The
working poor live on the edge of poverty, where every little thing can impact
their lives tremendously. Emergencies that many people absorb by dipping into a
savings account, or using a credit card, hit hard because there is no reserve
stash of cash. If your extended family survives on a month-by-month budget,
turning to them for help adds to a layer of embarrassment and failure to the
problem.
On
Thanksgiving, when we arrived at my brother’s home, a pool of water on the front
porch greeted us. We immediately suspected a water leak and sniffed out the
problem before we even put our bags into the spare bedroom. The water line
going to his refrigerator hissed. Cutting open the wall, we found a nasty spray
of water. The plumber my brother uses was out of town for the holiday and
wouldn’t be able to check out the problem until the following Tuesday. We
headed to Walmart (the only place open) and bought a variety of patch options,
which we Frankensteined over the whole as a temporary fix. The hissing leak
slowed to a sighing trickle.
As
the plumber did his repair, my brother called with the news. First, he was
extremely lucky. The water hadn’t backed into his kitchen. His kitchen cabinets
and the sheetrock along that wall remained dry. All of the water had flowed
forward and had seeped out to the front of the house along the exterior
foundation. We worriedly asked about the plumber’s fee. If he only did the
repair and didn’t patch the sheetrock, the bill would run about $400.00—a huge chunk
of money out of the fund our family maintains for my brother’s home and car
emergencies. We decided that we could run down to my brother’s house in a few
weeks to fix the wall. The hole hid behind the refrigerator, so it wasn’t an
eyesore.
As
usual, events in our own lives kept shifting back the trip to repair the wall.
Then horrendous rain storms pushed back the date even further. The hideous gap
remained for over four months. Although it didn’t take long to cut a patch,
float and tape and texture the area (plus add a new coat of paint to the wall),
that repair would’ve added a huge dollar amount to the plumber’s bill if he’d
used his supplies and time fixing the wall.
My
brother’s gratitude for our help always reminds us of how difficult it is for someone
working full-time, but not at a livable wage, to absorb setbacks. When he
stated optimistically, “If you have to have something go wrong, just hope it
goes wrong in the right way,” I had to smile.
Copyright 2018 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman
