Ladies' Night Andrews, Kay (great novels .txt) 📖

open shelves?” Grace asked, still anxious for his approval. “The old cabinet doors were warped and gummy with all those old layers of paint, and the only way to clean them up would have been to strip them all down to the bare wood, and I just didn’t have the time or the patience for that.”

“Hush,” Arthur commanded. He snapped two more pictures of the kitchen in rapid succession. “Wait until my wife sees this.” He chortled. “She’s said all along that we should just get rid of the darned cupboard doors. She even showed me a picture in one of her magazines, but I told her she was crazy. Just shows you how much I know.”

He walked back through the abbreviated hallway and poked his head into both bedrooms, nodding and snapping more exposures.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at Grace, still dressed in a simple cotton sundress for her coffee date with her lawyer.

“A little bitty gal like you got all this done, just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.

If only he knew, Grace mused, the untold hours she’d spent working on the house, for which she’d never be compensated—not in money, anyway.

“So, do you like it?” she asked.

“I do,” he said, patting her shoulder awkwardly.

“There’s still so much more to accomplish,” she cautioned. “The bathroom vanity—I know I told you all the fixtures were okay, but the sink has a leak, and that vanity is all rotted out underneath. I’d like to replace it with a pedestal sink with more of a period look. And the tub—I’ve scrubbed it and scrubbed it, but it’s pitted and chipped, and it’s going to look even nastier once I get the bathroom painted. I’d love to have it reglazed.”

“Do it,” Arthur said expansively. He was in a rare mood, Grace thought. Maybe now was the time to spring the rest of her wish list on him.

She followed him onto the front porch, where he gazed out at the yard. “What the hell have you done out here?” he asked wonderingly.

Grace blushed. “I have a friend, he’s a landscape architect, and he gave me some suggestions about cutting things back, reshaping the beds. There’s a lot more I’d like to do in the yard, eventually. This house has such incredible curb appeal now, but it could be even better.”

“It looks grand,” Arthur said, and he was actually beaming. “It looks better than it has in twenty years. Not just the yard, everything.”

“I’m so glad you like it,” Grace told him. “Once I get some poly on those floors, they’ll really look sharp. And then I was thinking, I could probably start furnishing it in the next week or so.”

“Fine,” Arthur said. “That sounds fine.”

“About the air-conditioning, Arthur,” Grace began.

He scowled.

Grace picked up a wooden paint-stir stick from her stack of supplies in the corner of the front porch. She poked the outside of the air-conditioning unit protruding from the living room window. A flurry of rust chips fell to the porch floor.

“The salt air has completely rusted this unit out,” Grace said. “It’s on its last legs. And the other units aren’t much better.”

“No ma’am,” he said firmly. “Why, those units aren’t that old. I put them in here myself.”

“In 1982. I found the owner’s manual in the hall linen closet. Arthur, these units are almost as old as me. They’ve outlived their useful life.”

“Then I’ll buy some new ones,” he said, his face set in a mulish expression.

“You’ll need five window units, at the very least,” Grace said, consulting the notes she’d scribbled on her last shopping trip. “I checked at Sears and Home Depot, for the BTUs we need in the main rooms, meaning, the living room, dining room, kitchen, and both bedrooms, that’s a little over two thousand dollars.”

“Nonsense,” Arthur said. “I can buy those units for under a hundred bucks apiece.”

She handed him the most recent sales flyer she’d picked up at Sears. “Maybe thirty years ago you could buy them for that, but not these days.”

He scowled down at the flyer. “I suppose you’re going to keep after me about putting in central air-conditioning?”

“Yes, I am,” Grace said emphatically. She handed him another brochure. “That’s an estimate I had worked up by a very reliable HVAC guy who my mom uses at the Sandbox. It’ll cost less than five thousand dollars! You’ll get an up-to-the-minute energy-efficient unit, and there may be tax breaks involved as well. And, since you pay the utilities, there will be a substantial savings on your electric bills.”

He ran a bony finger down the printed estimate, frowning. “I never figured to put all this much money in this little house.” He looked up at her. “There’s hardly any sense fixing it up this grand, just so the next bunch of tenants can come in here and ruin all our hard work.”

Now, Grace told herself. Ask him now.

“About the next tenants,” she said, fixing him with her most winning smile. “What would you say to renting this place to me?”

“Ah-hah!” he cried. “At last the other shoe drops. I should have known you had an ulterior motive for wanting me to spend all this money.”

“I want you to spend what is really a very reasonable amount of money to maintain and improve this lovely property,” Grace said, willing herself to keep calm and use all the arguments she’d gone over and over in her head. “I really didn’t intend to ask about renting it, but then, once I got it cleaned up and saw just what a nice place it could be, it occurred to me to inquire about renting it.”

His smile grew crafty. “All this money of mine you’ve been spending, you realize the rent’s going up, right?”

“Of course. If you’ll recall, that was one of the arguments I gave you for fixing it up. You’ve rented it so cheaply in the past, it’s no wonder you’ve gotten deadbeats and lowlifes as tenants. But if