Page 268 of The Parkers' Handsome Holiday
I laughed. “I see that, buddy,” I said.
Dad crouched down so that he was almost at Ethan’s height. “Should we make a bet?” he asked, grinning at the boy. “How much snow do you think we’re going to get tonight?”
“A lot,” Ethan said, scrunching up his face as he thought. “Maybe fourteen inches,” he finally said. “And if I’m right, you have to make sugar on snow!”
Dad laughed. “Sure thing,” he said, shaking hands with the young boy.
Yet again, I wondered why Dad was never more talkative with me. Watching him with my son, it was like he was an entirely different person. Sometimes, in my darker moments, it made me wonder what it was that I had done to make Dad dislike me the way that he sometimes seemed to. But I knew that wasn’t fair. This was just the way that Dad’s and my relationship had always been.
Really, I was just glad that he didn’t shut Ethan out. He seemed to enjoy the kid’s company just as much as Ethan enjoyed his Gramps’ company, which was a relief since there were times when I got called up to the mountain for some emergency maintenance when Ethan wasn’t at school, times when I didn’t have a chance to hunt down a babysitter for him.
It was always a relief to have Dad around at those times.
Like right now, in fact. My phone buzzed as Dad and Ethan chatted about the storm. Ethan was telling Dad all about how excited he was to go skiing again that year, and Dad was telling him that maybe we could build a little ski hill in the backyard until I got the chance to take the boy up on the hill after this storm. I didn’t have the heart to remind both of them that Park City snow was usually too dry to pack together into a small hill like that. Let them dream.
Anyway, Dad was an engineer. He was probably already counting on the dry snow and figuring out how to inject it with the perfect amount of water to hold it together but still keep it from icing. Let them dream and scheme.
I answered my phone. “Hello?”
“Hey, Adam,” Gretchen, my boss, said. “We just got a call that there’s a problem with a pipe in one of the rental condos on the resort. One of the Pine Ridge ones. I know we’ve got this big storm that’s just about to come through, so the sooner we can get things fixed, the better. They don’t have any hot water at the moment, and you know what that means to our guests.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. I understood it: not having any hot water sucked. But from Gretchen’s tone, I could tell that whoever was in the condo was acting like a lack of hot water was equivalent to the apocalypse, and like we were idiots for not getting things fixed for them sooner.
Of course, given how rich and spoiled a lot of the clientele were, especially the ones who could afford to stay on the mountain at the new ski-in-ski-out condos, this was probably as close to the apocalypse as they had ever felt.
“Sure thing, I’ll be over there as soon as possible,” I said, glancing over at Dad and Ethan. “Dad, would you mind hanging out with Ethan for the afternoon?” I asked, holding my hand over the speaker on the phone. When there was last-minute work like this on the hill, I usually brought Ethan with me. He had all the guest services workers wrapped around his finger, and he always came away with stickers and candies. Plus, not a visit seemed to pass without him getting to hang out with the snow patrol dog.
But it was a little different when I was fixing things up in the condos. No one had ever told me that I couldn’t bring Ethan with me when there might be clients around, but to be honest, I didn’t really want him around a lot of the hoity toity clients. Not that I thought that he would ever act half as spoiled as some of them.
Fortunately, Dad nodded at me. “No problem,” he said. I could see his brows knit together, like he was curious about what the mountain needed now. But I also knew that he would never actually ask me anything about it. Depending on how frustrating the job turned out to be, I might end up telling him about it later. But somehow, despite the fact that his work wasn’t all that different from mine, he just never seemed to care what I was up to on the mountain.
As I headed over to Pine Ridge, I tried to think about what the problem with the pipes could be. We had tested everything earlier in the season, before we started moving in guests, and things had appeared to be working fine. I wondered if one of them had frozen somewhere along the line and made a face just thinking about it. The last thing we needed was burst pipes right in the middle of a storm like this.
I glanced up at the sky. The flakes were starting to fall faster now. Faster and thicker, quickly coating me in white. Hopefully whatever was wrong, it was either an easy and quick fix or else something that I could fix from indoors. But I didn’t get a job working for a ski resort without figuring that there would be some cold and downright miserable days in there. Such was work with Mother Nature.
Still, despite the random hours, challenges, and everything else, I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. Especially not since it meant I got to live here in Park City, and raise Ethan here. Soon, his weekly race program would start up again, and there was nothing better than knowing that you could support a lifestyle for your kid where half of their interpersonal relationship learning happened out in the mountains, breathing in the fresh air.
I knocked on the door at the address that Gretchen had given me. A buxom blonde answered it, her eyes widening fractionally when she saw me. “Are you the mechanic?” she asked, giggling.
“Yup, that’s me,” I said, shoving my hands deeper into my pockets. The sooner she realized I wasn’t interested in her, the better things were going to be for both of us.
But her grin only widened as she stepped back to let me in, her eyes roving over my body. “So, you think you can fix things?” she practically purred.
“Hope so,” I said shortly, heading for the bathroom. She hovered by the doorway, her eyes never leaving me.
“Can I get you a drink?” she asked. Again, she giggled. “I think we’ve still got some beer from the party we had last night, but I’m not sure.”
“No thanks,” I said, crouching down and focusing my attention on the pipes beneath the sink. I reached up and tried the faucet, laying a hand lightly against the pipe to feel if it heated up as normal. Sure enough, it did, and a moment later, the water got hot.
I raised an eyebrow at the blonde. “No hot water?” I asked, trying to keep the frustration from my voice.
She looked surprised. “I swear it wasn’t hot earlier,” she said.
“You said you had a party here last night?” I asked, suspecting I knew what had happened. “Did anyone else shower here this morning?”
“Well yeah, there’s, like, ten of us staying here at the moment,” she said, and I could tell that she still didn’t understand what I was getting at.
I stood up, dusting off my hands even though I had barely had to touch anything. “There’s a finite supply of hot water in the tank,” I explained. “If someone takes a shower, you need to give it time for the new water to heat up.
