He kept a small notebook in his breast pocket with jobs written in pencil: boiler services, a flickering strip light in the GAA hall, a callout to a bungalow where the immersion had tripped the fuse box again. He liked the order of it. Wires had colours, pipes knew where they were going. If something went wrong, there was a reason you could touch.
Most days began before the street was fully awake. He took bread and cheese wrapped in greaseproof, a flask that clicked tight, and the van that rattled but never let him down. He kept spares in old biscuit tins — fuses, washers, a spare thermostat clipped into card — and could tell by a customer’s hallway what was likely wrong before he saw the problem. A good house smelled of polish and soap. A bad one smelled of damp and boiled cabbage. He never judged; he just fixed what he’d been asked to fix.
He met her at a school where the heating coughed and died every other Thursday. The caretaker pointed, the pipes thumped like a tired heart, and he bled the air from the line until the radiators warmed. She stood in the doorway with a pile of books, saying thank you as if warmth were something personal he’d given her. He nodded and said it was nothing. It wasn’t, and it was.
He had learned the value of quiet the hard way. There are sounds you never want to hear again, and he had heard them already: a door splintering, boots in a hallway, a voice pushed to breaking. Years back, in a different street, he’d stood between a woman and a man and taken the hit meant for her. After that, something in him settled. You can’t teach calm, you can only arrive there and decide not to leave.
When trouble came to her door, it arrived the old-fashioned way, with knuckles and engine noise. He knew the van before he saw it, the way metal speaks when it’s driven like a weapon. He stepped outside because that’s where men like him belong when a line needs drawing. Hands by his sides. No shouting. He looked at the space in front of him and treated it like a job: keep current low, keep heat where it belongs, don’t let anything arc.
The first time the bumper nosed too close he didn’t move. The second time it lunged, he put a palm to the bonnet as if calming a startled animal. The man inside wanted a show. He wasn’t going to get one. The engine stalled itself into silence. They looked at each other through glass and nothing passed between them that could be used later.
He never told her what to do. He fixed a loose hinge on her back door and said a stiff hinge always sounds worse than it is. He left his number written small on the inside of a cupboard where no one would notice unless she needed it. He kept his visits practical — flues checked, oil line bled, a stubborn pilot coaxed back to life, because that was the only safe way for anything else to exist.
On Sundays he walked along the river where the water kept its own counsel. He thought about what can be carried and what can’t. You can carry a kettle. You can’t carry someone else’s rage. If he prayed, it wasn’t with words. He gave thanks for working hands and the rare mercy of knowing when to keep them still.
There were nights when the phone rang late and he drove without turning on the radio. He’d park short of the lane and listen. If the house was quiet, he didn’t knock. If it wasn’t, he did. He wasn’t a hero and didn’t want the name. He was a man who knew how to keep a flame lit in a winter that had gone on too long.
He went home to his small kitchen, set the flask on the draining board, and laid out tomorrow’s pencil work. Jobs to be done. Things to be mended. He didn’t need more than that. Some lives are held together by the things left unsaid, and by the hands that keep doing the simple work until morning.
Aaron Vage 
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