Gloria misses nothing. She got up, came over, and massaged my neck right where the muscles were all knotted up. “Anyway, it’s over and done with. And I don’t care what anybody says, you’re much too young for pearls.” She brightened then.
“I forgot! Speaking of ugly gossip, guess what else Mae Finley said when she called?”
“Don’t know. Tell.”
“Madison’s official slut population just dropped by two.”
“Huh?”
“Paige and Lorna! Mae saw them loading stuff into a moving van this morning. And there’s a sold sign in front of their house.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, feeling my spirits lift a little. “Where’d they go? What happened?”
“I heard they’re moving to Marietta. Lorna’s been on disability since June, with emphysema. And now Paige lost her job at the ad agency,” Gloria said, her eyes sparkling. “A little bird told me they let her go because Madison Mutual took their account to another agency.”
“No!” I had to laugh despite my wretched mood.
“The same little bird told me that GiGi let it be known to Drew that she didn’t want to see that little blond hussy anywhere near her precious son. Didn’t want Paige getting any ideas that once you were out of the picture she could just slide right into the picture.”
“Poor Paige,” I said. “I guess she won’t be spending Christmas morning at The Oaks after all.”
43
It had been nearly a month since I’d seen my biggest client, Will Mahoney. During that time, at the beginning of every week, Nancy Rockmore would call and give me his itinerary and usually a phone number or address where I could overnight sketches or have a conference call with him. For weeks I’d been making room sketches, all prominently featuring Stephanie Scofield and Erwin. I’d also attached fabric samples and photographs of furniture, light fixtures, rugs, and paintings I’d bought or put on hold.
I’d already spent over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of his money, and Will hadn’t seen a single actual thing I’d bought. I was beginning to get nervous about the heavy outlay of cash.
And Miss Nancy, who cut all the checks, was beginning to get downright grouchy about seeing all that money going out the door to what she called Will’s own personal Taj Mahoney.
On the first Monday in July I dropped by the Loving Cup plant to pick up a check for a pair of cast-iron urns I’d bought for the front porch.
“Two thousand dollars,” she said, with an aggrieved air, as she typed out the check. “Are them things made out of solid gold?”
“They’re nineteenth-century jardinières,” I said, feeling guilty. “From a sugar plantation in Barbados. And that includes the packing and shipping from the dealer, who is in Mississippi.”
“For that kind of money they oughtta hand carry ’em on the back of a water buffalo,” she said. “And speaking of which, the boss is gettin’ in today from some heathen foreign place. He wants you to meet him out at the castle at four. Wants to take a walk-through.”
It was already nearly two. Damn. I’d have to run out to the house right now to make sure the site was picked up and looking spiffy. The construction crew had been working overtime to get the addition done, and cleaning up after themselves had not been a priority. All the walls were up, the wiring and plumbing stubbed in, and the floors laid. But the finish work seemed to be taking forever.
Will had insisted that the walls in the addition be plaster—not sheetrock—to match the original portion of the house. It had taken me weeks to track down somebody who still did old-time plaster and lathe construction. His name was James Moody, and he was an artist. He was also seventy-two-years old, and on wet days, which we’d had plenty of, the arthritis in his hands was so bad he had to sit on an upended bucket and give detailed instruction to his apprentice—an eighteen-year-old Mexican youth who spoke only rudimentary English.
Miss Nancy banged away at the keys to her computer terminal without looking up at me now.
“How’s it going around here?” I asked. There didn’t seem to be a lot of activity at the plant. The parking lot was nearly empty.
She pursed her lips. “It ain’t goin’,” she said flatly. “The boss don’t tell me much. But I know he came back from that last trip to New York in a terrible mood. The money men are telling him we can’t make bras in this country anymore. Not even the fancy underwire job he wants to manufacture here. They say the labor costs are too high down here.”
She lowered her voice. “That’s what all these goddamn foreign trips are about. He thinks I don’t know, but hell, I’m the one makes all the travel arrangements, sets up all the meetings for him. There’s a plant in Nicaragua he’s looking at, and another in Mexico. He had the girls in the sample room make up a set of samples to take down there to them, see if they can produce the kind of quality he wants.”
I held my breath for a minute. No wonder she resented Will’s house so much. The way she saw it, every dime he spent out at Mulberry Hill was a dime taken away from getting Loving Cup up and running again.
“But, even if he did that, he’d still keep the company here, right? I mean, there would still be jobs here in Madison. Right? Like the packaging and shipping and ordering, that kind of stuff?”
“If by company you mean me and a handful of other people, yeah,” Miss Nancy said. “The stitchers in the sample room would probably keep their jobs. But there’s only half a dozen of them. Used to be, we had two hundred machine operators back out there on the floor,” she said, her voice wistful. “Not to mention the cutters and pattern makers and all the other production folks. Most of them lost their jobs in the last buyout. But yeah, some of the marketing and accounting and computer types would have jobs. The college kids. The yuppies, they’d get to keep their SUVs and Rolex watches.”
I didn’t know what to say to her. Suddenly I felt a little like Marie Antoinette, gilding the lily at Versailles, while the French peasants starved. It wasn’t the same; intellectually I knew there was no comparison. But I still wished I hadn’t already gotten the okay to spend two thousand dollars for a pair of overpriced flowerpots.
“How’s it going with the boss and his little girlfriend?” Miss Nancy asked, trying to sound casual.
“Stephanie? How’d you know about her?” I asked. Will didn’t seem like the kind to share his private love life with people in the office, not even his assistant.
She made a sour face. “I send a dozen roses to a Stephanie Scofield at some fancy law firm in Buckhead every week,” Nancy said. “It don’t take a goddamn rocket scientist to figure out he’s hot for her. So how’s it going? What’s she like?”
“You probably know as much as I do. She’s very pretty. The athletic type. She seems interested in Will.”
“Interested in the castle, that’s for sure,” Nancy said.
“How’s that?” I asked, surprised.
“The boss had me make a set of keys and send ’em over to her,” Nancy said. “For the castle and the little house. So she could check up on things while he’s been gone.”
This was big news to me. I’d talked to my client several times, and he hadn’t said a word about Stephanie Scofield “checking up” on our progress. And I hadn’t run into her out on the job site either.
Nancy was watching me closely. “That’s good,” I said. “I’ve got other projects to worry about. It’s good to have another pair of eyes watching things. I’m sure Will appreciates her interest.”
“Suuuuree,” Nancy said. She went back to her typing, and I went home to change into jeans and sneakers before heading off to Mulberry Hill.
As usual, when I got out to the job site I marveled at the progress the workers had made in just six weeks, and at Will Mahoney’s ability to prod, bribe, bully, and beseech his crew to buy into his vision of what the house could be.
He’d been adamant that the façade of the house be the first thing completed. All the masonry, trim carpentry, stripping, painting, construction
of the side porches, and reinforcement of the columns, as well as the reinstallation of the windows and the “new” salvaged door—he had wanted it all in place, he said, so that everybody involved in the project could see what the finished project would look like.
And what it looked like was magnificent. As I drove down past the meadows, with newly painted white rail fences setting off the fields of wildflowers and grains, the sudden surprise of the emerald green lawn and the formal boxwood plantings made my heart leap. The old house gleamed snowy white against all that green. I couldn’t wait to drag those jardinières out onto the porch and fill them with the fluffiest ferns in Morgan County.
As I followed the drive around to the back of the house my smile dimmed. Mulberry Hill was like a Hollywood stage set. Beautiful and bucolic from the front, but once you drove around to the back-lot, it all started to seem like smoke and mirrors.
Pickup trucks and vans were parked all over the place. The sod that had been planted at the beginning of May was ruined, and the backyard was a sea of rutted red mud. A cement mixer churned on the patio of the pump house, and piles of lumber and bricks were strewn about in no discernible plan or pattern. And the trash! There were mounds of it everywhere. Fast food wrappers, scraps of wood, insulation and rebar, along with the discarded packing cases for the custom windows and the cardboard cartons for all the appliances had been tossed at random.
I parked the Volvo and hurried over to the back porch, where Will’s foreman, Adam, was watching a worker nail weather stripping around the French doors. The porch floorboards were coated in mud, and my heart sank when I saw the muddy footprints leading into the new breakfast room.
“Adam!” I said breathlessly. “This place is a disaster. You’ve got to do something.”
Adam was a muscle-bound black man in his early thirties. I doubt that he’d ever had to deal with an interior designer bossing him around on a construction site before. But Will had told him, in my presence, that I would be the oversight committee in his absence. We’d come to a tenuously workable arrangement. I didn’t talk directly to any of his workers. If I had a problem with anything, I was to bring it up with him, in private. He didn’t want his guys to think he took orders from some chick who drove a Volvo and wore high-heeled sandals on a construction site.
Now he tossed the cigarette he’d been smoking to the ground and regarded me cautiously. “What’s up, Keeley?”
“This mess,” I said, gesturing around at all the trash. “We’ve got to get it all cleaned up.”
“It’s a job site,” he said, frowning.
“But Will’s coming out for a walk-through at four,” I said. “And I don’t want him to overlook the incredible progress you’ve made because of all this trash.”
This was better. Positive reinforcement, that was the ticket. “The front of the house looks so fabulous, and then you drive around here, and it’s, uh, not so fabulous. Don’t you think we could have a quick cleanup? Maybe burn some of that scrap lumber and get the rest of the trash in the Dumpster, instead of strewn all around? And could we park the trucks away from the house? The backyard’s just a sea of mud. And it’s getting tracked into the house. I don’t want that beautiful new tile in the kitchen ruined.”
He nodded reluctantly. “Norman’s been bitchin’ at me about the tile. I got it covered up, but he says the paper’s torn near the threshold. He’s talking about having to replace some of the tiles there.”
Adam put his fingers to his mouth and whistled a blast so sharp, I thought it would burst my eardrums.
Instantly the hammering and sawing stopped. Workers drifted out to stand around us in a circle.
“Listen up,” Adam shouted. “Mr. Mahoney’s coming out here for a walk-through at four. I want all you assholes to get those trucks moved over off the sodded area. From now on, you park on the driveway in front, and walk around to the back. And stay off the friggin’ grass. Soon as the trucks are moved, get busy cleaning up all the trash. You can burn the wood and paper scraps in the barrel in the back of the lot. Everything else gets loaded in the Dumpster. As soon as that’s done, go through the house, pick up any trash in there. I want it looking sharp. Understand?”
“Got it,” one of the men said. They started to wander off.
“Hustle, dammit,” Adam hollered.
“Thank you,” I told him, giving him a smile.
“Okay,” he grunted. “But hey, you might wanta take a look around inside. See if it’s like you want it.”
The inside of the house was definitely NOT how I wanted it. There was mud and trash everywhere. I found a worn-out, dirt-crusted broom in the makeshift toolshed that had been assembled in the laundry room, and got busy.
I started at the front of the house and worked my way back, using a shovel as a dustpan, and an empty grout bucket as a trash can. Despite the debris, I had to admit that the house was shaping up. All the moldings in the original part of the house had been stripped and refinished, and Mr. Moody had wrought miracles with the plaster ceiling medallions in the parlors and the dining room. The chimneys had all been repointed and the fireboxes relined, and the marble I’d had shipped in for the hearths was in a shed out back, waiting to be installed.
On an impulse, I put down my broom and ran upstairs to check the progress there.
The landing was being used as a storage area. Huge cartons lined the walls, but the sight of them was a relief. I’d special ordered a reproduction claw-foot whirlpool bathtub for the master bath from Waterworks. It had been on back order since the beginning of summer, and I’d spent hours on the phone trying to make sure that I got the first one to come off the factory floor. The tub was here. So were the tinted green glass tiles for the shower surround. A huge package wrapped in moving pads was leaning against the far wall. I lifted the corner of the quilt and saw that it was the white marble slab I’d chosen for the vanity top.
Through the far wall, I could see Mr. Moody, laboriously slathering mud to the new lathe he’d nailed up for the walls of the master suite.
Quickly I gathered up an armload of trash littering the floors. I was on my way back downstairs to dump it when I heard a horn honking outside. I glanced at my watch.
It was five after four. I put the broom back in the laundry room and rinsed my hands in the laundry tub. It was showtime.
I was almost to the back door when I heard a car door slam. And then another door slammed. And then came a series of sharp, staccato barks.
“Erwin, no,” a woman’s voice wailed. “Wait for Mommy!”
44
“Will! Stephanie!” My voice was registering just the eensiest bit on the shrill side. I felt heavy breathing on my ankle. Erwin was looking up at me, his big liquid brown eyes saying…what? Maybe “I need to urinate”?
Will was wearing wrinkled khakis, a washed-out-looking golf shirt, and huge bags under his eyes. Stephanie looked vastly fresher, perkier, and more in control, dressed in what was probably her idea of pastoral: i.e., denim capri pants, a lighter denim crop top, and blue cork-soled wedgie sandals. There was that damn toe ring again. She clung to Will’s arm like a sailor to a life raft.
“Hey, Keeley,” Will said, giving me an awkward hug with his free arm. “The place looks great.”
My mood lifted, instantly. “You really like it?”
“It’s fabulous,” Stephanie said. She broke away from Will and planted a big, wet kiss on Adam’s cheek.
He blushed, but didn’t seem displeased.
“Will,” Stephanie said, “Adam has been so wonderful. Every Friday, whenever I’ve come out, he stops what he’s doing and shows me all around. He even let me pick the paint color for the new shutters!”
I almost bit my tongue in half. New paint color? I’d spent hours and hours going over the fan deck, looking for the exact right color for the shutters for Mulberry Hill. In the end I’d driven down to Monticello, Georgia, to pick up a paint chip from an 1840s Greek Revival house museum. I’d taken the chip to my Benjamin Moore d
ealer and had it spectroscopically analyzed, and the paint color custom mixed. It wasn’t blue, it wasn’t green, it wasn’t black. It was exactly what the house cried out for.
“Mochachino!” Stephanie was saying. She beamed over at Will. “That’s the name of the paint color I chose for the shutters. I just took my Starbucks cup to the paint store and matched it to what they had. Can you believe it? It’s the yummiest color ever.”
I was staring daggers at Adam. He looked the other way. At Erwin, who was relieving himself on one of the two-thousand-dollar jardinières.
“Let’s go inside,” I said to Will. “I guess you must be tired. Exactly where was it you flew in from today?”
“Mexico,” Stephanie said. She held out her wrist and jangled three thick silver and turquoise bracelets. “Isn’t he the most thoughtful man you’ve ever met? He sends me a present every week. Don’t you love a man who understands the importance of presents?”
“Yes,” I said. “Presents are lovely.”
Will yawned. “I could sleep for a week.”
The walk through the house wasn’t what I had hoped for. Will tried to be enthusiastic. He admired the plaster medallions in the front rooms, and showed real interest in the vintage fireplace surrounds I’d bought from my favorite architectural salvage yard in Jackson, Mississippi. But it was clear he was really sleepwalking.
He shook hands with Mr. Moody and ran his hands over the still damp plaster in the new breakfast room, but just nodded at the leaded glass doors on the kitchen cabinets the carpenters were installing in the kitchen.
Stephanie, however, was deeply concerned with the appliances. I’d found a fully restored 1940s six-burner Chambers gas range in an antique appliance shop in Clayton, Georgia. Its porcelain was milky white, all the chrome was polished, it had a clock, a built-in soup kettle, and a shelf for condiments. I’d designed the rest of the kitchen around the range.
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