Ladies' Night (21 page)

“And Grace?”

“Yes?”

“I think she’s housebroken! I was examining her, and she started to whimper, so we took her out to the dog run, and she did her business right away.”

Now Grace returned Sweetie’s smile. “Thanks, Dr. Katz. That’s the first good news I’ve heard today.”

22

She spent Tuesday working in the bar and fuming over Ben’s sabotage of her blog. But early Wednesday morning, Grace bounded down the stairs to the bar, her camera bag in hand.

Rochelle had the blender going, whipping up an evil-looking green concoction. She shut it off, poured the sludge in a glass, and sipped, all the while taking in Grace’s work ensemble, which consisted of a pair of thrift-store jeans, oversized T-shirt, and cheap tennis shoes. “No run this morning?”

“Nope,” Grace said, unable to suppress a grin. “I’ve got an actual job.” She poured herself a mug of coffee and snagged a banana from the fruit bowl on the bar back.

“Is that so?”

“Yup.”

“How’d you get this job? Where is it? What’s it pay?”

Grace couldn’t remember when she’d been this excited at the prospect of working for free.

“You won’t believe it, Mom,” she said. “When I was out for my run Monday I passed this really rundown house over on Anna Maria. There was a huge pile of junk at the curb. Obviously, somebody was doing a clean out. I stopped to look, because this guy had just dumped a great old midcentury rattan sofa. And then he added more pieces, and I kind of struck up a conversation with him. The house had been a rental, but the tenants trashed the place and skipped out on the rent, and the guy I met was the landlord. The rattan was really good stuff. Very collectible, so I asked him if I could have it, although God knows where I’d put it. He invited me inside the house—which was a disaster area, but it could be really wonderful.”

“Slow down,” Rochelle ordered. “You went into a house with a strange man? Are you nuts? What if he’d been some kind of deviate or something?”

“He wasn’t a deviate; he actually knew Dad,” Grace said. “So he was complaining about how long it was going to take him to get the place fixed up to rent again, and I asked him if he’d let me do it. You know, as a before-and-after story for the blog. And he said yes!” Grace was practically jumping up and down.

“How much?” Rochelle asked.

“I finally got him to agree to a minimum budget of five thousand dollars, although I think it’ll probably run more than that,” she said.

“He’s paying you five thousand? Honey, that’s great,” Rochelle said. “I’m so proud of you.”

Grace shook her head. “No. He’s not paying me anything. The budget to fix up the house is five thousand. Or more. I’m doing the work for free. So I can do a before-and-after series for my blog. Wait ’til you see this place, Mom. It’s over on Mandevilla, on Anna Maria, about a block from the bay. It’s a real old-timey Florida cracker house, with the pitched roof and the screened porch. All the inside walls are the original pine. Right now, there’s some skanky carpet on the floors, but I’m sure there’s hardwood under there. It’s got a tiny little galley kitchen, again with the original cabinets. I’m thinking I’ll take the doors off the upper cabinets…”

“Wait,” Rochelle said. “You’re going to do all this work? Without getting paid? How is this a good thing?”

“Because it’s design work,” Grace said. “I’ll be rehabbing a historic old cottage. It’s what I love to do! And I can photograph it from every stage and blog about it. And that is something that not even Ben and J’Aimee can rip off.”

She dug into her camera bag and brought out some Benjamin Moore paint chips, rifling through the colored cards until she found the one she wanted. “Here. Dove White. I’m thinking of using it for all the interior walls. The house is kind of dark inside, because of the porch overhang, so I want to brighten it up, make it look crisp and clean. Have you ever seen a prettier white?”

“You know all white paint looks the same to me,” Rochelle said. “But if you say it’s the best white ever, I believe it.”

“I might do the kitchen another color, maybe a soft aqua, something like that,” Grace mused. “But I want to get it all defunked, have a clean slate, before I make too many design decisions.”

“What’s the owner going to say about all those design decisions? And who is it? You said it’s somebody who knew Butch?”

“He doesn’t care what I do, as long as I get it presentable and ready to rent again,” Grace said. “He’ll be the perfect client—especially since he’s leaving soon to spend the summer in North Carolina. I won’t have him breathing down my neck, second-guessing everything I do. Oh yeah. His name is Arthur Cater. He said he used to take Dad fishing on his boat.”

“Arthur Cater? He’s your client?” Rochelle rolled her eyes.

“What’s that supposed to mean? No, never mind. I don’t want to hear it. I am not going to let you rain on my parade. Whatever you know about him, keep it to yourself.”

“I wasn’t gonna rain on your parade,” Rochelle said. “Arthur’s an okay guy. He used to come in here a lot, when they lived on the island, back before he got fancy and moved over to Longboat Key. There’s just one thing I want you to know about him.”

“Whatever,” Grace said, packing up her paint chips impatient to get started on her new project. “Can I have the key to the shed? Thank God I didn’t get around to cleaning out Dad’s tools. All my stuff is still back at Sand Dollar Lane. I don’t even have a hammer or a pair of pliers to my own name now. And I want to get that nasty carpet pulled up this morning. First thing.”

Rochelle went into the kitchen and came back with a key ring, which she handed to her daughter. “Just know this about Arthur. He is the world’s biggest cheapskate. He’s got tons of money, but he didn’t get that way throwing it around. He will nickel and dime you to death. Your dad used to say Arthur was so tight he squeaked when he walked.”

“I don’t care,” Grace said, cramming her sweat-stained Sandbox ball cap on her head. “I’ve dealt with cheap and I’ve dealt with difficult. I’m just happy to have a job again.”

*   *   *

Arthur Cater was standing in the driveway of the house on Mandevilla, directing two Hispanic day laborers as they loaded the avocado-green stove into the back of an ancient rust bucket of a pickup truck.

“Hey, Arthur,” Grace greeted him.

“So you didn’t have a change of heart, huh?” He took in her work clothes and toolbox.

“No way,” Grace said. “Did your wife give us the thumbs-up?”

Arthur mopped his face with his handkerchief. “She says you’re a big-deal interior designer. She’s all excited now. Says she reads your blog and she can’t believe I could trick you into working for nothin’.”

Grace laughed. “She doesn’t know I’m the one who tricked you, does she?”

He gestured toward the house. “I got over here right at sunup this morning and set off a couple of flea bombs in there. I just opened up all the windows, so you should be all right to go in now.” He reached in the pocket of his own faded blue jeans. “Here’s the keys. Front and back doors, and the garage.” He nodded at his workers, who were bringing the washing machine out on a furniture dolly. “I had the fellas put all that furniture in the garage, and put a tarp over it. There’s some other odds and ends out there you can maybe use.”

“All right,” Grace said. She took her camera from around her neck and stepped into the street, clicking off a few frames.

“Stand right there by the mailbox, will you Arthur,” she called. “I like to document everything, right from the beginning.”

Arthur stood awkwardly by the curb, his hands thrust in his pockets. “You don’t want pictures of this ugly old mug,” he growled. “It’ll break your camera.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” Grace said, stepping backward to shoot. “Arthur, do you have any idea when this house was built?”

“Let me see. Well, I’m seventy-three, and we’ve got old family pictures of my grandma, standing out front of this house with me in her arms. I know my grandpa bought the house, probably sometime in the thirties. It looked a lot different back then. There was no front porch, no real trees, just some scrub palmettos and sand, and where the kitchen is now, was a porch they used to cook on. There was an old wood cookstove out there. My grandpa used to fry mullet on it Friday nights. Hard to believe they raised seven kids in this little bitty place, isn’t it?”

It was just a little after nine, but the sun was already high in the sky, the summer heat relentless. Grace walked all the way around the house, photographing it from every conceivable angle, swatting at mosquitoes and stopping to pick off the sandspurs clinging to her ankles. She prayed no snakes were lurking in the thick underbrush. Despite that, the more she saw of the house, the more she liked. Virtually nothing had been done to change the house in the years since the porch had been added. In a way, she decided, it was a very good thing that Arthur Cater was a cheapskate.

When she got back to the front of the house, Arthur was standing by the truck, waiting on her. He handed her a slip of paper. “Here’s my phone number. You call me if there’s a problem, hear? I set up a draw for you at the hardware store. And my wife said I should tell you she’d like it if you’d e-mail us some pictures as you go. She’s all jazzed up about this project of yours. Good thing we’re leaving town, or she’d be over here all the time, sidewalk superintending.”

Grace stood on her tiptoes and planted a kiss on Arthur’s grizzled cheek. He looked surprised, but not displeased. “All right then, get to work,” he ordered. He drove off with the two laborers in the back of the truck, wedged in among the rusted appliances. A moment later, he was backing down the street toward where she stood at the curb.

He hung his head out the open window. “Meant to ask you about that little dog,” he said, failing miserably at pretending he didn’t care. “How’s she doing? Did you find somebody to take her in?”

“Sweetie is going to be just fine,” Grace said. “They kept her overnight at the vet’s office, giving her some IV fluids and some antibiotics. I’m going to pick her up this afternoon. And I’m going to keep her myself, until I figure out something else.”

“Sweetie, huh? Dumb name for a dog.”

*   *   *

Grace paced every inch of the cottage interior, snapping photos and making notes. She found an old broom in a tiny utility closet off the kitchen and swept up an entire village of dead insects. Then she cranked up the music she’d downloaded onto her iPod, adjusted the tiny little speakers, pulled on her work gloves, and got down to business.

A veteran of the remodeling wars, Grace donned a paper face mask before tackling the carpet. It was a hot, filthy job. The carpet was so old and brittle, hunks of it tore apart in her hands as she pried it from the nail strips along the baseboards. But when she pulled up the thin foam padding and got the first glimpse of the intact oak floors, she got a new burst of energy. By noon, when she took her lunch break with a sandwich and a bottle of water she’d brought from home, she’d pulled up all the carpet in the bedrooms, rolled it up, and dragged it out to the curb.

She was buzzed with adrenaline, dancing around the smaller of the two bedrooms doing a creditable accompaniment to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” using the broom as a makeshift microphone. The music echoed in the high-ceilinged empty rooms, and she whipped her sweat-dampened hair from side to side as she cataloged the all-too-familiar misery of a lover done wrong.

Grace didn’t hear the front door open. Didn’t hear anything except the music, until she happened to turn around and see Ben, standing in the doorway, arms folded over his chest, watching her performance with no trace of amusement.

Her face flamed. She grabbed for the iPod and shut it off.

For a moment, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her throat went dry, and all she could think of was how idiotic she must have looked to him, dancing around a filthy house, in her filthy clothes, playing air guitar with a broom.

Then she got mad and found her voice again. “What are you doing here?” she asked, clutching the broom, because she needed to clutch something. It was the first time she’d seen him since their day in court.

He was dressed for golf, in a spotless white polo shirt, crisp black shorts, golf shoes, his aviator sunglasses pushed back off his forehead.

“I came to see the floor show,” Ben said. “Good thing it’s free.”

“How’d you know where to find me?” Was he following her?

“Your mother told me you were working at a house over on Mandevilla. You’re not that hard to find. She really, really doesn’t like me, you know.”

“That makes two of us,” Grace snapped. “I’m surprised she actually spoke to you at all. But then, probably you lied to her. Lying seems to be your good thing.”

He smiled. His orthodontics were a thing of beauty. “I told Rochelle I had something to give you. I guess she assumed it was money.”

“But it’s not.”

“No,” Ben said. And his smile dissolved, like Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat. “No money. Just some advice.”

He took a step into the room. “I got a call this morning, from Anna Stribling, at Home Depot. It seems she had some ‘concerns,’ as she called them, about the originality of our material on Gracenotes.”

“Oh?” Grace wondered if he could see her hands shaking as she clutched the broom.

“Yes. She was specifically wondering if J’Aimee’s corn-crab chowder recipe was original. Because, she said, she’d had a disturbing e-mail from you, accusing us of stealing your material.”

“Which you did. A blatant rip-off,” Grace said. “My photos, my recipe, my everything. And that’s what I told her.”

“But you don’t have any proof of that, do you?” Ben raised one eyebrow, amused.

“Because you hacked into my Web site and erased it. And put that filthy porn link on there,” Grace fairly spat the words at him.

“And you don’t have any proof of that, either.”

Ben took a step closer. She could smell his elegant cologne. The Clive Christian 1872 that sold for $310 a bottle at Saks. Everything about Ben was elegant. “What I told Anna during our chat today is this. I told her that you’re delusional. That you’re bitter and jealous and emotionally fragile. I mentioned that you’re in court-ordered counseling. I think she felt a lot better after our conversation. In fact, I know she felt better, because Home Depot just agreed to take a bigger Gracenotes banner ad starting next month.”