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

Better. Grace slipped one of her father’s old T-shirts over the tank top she’d worn to the hardware store. Its hem touched the top of her thighs and nearly reached the ragged hem of the faded blue cutoffs she’d picked up at the animal-rescue thrift shop in Bradenton. She hesitated for a moment, then stripped off her bra. It was kinky, she knew, but for some reason, she’d never been able to paint in a bra. She knotted her hair in a ponytail and tied a bandanna over the finished coiffure. She was good to go.

She’d already taped off one wall of the living room and spread out her canvas drop cloth. Now, she dipped a trim brush in the bucket and brushed it onto the wall in a two-foot-wide square. She stood back and checked the effect. It did not suck. She moved her equipment to the long wall opposite the front door and painted a swatch there. Maybe?

She fired up the box fan she’d placed in one of the dining room windows and pried open all the rest of the windows that hadn’t been painted shut. It was still hot in the house, but she was pleasantly surprised when the cross-ventilation at least kept the warm air moving. Grace still wasn’t convinced that the ancient window-air-conditioning units actually worked, and, anyway, the house still needed airing out.

While her test paint swatches dried, Grace went back into the kitchen. She’d managed to pry up most of the harvest-gold vinyl flooring, but what she’d found underneath was a nasty surprise. Plywood sheeting. No heart pine, like the rest of the floors, just plywood. And it was speckled with bits of mastic that had been used to glue down the vinyl. Whatever she did with these floors, she’d have to get rid of all those gobs of goo. It made her back ache just thinking of it.

The first day she’d set up her laptop in the house, she’d been thrilled to discover she could piggyback off a neighbor’s wireless Internet. Now she clicked over to her blog again and read another handful of comments, all positive, except for one from someone calling herself Freebird.

Wow, what happened to that showplace mansion you used to live in? Oh that’s right, your hubsand kicked you out for a real woman. This place is a pigsty and a waist of time. Save the paint and buy a box of matches and a can of gas instead.

She was positive Freebird was really J’Aimee, who couldn’t spell to save her life.

Leaving TrueGrace, she clicked over to Craigslist. She’d done some preliminary shopping and discovered that even the cheapest stoves and refrigerators at the big-box chain stores would put a worrisome dent in her budget. Maybe, she thought, she could find a bargain on Craigslist. Stainless steel would be nice, but she’d be happy with nearly-new good quality white appliances if the price was right.

She typed stoves into the search bar and came up with a list of nearly two hundred possibilities, ranging from the ridiculous—“Free stove, only one burner works, door has to be duct-taped. Must pick up today.” To the sublime: “Viking 48-inch stainless steel pro series dual fuel, six burners, 12-inch steel griddle, simmer plate, convection/gas oven, electric broiler, Like new, $6,000.”

“This is more like it,” she muttered, reading a listing for a, “Like-new GE Profile refrigerator, and electric range, removed from model home, still in warranty, $200 must pick up.” She e-mailed the owner, asking about availability, and then logged off.

Grace walked back and forth between the paint swatches, debating whether or not the white would work. Was it too cold? Too gray? She held the Benjamin Moore paint chips up against the walls for comparison. It wasn’t Farrow & Ball, that was for sure. She would never be able to duplicate the depth of color or matte finish of the English paint, but this color? Yeah. She nodded. It was a happy, clean white, and a huge improvement over the current dirty taupey-pink walls.

She finished taping off all the trim, cranked up the tunes on her iPod, and went to work. Grace had always secretly enjoyed painting and had done a lot of it in her early days as a single career girl and then in the first few houses she and Ben rehabbed.

But at Sand Dollar Lane, she’d happily relinquished the job to the contractor. All those soaring cathedral ceilings and huge window walls and stairwells, not to mention the miles and miles of moldings and the window frames themselves, were too intimidating. Besides, Ben insisted it was time to have everything in the new house “first-class.”

“You’re going to be photographing the house all the time, and we’re gonna shoot videos here, so how will it look to your readers and followers if they see streaky or chipped paint?” he’d said.

Now, she worked quickly, rolling the paint to the beat of the music. Unlike most people, she loved the smell of wet paint, especially mixed with the leftover fumes from all the Pine-Sol she’d used to get rid of the funky white-trash odors the house had absorbed.

She didn’t stop for lunch until after she’d finished the living room and the dining room. Then, she took her sandwich, a bottle of water, and a ripe peach out to the front porch, where she sat in an old aluminum-and-plastic-webbed lawn chair she’d found in the toolshed. Sweetie sat at her feet while she ate, gobbling up whatever crumbs Grace tossed her, then curling up in a sunny spot near the screened door for a nap.

Grace stood up and stretched. She’d considered starting on the paint in the kitchen, but since she still didn’t have a solution for the kitchen floors—and because she dreaded the thought of painting the old cabinet boxes and drawers, she decided to move on to the bedrooms.

It was no good trying not to play the “if I lived here game.” She’d been