The Ladies' Room (12 page)

High color crept up his neck and around his angular jawline
to his cheeks, which were blazing in a matter of seconds.
"There's enough to take care of whatever you want done. I can
work for you for a whole year and not lose a dime."

"Good! Then, yes, I want all the paint taken off and the
wood stained and shining."

"High gloss?" he asked.

The color in his cheeks began to fade. Maybe the mustard
took it away. Hmm, maybe it would work like that on cellulite.
If I ate mustard and pickles every day, would the fat disappear
off my thighs? Or if I rubbed mustard on my thighs and let it set until it was dried up like an old creek bed, would I wash
away all the pesky little cellulite critters?

"What?" I belatedly asked.

"Varnish comes in flat finish, semigloss, and high gloss," he
answered.

"I guess high gloss is the shiniest?"

He nodded.

"Then that's what I want. Does it look like a basketball
court when they've just waxed it?"

He grinned. "That's about right."

When I finished chewing and swallowed the last bite of the
sandwich, I brought out the cheesecake.

He groaned. "I forgot we had dessert. I shouldn't have eaten
the third sandwich."

"Want to save it until midafternoon for our coffee break?"

"Yes, I do. But you go ahead. You only ate one sandwich."

"I think I'll wait too. It'll taste good with a cup of coffee in
a couple of hours."

The window guys returned, and we all went back to work.

Put on stripper. Take off blistered paint. Do it again and
again.

"Do you remember Mrs. Dorry in the first grade?" I asked.
He'd remembered that I colored hair purple and the sky green.
What else was hiding in that brilliant mind of his?

He nodded.

"I was terrified of her," I said.

"I know. When she called on you, I always wanted to answer
for you. You looked so scared that I felt sorry for you"

"You were shy too."

"More like bored. My grandmother taught me to read before
I went to school. I was reading the newspaper when I was five.
And Grandpa taught me to do math and figure. They believed
in living simply. Grandpa grew a garden, and Grandma canned
food for the winter. They taught me to work and to love to
learn new things. I wasn't really afraid or shy. I was just bored
and different."

Suddenly it mattered to me very much that Billy Lee was
my friend. He'd said I looked nice on Sunday; that he liked my hair; that I wasn't a whiner. He'd brought supper the day after
Gert died. Not one of my old friends or acquaintances had
even called or come by my house to see how I was faring with
the loss and the divorce, much less brought barbecued ribs.

I tried to remember if I'd said anything nice to him since
the funeral. Other than standing up for him with Drew-and
I'd have done that for the real village idiot out of anger-I
hadn't. Some friend I was!

That night I ran a warm bath and only whimpered a few
times when I sank down into the water. The old claw-foot tub
had a nice, sloped back made to lean against. I promptly fell
asleep and awoke an hour later sitting in a tub of cold water.

After I'd toweled off and slipped into underpants and a
comfortable old cotton gown, I stepped into the bedroom and
actually shivered. God bless the woman who'd invented airconditioning. Okay, it might have been a man, but I'll bet you
dollars to earthworms that a woman nagged him into it.

I held the bottom of the nightgown over the front of the air
conditioner for a few minutes, not caring if it produced chill
bumps. Then I crossed the hallway to the room that would
eventually be my bedroom and switched on the light to look at
the progress one more time.

My bedroom. Mine. Not mine and Drew's but mine. I was as
possessive as a little girl on Christmas with a brand-new doll. I
turned the light off and noticed a yellow glow coming from
across the yard, so I ventured to the window and looked out
toward Billy Lee's place. His small house was dark, but light
flowed from big open garage doors at both ends of his enormous
shop building out in the backyard. Did the man ever sleep? As I
watched, the lights went out, and the doors rolled down. Billy
Lee made his way across the yard and into the house.

Alone isn't a bad place to be, especially when it's the alternative to distrust and unhappiness, but alone brought loneliness as the darkness surrounded me. I wished for the nerve to
go downstairs and call Billy Lee. Just to hear his voice. Just to
talk about the day. Just to be a nosy neighbor and find out
what he was doing every evening in that big shop building.

awoke in a royal pout.

Life was not fair.

It could have given me what I'd thought I had all along, but,
oh, no! It had to wait until forty was bearing down on me to
play show-and-tell with the truth of what had happened in my
life.

Before the day in the ladies' room, the worst thing in my life
was facing my fortieth birthday in July. I had a lovely home, a
healthy, grown daughter, a loving husband, and friends by the
dozens. That was BTF: before the funeral. Now I had an old
house filled Aunt Gert's past, a daughter who was married to
a boy I'd never met and who hadn't talked to me since the funeral, and an ex-husband who'd evidently never loved me. And
the only person who'd come to my rescue was Billy Lee Tucker.

In the middle of the stripping job, I took a moment to really
look at him. He was talking with the crew of men who'd arrived to put in my new central air-conditioning unit. The window men would finish their job by noon, the electricians were
out of the attic and working their way through the bedrooms
upstairs, and the plumbers would arrive Monday morning.

By the end of the next week the people crawling all over my
house would be gone, and it would be up to me and Billy Lee
to do the finish work. We wouldn't even have to work in the
backyard once the air-conditioning was installed. But that
morning the house was so hot, it sucked the air out of my
lungs, so we were outside. Billy Lee had taken the doors off
the bedroom and laid them across sawhorses under a shade tree. My job was to strip all the paint off one closet door. Billy
Lee worked on another one when he wasn't supervising any
workers. He kept everything going smoothly, and I was glad. I
couldn't have done it even with a day planner at my fingertips.

He must've felt me staring at him, because he looked up
and raised an eyebrow in question. I shook my head and went
back to work. He gave the fellows a few more instructions and
crossed the yard to me.

"Did you need something?" he asked.

"How do you do it?"

He picked up his paintbrush, loaded it with stripper, and
slathered a section of the door. "Do what?"

"Keep everything going at once and organized."

He shrugged. "It's not so hard. Visualize the end, and start
at the beginning."

"You are a genius."

He grinned. "Never been called that before"

"I'm adding it to your resume"

"Thank you"

"No thanks necessary. The truth is the truth whether you
serve it up plain or top it with chocolate frosting. It's still the
truth."

"So now you're a philosopher as well as a stripper."

I laughed aloud. "The first I might be. The second would be
a physical impossibility."

"Why? You're doing a fine job," he said.

"Think, Billy Lee! You just called me a stripper."

He blushed. "Why would that be a physical impossibility?"

"I'm over the hill. Strippers are young and built well."

"You are stripping and doing a fine job of it," he teased.

"Oh, hush. I can't win a fight with you. So, what's next?" I'd
gotten the hang of paint removal and hadn't dropped any of
the lethal stuff on me in a couple of days until that moment. I
dropped a glob onto my bare left foot, which I hurriedly wiped
away. And I did not whine!

Billy Lee smiled and changed the subject. "Alford should
have the bedroom and landing floors sanded by noon. So after
we get these doors ready, we'll stain woodwork in those areas. We wait until the plumbers, electricians, and air-conditioning
men are finished to apply the sanding sealer and varnish. We
can go ahead and work on some more doors if we finish before they do"

"Speaking of varnish, I've changed my mind. I want the floors
so shiny you can see yourself in them but not the woodwork.
I want that to look softer. Does that make sense?" I said.

Billy Lee nodded. "Yes, it does. You're making a wise decision. Satin finish will give it a classy look. High gloss could
look cheap"

My temper flared. He would have let me ruin all our hard
work without saying a thing? What was the matter with the
man? Did all genius-level people have trouble speaking their
minds? "Why didn't you tell me that?"

"Are you going to put the same furniture back in that room
when it's all ready?"

I put the brush down and popped my hands onto my hips.
"No, but don't change the subject. I want to talk about varnish."

"Are you upset?"

"Why didn't you say that high gloss would look cheap? You
would have just let me make a big mess after I'd worked hours
and hours on stripping the old paint off? I'm not working on
this house to have it look cheap. I want it to be warm and
beautiful."

He folded his arms across his chest and set his jaw. "You're
mad at me because I was going to let you do what you wanted
with your own house? It's your house. You didn't ask my advice, so I didn't give it. When you did ask, I was honest. So
don't be mad at me because you almost made a bad decision."

"You should have told me high gloss would look ugly. We
made a deal to be honest, and if you are my friend, then we have
to be honest. I don't care about being nice. Look where that got
me before"

He gritted his teeth. "Don't compare me to Drew. I never
would have treated you that way. If you want me to tell you
what I think, all you have to do is ask, and I'll be honest every
time, but I've learned the hard way not to put my two cents in
where they are not wanted," he said.

"From now on I want your two cents. If I don't like them,
I'll tell you, and we'll discuss it."

He nodded.

"Tell me what you think, and be honest"

"High gloss on the floor and satin on the rest," he said.

"And you'll tell me what's best from now on?" I asked.

"No."

I jerked my head around to find him grinning. "Then we
just had a big fight for nothing?"

"You call that a fight? I call it a minor disagreement."

"Why? I was blunt and not nice. It was a fight," I argued.

"A fight is when we don't talk to each other for a whole hour."

"Why won't you tell me what's best?"

"Because you can make decisions for yourself even if they're
wrong. Mistakes can be corrected. Life is too short to have
everyone else tell you how to live. Make a few mistakes, and
learn from them. At least they'll be real, and you'll be living,
not just existing."

"Are we talking about varnish or life in general?"

"Life as a whole," he answered.

"Who died and made you God?"

"Gert," he said.

A giggle started in the bottom of my heart and rose to escape out of my mouth in a guffaw. I could never stay mad at
Billy Lee for a whole hour, so how could we ever have a real
fight?

He grinned but didn't laugh. "Now, tell me what kind of
furniture you want for your new bedroom."

"Gert was pretty high up on the ladder, wasn't she?"

That's when he chuckled. "One more step and she'd have
been right up there with Saint Peter and the angels."

I laughed hard enough that the men working on the central
air unit looked my way. I didn't even care. It had been years
since I'd found anything so funny. Poor Trudy, bless her heart!

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"Saint Peter has his hands full with Gert, don't you imagine?"

"Probably so, but then, maybe she's got her hands full with
Saint Peter. You going to answer me about that furniture?"

I wiped my eyes on the corner of my shirtsleeve. "I want a
sleigh bed, queen-size. A dresser with a big mirror to match
and a chest of drawers. Two nightstands, one for each side of
the bed, and a thingamajig to put quilts inside."

He cocked his head to one side. "Quilts?"

"I've always loved quilts, so I'm decorating with them. I'll
hit the antiques fairs and begin a collection, so I'll need a shelf
thing to keep them in and one of those things that hangs on a
wall to display one at a time and maybe even a quilt rack that
holds six or eight to sit on the floor in the living room."

He nodded.

"Maybe next week we'll go find some of that kind of furniture. Or is it infringing on our friendship too much for you to
go furniture shopping with me?" I asked.

He kept working. "Nothing can ever infringe on our friendship. It's solid."