The linoleum in Grandma Verna’s kitchen had been peeling near the sink since the year George Bush the elder took office, curling up like a dry autumn leaf whenever someone dragged a chair across it too hard. I had been nagging her about it for six months, telling her that sooner or later she was going to catch the toe of her slipper on that torn edge and break a hip. Grandma just laughed and told me her legs were sturdier than my patience, which was true enough.

But when she finally called me on a Tuesday morning to say she had hired two local fellows to come in and lay down some fresh vinyl tile, I drove right over to help her clear out the lower cupboards before they arrived.

Their names were Walt and Ray, though nobody ever called Ray anything except Big Ray, which suited his forty-inch waist and the way he breathed through his mouth like a draft horse. They showed up in a faded red Ford pickup with a rusted tailpipe that sounded like a bag of tin cans rattling in a dryer. They were big men, both of them wearing grease-stained Carhartt overalls that smelled of stale tobacco and cheap floor wax. Grandma Verna was eighty-one years old, standing barely five-foot-two in her stocking feet, and when Walt hauled the heavy black gas range out into the hallway without asking where to put it, he nearly knocked over her ceramic cookie jar shaped like a fat red hen.

I stood by the kitchen table with my arms crossed, watching them shove the old refrigerator across the linoleum without using a furniture dolly, leaving long black skid marks right across the middle of the floor. Walt didn’t even look at me when I told him to watch the baseboards, just grunted something about having a tight schedule over on Maple Street. They worked fast, I’ll give them that. By eleven o’clock, the old floor was stripped away down to the plywood subfloor, and they were rolling out the new gray-veined sheets of vinyl with a squeegee and a tub of yellowish glue that smelled strongly of vinegar and turpentine.

By noon, the job was practically finished. The stove and the dishwasher were still sitting out in the middle of the dining room floor, surrounded by scraps of paper backing and empty glue buckets, but the main floor was down and rolled flat.

Grandma Verna went to the fridge, which was plugged into a temporary extension cord in the pantry, and got out three bottles of cold root beer. She handed them over with a polite little smile, thanking them for getting the old kitchen squared away before her sister came down from Erie for the weekend.

Walt wiped his mouth with the back of a thick, calloused hand and crumpled his empty glass bottle in his palm. He looked down at Grandma Verna like a school principal inspecting a tardy pupil. That was when he pulled a folded piece of yellow tablet paper from his shirt pocket, smoothing it out against the edge of the new counter with his thumb.

“That wasn’t in our contract,” Walt said, his voice flat and heavy.

Grandma blinked, her glasses sliding an eighth of an inch down her nose. “What do you mean, son? We agreed on three hundred and fifty dollars flat, materials included. I gave you the fifty down last Friday.”

Ray stepped in closer, crowding the doorway so the little kitchen suddenly felt airless. He tapped a stubby finger against the yellow paper where some scribbled math sat under a greasy thumbprint. “Prep work on the subfloor. That’s extra. The wood was warped around the drain pipe. Took us an extra hour of scraping. That’s forty-five dollars more.”

I uncrossed my arms and took a step forward, the floorboards groaning under my sneakers. “You didn’t say a word about extra charges when you started this morning. You saw the subfloor when you pulled the old linoleum up.”

Walt didn’t even look at me. He kept his eyes fixed on Grandma Verna, who was holding her purse against her house dress like a shield. “Take it or leave it, ma’am. But we aren’t moving your stove and fridge back into place until the balance is settled in full.”

Grandma Verna looked around her kitchen, at the heavy stove stranded by the dining room table, at the dishwasher blocking the pantry door, and then at the two huge men standing between her and the front door. She was small, she was alone for most of the day, and she hated a fuss more than anything on earth. Her hands trembled just a little bit as she unsnapped her leather purse and pulled out her checkbook, her fingers moving clumsy and slow. I wanted to snatch the book right out of her hands and tell them to get off the property, but I knew how stubborn she got when she felt cornered about money. She wrote the numbers out in her neat, spidery cursive, tore the green slip from the binding, and handed it to Walt without a word.

Walt took the check, flicked it once with his thumb to make sure the ink was dry, and shoved it into his overall pocket alongside a pack of Red Man chew. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he said, and neither of them offered to touch the heavy appliances before they tramped out the back door toward their truck.

The screen door slammed behind them with a sharp, aluminum rattle that made the windows vibrate in their frames. Grandma Verna let out a long, shaky breath, her shoulders dropping about two inches as she looked down at the empty space where her stove belonged. I felt a hot, prickling anger start right behind my eyes, the kind of useless rage you get when you realize someone has just robbed an old lady in broad daylight and there is nothing you can legally do about it without calling the sheriff and waiting three hours for someone to drive out from the county seat.

“It’s all right, honey,” Grandma said softly, reaching out to pat my arm. “It’s just money. The Lord provides.”

“The Lord doesn’t have to deal with two crooks in a rusted Ford,” I muttered, turning to grab the handle of the heavy refrigerator to see if I could drag it back toward the wall by myself.

Before I could even get my fingers under the edge, the front doorbell gave a sharp, impatient double-ring. It wasn’t the delivery chime; it was the loud, aggressive buzz that meant someone was standing right on the mat with their thumb pressed hard against the button until you answered.

Grandma Verna frowned, wiping her hands on her apron as she shuffled toward the hallway. I followed right behind her, my boots hitting the hardwood floor with enough force to let whoever was out there know we weren’t hiding under the kitchen table. When Grandma pulled the wooden door open six inches against the brass security chain, Walt’s red face was pressed right up against the gap.

He didn’t look happy. In fact, he looked like he had just swallowed a sour plum.

“Your granddaughter’s little red sedan,” Walt said, his voice dropping an octave into something that sounded like a gravel truck shifting down on a steep grade. “It’s parked right dead center behind our van in the driveway. We can’t back out past the maple tree.”

I leaned past Grandma’s shoulder, looking out through the narrow gap in the doorway. My little Honda Civic was parked right where I always left it when I visited on Tuesdays, tucked neatly inside the brick pillars of the driveway, about three feet behind their rusted Ford. There was plenty of room for a good driver to slip out onto the asphalt, but for two men hauling a wide-bed trailer full of old flooring scrap, it would take some careful wheel-turning.

Grandma Verna didn’t say anything for three long seconds. She just stared at him through her bifocals, her expression shifting from the scared old woman who had just written out a forty-five-dollar check to something entirely different, something cold and flat that I hadn’t seen on her face since my grandfather passed away five winters ago. She adjusted her glasses with one finger, very slowly, the way she used to do when she was checking the ledger at the church bazaar.

“Well now,” Grandma said, her voice dropping into that quiet, measured register that always meant trouble for whoever she was talking to. “That wasn’t in our original arrangement.”

Walt blinked, his heavy eyebrows bunching together over his nose like two hairy caterpillars meeting in a dispute. “What are you talking about? Just move the car so we can get off your property.”

“That’s extra,” Grandma said, and she didn’t even blink.

Walt stared at her, his mouth opening slightly before he caught himself. “Lady, are you out of your mind? It’s your car. Move it.”

“Parking lot blockage and driveway clearance,” Grandma Verna said, reciting the words as if she were reading them off the yellow tablet paper he had shoved in her face ten minutes ago. “That takes special maneuvering around the maple tree roots. Took us an extra ten minutes of my afternoon just to look at it. That’s a sixty-dollar convenience fee.”

Big Ray lumbered up behind Walt, his big red face turning the color of a bruised beet as he leaned into the doorway. “Are you serious right now? Give us the damn keys or we’ll call the tow truck ourselves.”

“Go right ahead,” I said, finally speaking up from behind Grandma’s shoulder, my voice shaking just a little bit with spite. “The town constable lives three houses down, and he loves nothing more than a couple of unregistered contractors blocking a private right-of-way without a proper municipal permit. I’m sure he’d love to take a look at your truck while he’s here.”

Walt looked at me, then down at Grandma Verna, who was standing there with her hands folded over her apron, looking as calm as if she were waiting for the Sunday collection plate to reach her pew. He reached into his overall pocket, pulled out the green check she had just written him five minutes ago, and slapped it down onto the small oak telephone table beside the front door with enough force to knock over the little brass dish where Grandma kept her spare stamps.

“You people are out of your minds,” Walt muttered, his face dark as a thunderhead as he turned on his heel and stomped down the porch steps so hard the timber stairs groaned.

We watched through the living room window as they piled back into the Ford, the engine roaring to life with a foul cloud of blue exhaust that smelled like burning oil. The truck lurched backward, its tires spitting white gravel across Grandma’s freshly weeded petunia bed before it finally found the asphalt and tore down the road toward the highway, leaving two long black skid marks right where the driveway met the street.

Grandma Verna stood there for a long moment, watching the dust settle over the hydrangeas. Then she turned around, walked back into the kitchen, and picked up the thirty-five-dollar check that Walt had left behind on the table, tearing it neatly down the middle into two even pieces before dropping them into the kitchen wastebasket.

“Well,” Grandma said, smoothing her apron down over her hips and looking at the heavy stove sitting out by the dining room table. “I suppose we’d better find someone else to push that stove back against the wall, because those two certainly weren’t professional enough for the job.”