Page 136 of The Homewreckers
Construction workers swarmed over the house on Chatham Avenue. A tractor-trailer load of Lumberlyke planking had arrived and was unloaded, and Hattie’s framing crew set about rebuilding the old dock. The electricians removed, rewired, and reinstalled four more light fixtures with faulty wiring. The painters repaired and repainted the ceilings.
As soon as the kitchen fixtures were replaced, Trae shut himself off in the kitchen. On his hands and knees, he measured and taped off the checkerboard diamond pattern he’d designed for the wooden floors.
Hattie and Cass spent an entire day working with the finish carpenters to complete the upstairs bedrooms and bath, installing new baseboards and window trim, and painting the heavily scarred wooden floors with a coat of milk-white deck paint.
“Amazing,” Cass said, standing in the doorway of the guest bedroom, where the afternoon sunlight cast warm streaks of light on the pale, gleaming floors. “I think this was the smelliest, gloomiest room in the whole house. Now, I just want to move in.”
“It looks and smells a lot better now that the roof isn’t leaking, and the ceiling has been replaced. And look at the view out thosewindows,” Hattie said, pointing to the bay windows on the east side of the room. “Can you imagine lying in bed in here, watching a Tybee sunset?”
“I can’t imagine lying in bed, period,” Cass said, groaning and clutching the small of her back. “I feel like I’ve been working nonstop for the past eighteen hours.”
“That’s because you have.”
They moved down the hallway and the stairway, pausing to take in the living room below. The new mantel had been installed, and the brick fireplace with its light coat of limewash gave the room a mellow dignity. The floor had received two coats of matte polyurethane. “Looks awesome,” Hattie said. “We’ll come back later and give it another light sand and a couple more coats. We’ll just have to warn anybody who walks through here to take off their shoes.”
They moved downstairs and opened the door to the new bathroom that had been tucked under the staircase. “What else are we doing in here?” Hattie asked. “It looks so bare.”
The floors were covered in a vintage-looking gray-and-white basket-weave tile, and a painted wooden wainscot extended halfway up the walls, with unadorned sheetrock above.
Cass leaned against the doorjamb. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Trae ordered some fancy custom wallpaper, but he waited until yesterday to tell me it hasn’t shipped yet.”
Hattie sat down on the closed seat of the commode and glanced around. She’d found an old pine dresser with a marble top to use as a sink vanity, but the rest of the room was bare.
“It definitely needs something,” she mused, and then snapped her fingers.
“Nautical charts. I bought a whole barrel full of them at an estate sale down in Brunswick last year. They’re great colors, and a lot of them are of the South Atlantic coast. We’ll glue them right to the walls with wallpaper paste.”
“Sounds good.” Cass picked up one of a pair of antique unvarnished brass sconces that had been laid out on top of the vanity. “Trae found these out in the boat shed, beneath that old farm sink. They’lllook good in here, right? But what should we do for a mirror? He said that hasn’t shipped either.”
“Didn’t we save a dresser mirror from one of the upstairs bedrooms?” Hattie asked. “Seems like that would be about the right size.”
“But it’s mahogany. Don’t you think it’s too fancy with this primitive pine piece? What if we wrapped the frame with rope?”
“I like it. No, I love it,” Hattie said.
“What’ll Trae say about us taking over his design decisions?” Cass asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Who cares? Get ’er done. That’s my new mantra.”
The two women spent the rest of the day measuring, cutting, and gluing nautical charts to the walls, and even the ceiling of the bathroom. They were almost finished when Leetha arrived to check on their progress.
“Ooh, I like it,” the showrunner said. “Thinking outside the box. I just came from the kitchen. Saw Ashtray down on his hands and knees taping those floors.” She held up her cell phone. “Had to take a photo to commemorate the occasion.”
“Did Trae say when he thought he’d be done?” Hattie asked.
“He swears it’ll be done by morning,” Leetha said, looking dubious. “Said he’s going to paint it himself, because he doesn’t trust y’all’s painters not to muck it up.”
“Good,” Cass said. “Our guys already have enough to do fixing his screwups. Let him spend the whole night crawling around on the floor.”
62Quel Scandal
Mo was sitting at the bar at The Whitaker, nursing a bourbon and water, going over his notes. He’d ordered dinner and was savoring the opportunity to relax and clear his mind after another chaotic day of homewrecking.
Two more days. His stomach growled. He’d had a stale bagel from craft services for breakfast and couldn’t remember having lunch. The Chatham Avenue set was chaos, as Hattie and Cass and even Trae raced the clock to finish work on the house.
He’d been back to this hotel several times since the night he’d dropped off Trae’s iPad. The place had grown on him. He liked the clubby ambience, and the food and excellent selection of bourbons. But mostly he liked that he wasn’t eating his own fairly dismal cooking.
To Mo’s surprise, Savannah had started to grow on him too, despite his best efforts to resist its charms. He didn’t care for the heat or humidity, or the damned no-see-ums, but the city itself, with its wide streets lined with moss-draped oaks, the quiet green squares surrounded by elegant nineteenth-century town houses, the languid pace, and the quirky friendliness of most of the natives? He’d succumbed to all, dammit.
