Chapter 5: First Repairs
The ice machine was a corpse.
Not broken—dead. The kind of dead that meant compressor failure and refrigerant leaks and costs that exceeded replacement value. I'd spent an hour trying to resurrect it, hands cramping around tools that had become extensions of my arms, before accepting the truth.
Some things couldn't be fixed. Not by skill, not by effort, not by whatever strange ability let me learn carpentry in twenty minutes.
I wiped grease on my jeans and stepped back.
"Giving up?"
Stevie had materialized behind me. Silent. Probably on purpose.
"It's dead. Has been for a while. Someone should have told you it wasn't worth repairing."
"Someone did tell me. I chose not to believe them."
"Optimism?"
"Denial. It's different."
I almost smiled. The deadpan delivery, the self-awareness—this was the Stevie I remembered from the show. The one who'd grow into something more under Johnny's mentorship.
"The doors I can fix," I said. "The locks, the frames, the weather stripping. But this needs replacing, and that needs money."
"Money." She said it like a foreign concept. "Yeah. That's the problem with most things around here."
I rolled my shoulders, feeling the accumulated strain of four hours of labor. Room six was done. Room twelve done. Three other doors in various states of repair. My muscles screamed protests in languages I didn't speak.
"What would it take? To actually turn this place around?"
Stevie leaned against the railing, watching me like I'd asked about terraforming Mars.
"Why do you care?"
"Because I'm standing in a motel that used to be something and now it's nothing and I want to understand why."
"That's a lot of wanting for someone who used to not want anything."
Fair point.
"People change."
"So you keep saying."
A truck pulled into the parking lot—older, dusty, the kind of vehicle that belonged to someone who'd owned it for twenty years and planned to own it twenty more. Bob Currie climbed out, a vacuum part in hand, shuffling toward us with the unhurried gait of someone who'd stopped rushing decades ago.
"Stevie." He nodded. "Mutt."
"Bob."
"Got that part you ordered." He held it up—some filter or attachment, I couldn't tell. "Took a while. Had to special order from Toronto."
"Thanks, Bob."
He handed it over, but his attention had shifted to the work scattered around us. Tools. Wood shavings. The repaired doors visible through propped-open frames.
"You do those hinges?"
The question was directed at me.
"Yeah."
Bob walked over to room six, examined the door with the kind of careful attention that suggested professional interest. He opened it, closed it, tested the swing.
"That's a good fix. Most people overcorrect—they tighten too much and the frame binds in humid weather. You left enough play for expansion."
I hadn't thought about expansion. I'd just—known.
"Thanks."
"You've got good hands." He said it matter-of-factly, without flattery. "Your dad never had patience for detail work. Glad it didn't skip you."
He shuffled back to his truck, started the engine, drove away without another word. The interaction lasted maybe two minutes.
But something stuck.
Good hands. Patience for detail.
Bob was competent. Really competent. I'd noticed it at the café—the efficiency of his movements, the quiet expertise hiding under years of small-town entropy. Now I'd seen it confirmed.
File that away. Could be useful.
"You know Bob's one of the best mechanics in the region?" Stevie said. "Used to run a shop in Elmdale. Could have gone anywhere."
"What happened?"
"Same thing that happens to everyone here. Life. Family. Inertia."
The word hung in the air. Inertia. The physics of staying still because moving took too much energy.
"Is that what happened to you?"
The question was too personal. I knew it even as I asked. But something about the afternoon—the labor, the honest fatigue, the stripped-down quality of working with my hands—made deflection feel wrong.
Stevie's jaw tightened.
"I don't know what happened to me. That's the problem."
She walked away before I could respond. Back to the lobby, back to the desk, back to the book and the waiting and the long hours of nothing that defined life at the Rosebud Motel.
I watched her go and thought about the show. The transformation waiting for her. The confidence she'd find under Johnny's patient mentorship. The person she'd become when someone finally believed in her.
Two weeks. The Roses arrive in two weeks, and everything starts to change.
But what if I could start the change earlier? What if I could lay groundwork, prepare soil, make the eventual growth easier?
Careful. That's the optimizer talking. The project manager who thinks he can control outcomes.
You don't know these people. Not really. You know characters. Scripts. Plotlines.
Real people are messier.
I gathered my tools and sat on the motel steps, muscles screaming, and let myself feel the exhaustion. Not the tired of sleepless nights and racing thoughts—the honest tired of physical work.
It felt good. Earned.
The sun had shifted toward afternoon. My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Roland. A text message in all caps, because Roland had never met a smartphone feature he didn't misuse.
TOWN COUNCIL MEETING TOMORROW NIGHT. 7 PM. BE THERE.
Not a question. Not a request.
I stared at the message, thinking about town councils and small-town politics and the systemic apathy that defined Schitt's Creek before the Roses arrived.
You want to understand this place? Understand how it makes decisions. Understand what keeps it stuck.
I typed back: OK.
Then I put my phone away, watched the motel sign flicker in the fading light, and wondered if I was making a mistake.
The drive home was quiet.
Mutt's truck rattled along familiar roads, passing landmarks I'd never seen in person but recognized anyway. The elementary school. The church with the crooked steeple. The gas station that would eventually become a location for one of David's meltdowns.
Strange, I thought. Strange to know a place you've never been.
The barn was cold when I arrived. I hadn't fixed the heating situation—too busy with motel repairs, too distracted by abilities I didn't understand.
I made instant coffee and sat on the bed that wasn't quite mine, hands wrapped around warmth, and tried to think.
What do I actually know?
The abilities: rapid learning, perfect recall. They worked together somehow—I stored information, then accessed it with efficiency that exceeded normal memory. Skills developed faster than they should. Competence accumulated.
The cost: fatigue. Physical strain from work that should have been beyond me. And something harder to name—a pressure behind my eyes, like my brain was running processes it hadn't been designed for.
But I'm not breaking. Yet.
The timeline: eleven days until the Roses arrived. Nine days if the council meeting counted as tomorrow. Nine days to understand this town, establish myself, prepare for whatever role I'd play in the story that was coming.
Or don't play a role. Let the story happen. Stay in Mutt's lane.
But that felt wrong too. I'd been given something—abilities, knowledge, a second chance in a body that could make a difference. Doing nothing with it seemed like waste.
Help without controlling. Support without manipulating. Let people choose.
The mantra from a self-help book I'd read in my old life. Ironic that it applied here.
I finished my coffee and stared at the ceiling until the cold became unbearable. Then I got under blankets that smelled like someone else's life and didn't sleep until my body forced the issue.
Tomorrow: town council. The first real test of whether I could understand Schitt's Creek well enough to help it.
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