day after a morning shift at the hospital, Myron returned home and on his way to make himself some lunch saw again the reminder on the door of the icebox: He owed Jeannie a description of rental. With a ham sandwich in hand, Myron began to write and surprisingly the words came easily:
Well, they can count the characters, Myron thought. His bowling team had a game that night. In the car he remembered to call Jay. He left a voice mail: Hey, it’s the last person in the world to call you Jay. The writeup for Jeannie is on the icebox. You know where the key is. I won’t be home until late, bowling. Take care.
Three months later, with spring in the air finally, the old studio apartment was on the internet, waiting to be let to those with more money than they knew what do with. Ron was excited about the possible windfall, and his wife Jeannie was thrilled with the photos that emphasized the farm yard with frozen piles and the down at the heels look of the furniture, carpet and everything in between. The writeup was perfect.
“Why you’d be an idiot to spend a weekend there, especially at 300 bucks a night” Jeannie whispered to her daughter after the final touches were applied. They had a good laugh, sure they did. “Plus cleaning fees,” Cathy added, letting out a howl of laughter.
The following Tuesday just three days later Jeannie was blindsided by seven requests for the studio. It looked like the month of May and one weekend in June were already submitted for approval. Jeannie was in a panic. What to do now? As soon as Ron left to meet the boys for a game of pool, she was on the phone to Cathy.
“What should I tell these people? For God’s sake Cathy, if Ron finds out that I turned down all this money, why it’s almost three grand, plus the cleaning fees and the rest. What should I do?”
“Oh lord, you’re kidding right? These could just be people playing with us. Let’s see what happens when you accept one of them, for the first weekend in May. Let’s see if it actually charges their credit card?”
“Ok.” Jeannie, with Cathy following along, approved the request. The system turned for a minute, and then a message appeared. The down payment of half was charged successfully. On May 4 and 5, Eliot and Amber were coming to stay at the farm.
“I my gosh, Cathy, it worked, it’s real, they’re coming in less than a month!”
That night Jeannie, with Cathy on speakerphone, confessed “the whole shebang” as she called it to Ronny. He finally took a moment to read the piece that Myron had written and really lost it.
“Where the hell am I supposed to find animals, we haven’t had animals in 20 years,” Ronny screamed. For gosh sakes, and what’s this about an outdoor shower, for Chrissake, you’ve made a mess of it, and you took easy money and made it a project for sure.”
“Well, now you know how I feel, I’ve got to do all kinds of work to get the place clean,” defended Jeannie.
“Actually Mom, maybe that’s not true.”
The next morning Ronny was on the phone early. He bought a dozen old hens from Jim B down the road. They didn’t lay very many eggs anymore, but they were living, pecking chickens, which was fine by Ronny, and two of them, Jim B vouched, were old roosters who knew how to make a ruckus most of the morning. I could sneak a few brown eggs out to the barn every morning if I had to, Ronny reasoned. He also made a call to his old friend Myron and swore and stomped for a couple of minutes about the betrayal of the studio description while Myron muted his phone to keep his laughter from escalating the situation. Ronny demanded as recompense that Myron return that weekend and help erect an outdoor shower. “Aww hell, Ronny, don’t you have a hose you could just use?” In the end, after more cussing and yelling, he agreed to drive up that weekend and help out.
Chickens were pretty common, but the goats and the milk cow were altogether different propositions, but Ronny eventually collected a little arkful of beasts: A three legged goat with the added benefit of not being able to jump on a car’s hood, but no one could guarantee it; several demonstrative geese of different varieties that did not like moving to a new barn; a large, nameless turtle, and a milk cow just weeks away from the hamburger mill; and with the chicken feed tossed on the ground every morning the mice reappeared along with a barn owl. Jeannie picked up a stray cat, as well.
On Saturday Myron showed up, ready for a fight, but Ronny was in no mood for nonsense; the flame of a project to complete was lit and the two of them were on the case. They found an old, large black barrel that Ronny kept rags in. It was fairly clean inside and had a lid. This gave them the key idea they were looking for all morning.
Myron rolled the empty barrel to the middle of the lawn between the house and the barn, out in full sunshine all day. Meanwhile Ronny collected all of the hoses from the barn and brought them out to the barrel. Together the two men screwed all the hoses together and then wound them inside the barrel. They had the two ends come out the hole in the lid. They connected one end to the water from the house and one to another hose that they positioned on a tree limb. Underneath the limb they erected a simple 2 x 4 three sided structure covered with an old tarp, and made a floor of a pallet with a pretty nice piece of plywood on top. Ronny hated using the plywood like this, but it was time to make tough decisions. To the hose end draped over the tree limb they added a garden wand with a shutoff. They turned the water on, and an hour later were thrilled to see almost 6 minutes a warm water come out of the wand.
“That oughta be enough,” said Ronny, “that’s more hot water than I had until I was 18!”
Myron agreed. In the meanwhile the ladies had taken most of Ronny’s collected junk out of his workshop; endless pieces of motorcycle this and that, from engine parts to mufflers, that were to be part of a new cycle any year now. These were all crated up in the yard and now Myron and Ronny walked the crates into the barn. In their stead, the men carried into the workshop armfuls of old farm tools; scythes and wooden rakes not used in a hundred years.
The work continued like this for the weekend and then off and on for the next two weeks. Jeannie pushed as much as she could on Ronny since it was his idea, and he eventually had the place looking spiff, and the barn full of an admittedly odd assortment of animals. On Friday afternoon Amber and Eliot showed up just after supper. Ronny escorted them to the the little outbuilding second floor apartment where they were to stay for the next two nights. He bid them good night and raced back to the TV and his favorite show, Wheel of Fortune.
The next day about eleven in the morning, Eliot and Amber appeared at the back door, looking for coffee. They had actually stopped at the barn and found the eggs Ronny left there. Without much to say, Jeannie got the breakfast going and put an opened bottle of Canadian Club on the counter, telling the guests to help themselves.
After cleanup, Ronny came into the house looking for lunch, but instead caught a glance from Jeannie and decided to see what he could put together himself. Jeannie stood at the kitchen window above the sink, and leaned forward. “Is that what I think it is?” she asked, looking in the direction of the new shower.
Ronny, stood behind her, with his hands on her hips, “If it ain’t it sure is a damned good imitation,” he said.
“Don’t get any ideas,” exclaimed Jeannie.
Unfortunately for Eliot and Amber, just as their morning celebration at the farm was coming to an exciting finish, the hot water ran out. The 52 degree well water hit them like birdshot and they raced out of the shower and into their lodgings shrieking with laughter.
“Holy Toledo,” Jeannie and Ronny said together, watching the two run off together.
Later that day, while hanging wash, Jeannie saw the two of them, fully clothed now, giving one of the old scythes a workout in a thick grass row of the orchard. The boyfriend tried first, looking like he had a fair idea of the process. Then the girlfriend took the tool and while the boy tried to explain the hand positions, she gave it a twirl that would have cut his ankle good and deep if he hadn’t jumped into the air at the last moment. He yelled at her then, and she threw the scythe and ran off a little ways. He ran after her, and after some consolation, the two of them, in matching overalls, took a walk through the orchard together.
The next morning was a replay of the first, right through the suddenly cold shower. But afterwards the city couple were not keen for the scythe, and asked Ronny if they could take out the tractor. Eliot jumped up into the seat and while Ronny was explaining the clutch and the gears, the boy let it fly in reverse and ran over Ronny’s foot.
“These two are dangerous, for gosh sakes,” complained Ronny, in the kitchen afterwards, looking at his naked foot, “I hope like hell I’m not going to lose a toe nail again.”
“Yeah, the farm weekend is not the way to sell this Ronny, these people have no idea what the hell they’re doing. Someone’s going to get hurt.”
That afternoon, on their way home the young couple stopped to say thank you! They had enjoyed themselves so much and were hoping to rent the place for a full week in the summer, and is there a discount if they took seven nights?
Jeannie, pretty quick with the math, was ready to say $2000 for the week, but Ronny butted in and told them the summer weekends were already sold out.
He had Cathy take down the rental that afternoon, as well. “I just can’t see two naked people running around the farm, and have my foot run over, all in the say day. I’m not as tough as I used to be!”
Myron got the whole lowdown that Monday, and it became one of the best stories he ever told in the hospital lunchroom. While moving patients from floor to floor he often thought about those two city types running across the yard naked. Boy that small favor was a helluva bargain, he thought.