“I’ve cancelled the plumber and the pipe delivery. You can spend the weekend without water, then you’ll see who’s the man in this house.”
That was Leo’s parting shot, thrown over his shoulder with the tone of a stern lord depriving his serfs of fresh water.
“I’m going to Mum’s for the weekend. I need a break from your endless demands. Try handling man’s work yourself for once. Let life teach you to appreciate the one who’s holding this house together.”
He stood in the hallway, travel bag packed, chest puffed out as if his windbreaker hid a medal for saving the galaxy.
For years Leo had presented every lightbulb he’d screwed in as a heroic feat of national importance, and every receipt from the builders’ merchant as a citation of honour. Now he expected me to throw up my hands and cling to his leg, begging him not to abandon me to a broken cottage water system.
I silently shifted my gaze from his polished shoes to the cage in the corner of the room.
There, on its perch, preened Poirot – a large grey parrot, my personal feathered prosecutor with a phenomenal memory for other people’s stupidity. Poirot fixed Leo with a round yellow eye and gave a meaningful squawk.
“Good riddance, Leo,” I said calmly. “A change of scenery is the best rest.”
A man’s indispensability is a perishable commodity: the moment you manage without him, it turns into plain incompetence. But Leo didn’t know that yet. He snorted loudly, slammed the front door hard enough to send flakes of whitewash drifting from the ceiling, and rode off into the sunset to his mother, Valerie.
As soon as his footsteps faded on the stairs, I switched on the computer.
The repair order had been placed under his name, but it was to be paid from our joint account. In the search history on the computer he’d forgotten to shut off in his dramatic exit, there was a cancelled invoice for a new pump, pipes, and fittings. And next to it – an open chat window.
I stared at the screen, and my slight smirk quickly turned to cold fury.
In a message to a supplier buddy of his, I read: “Let Emma go a couple of days without water – then she’ll agree to any price.”
Leo hadn’t just wanted to leave me without water for the weekend so he could return triumphantly on a white horse. He’d ordered building supplies from his old school friend’s firm at three times the market rate. This “head of the family” had planned not only to give me a public lesson in helplessness but also to drain forty-five hundred pounds from our joint savings for materials that cost barely fifteen hundred pounds at the nearest DIY store.
Any pity for my husband evaporated completely. Simple arithmetic began.
In two hours I found a direct supplier through a trade database. In three minutes I arranged delivery for Saturday morning. Another fifteen minutes went into finding a decent handyman on a local forum – Uncle Vic, who agreed to do the whole installation for a fair price, not the astronomical sums Leo usually wrote off as “the difficulty of man’s labour.”
The weekend at the cottage was not just productive; it was savoured with a particular cynical pleasure.
On Saturday, Uncle Vic arrived with everything on the list, installed the new pump, re-soldered the plastic pipework, replaced the fittings, and got the system running. The old unit, which Leo had claimed was beyond repair, Vic dismantled on the spot, found a cheap fault – a loose contact – and took it for spare parts, handing me five hundred pounds in cash.
By five o’clock on Sunday, the cottage smelled of freshly cut grass. The new pump hummed with the enthusiasm of a Trojan, and I sat on the veranda, spreading out receipts, guarantee cards, and invoices in front of me. The picture was perfect. I was waiting for guests.
The gate creaked at exactly six. Two figures appeared on the path. In front, like a strict inspector at a disaster zone, marched my mother-in-law, Valerie. Behind her, wearing the mournful expression of an exhausted Atlas, shuffled Leo.
They evidently expected devastation: withered flowerbeds, dried-up taps, and me in a frenzy with a spanner in my hands.
“Well, Emma, dear?” Valerie began, still approaching the porch. Her voice dripped with sweet, sticky venom. “Now you understand that a man in the house is the head? A wife without a husband, as they say, loses her way at the first loose nail! Leo was so worried, so worried – he didn’t know what to do with himself all weekend…”
At that moment, from the open window of the living room – where the cage had been moved for the summer – came a cheerful, raspy squawk from Poirot:
“Head’s gone! Water’s come! Head’s gone!”
Valerie stopped dead, like a singer who’d forgotten her backing track.
Leo craned his neck and stared at the brand-new tap on the outside wall, from which water sparkled in the sun, dripping merrily.
A family is a boat: one quietly rows, the other loudly criticises the current, sincerely believing himself the captain.
“Oh, Valerie, not at all,” I said, not even getting up from the chair. “Come in, sit down. There’s water, the pipes are replaced, the pressure is excellent.”
“What… replaced?” Leo blinked. “Who did it? You don’t know anything about this! You’ve been ripped off a hundred percent!”
Poirot, sensing an appreciative audience, crept closer to the bars, tilted his head, and delivered the next tirade, copying Leo’s intonation down to the last boastful note:
“She’ll come crawling! She’ll be lost without me! Let her feel it! Let her feel it! Couch hero!”
Leo turned pale. Valerie glanced bewilderedly at the window.
“Leo, what is that bird going on about?”
“It’s just picked up stuff from the telly,” Leo muttered feebly, backing towards the gate.
His inflated self-importance was melting before my eyes, giving way to outright panic. But my feathered prosecutor was unstoppable.
“Tell Mum! Tell Mum! Emma can’t do it!” Poirot finished, letting out a nasty, gurgling laugh that was unmistakably Leo’s after a couple of beers.
The veranda fell so quiet you could hear a bumblebee buzzing over the flowerbed.
Valerie’s face flushed deep crimson. Finally, the full extent of her son’s scheme dawned on her: he hadn’t been “worried” – he had deliberately sabotaged the system so he could later show off at my expense in front of her.
“Now, about who’s been ripped off,” I said, picking up the papers from the table and sliding them to the edge, close to my shrinking husband. “Here’s your cancelled estimate. Forty-five hundred for materials from your mate. And here are my receipts. Fifteen hundred for everything, including delivery. Plus the five hundred from Uncle Vic for your ‘dead’ pump.”
I paused, watching Leo avoid my eyes.
“So, Leo, your invaluable help would have cost our budget a clean thirty pounds of loss.”
Leo stared at the numbers with glassy eyes. His lips flapped uselessly; no sound came out.
“Leo… so you were going to take three times as much from Emma through your friend?” Valerie asked quietly.
She loved the word “man” so much that for the first time that evening, she couldn’t find a place to fit it.
Deprived of her main trump card – her genius son – my mother-in-law pursed her lips until they looked like chicken’s backside and averted her gaze. Defending a man who had been caught so stupidly – boasting and embezzling – didn’t fit her worldview.
I stood up, leaning on the table, and looked my husband straight in the eye.
Then I gathered the papers and placed my receipts in a clear plastic folder alongside his cancelled estimate.
“This will now be kept in the ‘Man’s Decisions’ folder. For the record. So next time you want to teach me a lesson, we’ll have a textbook ready.”
Leo opened his mouth, but I stopped him with a gesture.
“The family budget no longer feeds your buddies. Not a single estimate, not a single handyman, not a single man’s decision without my approval. If you want to be head of the house, first learn to be useful, not harmful. As long as you produce only loud words and a shortage of cash, you’ll do what I tell you.”
I turned and walked into the cottage. No protests behind me, no usual lectures about a woman’s lot. Just heavy, humiliated breathing.
When my hand was already on the door handle, from the window came Poirot’s jubilant cry, putting a fat, final full stop on the whole affair:
“Couch hero! Show the receipt! Show the receipt!”
