"And?"
Bobby grinned. He reached over and gently squeezed my right forearm. "How do you feel about working up some muscles?"
"What are you proposing?"
"Sweat equity," he said. "We take off every single one of these cabinet doors and pull out the drawers. I'll strip the boxes, you strip the doors. When we're done, you're gonna have cabinets a lot prettier-a lot better-than any of that pricey junk over to the Home Depot."
"Strip how?"
"Could do chemicals, but I'm thinking a heat gun's gonna be cheaper. And quicker," he said.
I looked down at his sketch, which was a simple schematic drawing of the kitchen. "But these doors here"-I tapped the drawing-"look like they have glass panes in them."
"That's right," he said smugly. "I seen it in my wife's magazines she brings home from the beauty parlor. Glass-front cabinets, that's what your high-end kitchens have these days."
"Expensive," I reminded him. "And not in my budget."
"Sure it is," he said, lifting a glass-paned cabinet door from the chair beside him.
"Is that one of the cupboard doors from the butler's pantry?"
"Sure is," he said. "They're the exact same size as the ones in this here kitchen. I'm thinking we swap out some of the glass-pane ones for the solid ones. Don't need all those cupboard doors in the butler's pantry anyway. Shelves are all right in there. We strip these down, they're gonna be pretty as a picture."
He smiled shyly. "What do you think?"
I shrugged. "You've got an island drawn in the middle right where this table is. That's gonna cost."
"That I can build," Bobby said. "Down in your basement? Over by the furnace, somebody left a big ol' pile of lumber, all stacked pretty as you please, up off the floor so it never got wet or warped. Probably left over from building that shed you got out back. Anyway, it's good solid two-by-fours and four-by-fours. I can glue up some of 'em, put 'em on my lathe, and turn you some table legs look just like what I've drawn here."
"I like it," I admitted finally. "What's that hanging from chains above the island?"
"That's a pot rack," Bobby said. "You got an old apple-picking ladder out in that shed. We hang that from some of that chain and put some iron hooks on it, it'll work as good as store bought."
"It all looks great," I said. "But what do we do about countertops? That yellow Formica has got to go."
"No two ways about it," Bobby agreed.
"I guess I could shop around, see if I can come up with something that looks as good as granite, but is cheaper." I looked with distaste at the floor, with its cracked green linoleum tiles. "What do we do about this floor?"
Bobby was in his midsixties, but he dropped easily to his hands and knees and gently pried up one of the tiles just under the table. Again, with the tip of his knife, he scraped at the thick black mastic.
"Huh," he muttered. "This ain't good." He scrambled to his feet, and without another word walked out the door. When he came back a moment later, he had what looked like a heavy-duty black hair dryer in his hands. Snaking the thick black cord over to an outlet by the sink, he plugged it in.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Heat gun I was telling you about," Bobby said. He held up the tip and I could see the glowing red coils. He aimed the gun a few inches from the black mastic, and after a moment, reached into the pocket of his work pants and brought out a sharp-edged scraper. When the black goo began to bubble, he worked the edge of the scraper across it. He grabbed the discarded green tile and wiped the molten mastic on it.
"Look here," he said proudly.
I got down on my own hands and knees to get a look. "It's wood," I said, meeting his grin with one of my own. "Like all the rest of the floors."
"Heart pine," Bobby agreed. "All we gotta do is pull up these old tiles and scrape up that mastic. You can't buy floors this good anymore."
I sat back and looked around the kitchen with new appreciation. "This could be nice," I said finally. "Much better, anyway, than what's here now."
"You bet," Bobby said. He stood up and walked over to the sink. "This old sink, it's pretty grimy." He glanced around, and whispered, "Ella Kate, she's a nice lady, but I don't think housework was ever her strong suit."
"You know Ella Kate?" I don't know why I was surprised. Guthrie was so small it made Mayberry look like a metropolis.
"Oh, sure," Bobby said. "I been knowing Ella Kate, and Mr. Norbert too, for a good long time. Norbert, he was pretty tight with a dollar, but when he got up in years and couldn't get around too much, he'd hire me to do little jobs around the place."
"What can we do about the sink?" I asked.
"Elbow grease," Bobby said. "Get it cleaned up and polished, it'll look as good as those farmhouse sinks in the magazines. Same with these old faucets. They're nickel plated," he continued. "That's the thing about Birdsong. The Dempseys, your people, they had plenty of money back in the day, and they didn't mind spending it. Everything in this house-it may be old, but it's first-rate."
"I guess," I said. "Everything but me."
Bobby gave me a quizzical look.
"Never mind me," I said. "I'm just having a little pity party for myself."
Bobby picked up his clipboard and handed it to me. His precise block letters covered most of the page, everything itemized. I looked down at the bottom line and smiled. His estimate-for everything, labor and materials-came in right at $78,000.
"When can you start?" I asked.
"How's tomorrow?"
"Fine," I said. I kicked at the loosened floor tile with the toe of my sneaker. "Can you leave that heat gun with me tonight? I've got some aggression I need to work out."
I walked Bobby out to the porch. And when I opened the door, was greeted with the smell of fresh paint.
Jimmy Maynard, my new friend from the hardware store, stood on the porch, brandishing a can of paint in one hand and a brush in the other. The day was sunny, but although temperatures were still only in the high sixties he was again dressed for a day on the golf greens, in blue madras Bermudas and a hot pink golf shirt. He'd painted a three-foot-wide swath of rich green paint on Birdsong's faded pink siding.
"Bobby Livesey!" Jimmy said, putting the paint can down and wiping his hands with a handkerchief he pulled from his back pocket. "You coming to the rescue of Miss Dempsey Killebrew here?"
"Looks like it," Bobby said, pumping Jimmy's hand. "Did Dempsey line you up to do the house painting? I didn't know you'd gotten out of real estate."
"Oh no, I'm still messing with real estate," Jimmy said. "Too old to change my stripes now, you know."
The two men laughed over their shared joke, and Bobby took his leave, promising that he would arrive bright and early in the morning.
Jimmy Maynard nonchalantly opened another can of paint and started brushing a lighter shade of green on the other side of the door.
"What are you doing here?" I asked, crossing my arms across my chest. "Besides defacing my property?"
Jimmy gestured with his brush at his handiwork. "I was over at the hardware store this morning, and I got to thinking about Birdsong. I've driven back and forth past this house at least twice a day for the past twenty years, and every time I pass it, I think about what a beautiful place this could be if it was fixed up. You know I just live up the block, don't you?"
"I didn't know that."
He pointed to his right. "The little brick Colonial Revival. Six houses down. First house I ever bought. I lost it in my first divorce, but then, when Shirlene hooked herself a rich doctor and moved out to the country club, I managed to buy it back. Two marriages and two divorces later, I'm still hanging on to the place."
"You've been married and divorced three times?" I asked incredulously.
"Four, if you count good ol' LaDonna." He was opening another can of paint. This one was an acid green. "Oh hell," he said, putting the lid back on. "That won't work. Looks like baby puke."
"I thought you wanted me to paint the house white," I said.
"Change of plans. White's boring. Dill pickle, this is called," Jimmy said. "Stupid name for a paint, you ask me. I think I'd like it better if we cut it twenty-five percent with white."
"We?"
"Just a figure of speech."
"Back to your marriage record," I said, starting to enjoy myself despite my previous funk. "Why wouldn't I count good ol' LaDonna?"
"That one was a shotgun wedding. Her daddy caught us in the backseat of my Camaro, out at the reservoir. I was seventeen, but ol' LaDonna was eighteen."
"You got married at seventeen? Were you still in high school?"
"Technically," he said. "We moved into a double-wide out at my granny's farm, and I went to summer school so I could graduate early. Her daddy got me a job at the bedspread mill. At the time it was durned good money. For a seventeen-year-old."
I leaned up against one of the porch columns. "Then what happened?"
"I got laid off at the mill, and LaDonna got laid by some dude she met at a dance at the VFW. No hard feelings though. I even let her have the double-wide."
"You're quite a guy, Jimmy Maynard," I said.
He put his hand on my arm, and I shivered involuntarily. "Oh, darlin'," he drawled, with that slow, deadly smile that had obviously affected many a woman in Guthrie, Georgia. "You don't know the half of it."
I gave him a long, searching look. He flashed the grin, full force. I think he thought I'd drop my panties right there.
I shook my head. "You're good. But it won't work on me. You forget, I'm not from here. Anyway, it's a waste of time expending all that charm on me. I'm going to get this old house fixed up, and sold, and then I'm outta here. Two months tops."
He looked hurt. "Why? You don't like me? Let me guess. You think I'm too old for you? Just how old do you think I am, anyway?"
"It's not that," I said quickly. I flashed back to what my roommate had said about my affinity for older men. She was wrong. Dead wrong. Wasn't she?
"What is it then?" he persisted. "Ah, hell. Don't tell me. I bet you came down here to nurse a broken heart."
"That's not it," I said sharply. "I told you already, I'm down here on business, plain and simple. I'm really not in the market for complications."
"Complications?" he hooted. "Anybody who knows me can tell you, I am the least complicated man on this planet. I'll tell you straight up who I am. I like my sippin' whiskey old, my cars fast, and my women young. Oh yeah. Money. I like money. You see, Dempsey Killebrew? With me, what you see is what you get. Ain't that refreshing? No bullshit. No complications. Now, what about it?"
"What about what?"
"You and me. Tonight. Some dinner. Some drinks. Some laughs. I promise, it'll be strictly physical. And I'll still respect you in the morning." He gave me a broad, endearing wink.
"Sorry," I told him. "I already have plans for tonight."
His face fell. "With who? Don't tell me you're seeing little old Tee Berryhill again. What? You got a thing for lawyers?"
My face flushed at the mention of Tee. We'd had one dinner-definitely not a date. His father did the cooking. Did everybody in town know my business already?
"I'm staying in tonight," I told Jimmy. "Just me and the heat gun. It's going to be hot, and it's going to be messy."
I left him standing on the porch, paintbrush in hand.
22.
I hadn't lied when I told Jimmy Maynard about my plans for the evening. Still smarting from Alex's phone call, I decided the best way to work out my worries was with a project.
I cleared all the furniture out of the kitchen, stacking the chairs on top of the table, which I'd dragged into the dining room.
For a moment, I stood looking down at the ugly green floor, trying to figure out where to start. The room reminded me of an enormous, scummy pond. The only way to empty it, I decided, was bucket by bucket, or in this case, square by square.
At my request, Bobby had left me a wooden fruit crate full of tools he'd gathered from Birdsong's basement and toolshed. I dug out a measuring tape and measured the room. It was exactly fifteen by twenty. The tiles themselves were eight-inch squares. By my quick computations, there were 630 tiles begging to be demolished.
The old linoleum tiles were worn and brittle and came up relatively easily with the aid of the knife-edged pry bar Bobby had lent me. Each time I whacked the head of the pry bar with the mallet, the sensation filled me with malicious delight. By eight o'clock that night, I'd filled two heavy-duty plastic trash bags with the discarded tiles. I was elated when I dumped the last tile into the last bag. Piece of cake, I decided. At this rate, I might have the entire kitchen rehabbed within a week. And if Bobby could match my pace, I would have Birdsong spiffed up and sold in half the time Mitch and I had allotted. Soon, I thought, I would be seeing Guthrie in my rearview mirror. By April, I would be seeing the cherry blossoms in bloom around the tidal basin.
Cheered by this thought, I made quick work of dragging the bags of discarded tiles outside to the garbage cans. But when I came back inside, it was to find Ella Kate standing in the middle of the kitchen, a look of fury on her face.
"What's all this?" she demanded. "Look at the mess you've made here. What do you think you're doing to my floor?"
Something in me snapped.
"It's not your floor," I said. "I'm sorry, Ella Kate, but that's the truth. Norbert left the house to my father, and he has asked me to get it ready to be sold. That's what I intend to do."
"You Killebrews!" She bit the words out. "Think you know everything. Think you run the world." She stomped out of the room, slamming behind her the door to the hallway.
I vowed once again to get to the bottom of Ella Kate's feud with my father. Later. Right now, I had a floor to demolish.
I plugged in the heat gun and started to work. If the tiles had come up with relative ease, the stubborn black adhesive was a whole different ball game. I had to aim the heat gun inches from the mastic with my left hand, use the heat to soften it, and after precisely two minutes, quickly scrape up the goo with my right hand before it had time to harden again into a seemingly impregnable lump.
In an hour's time, I had barely managed to scrape clean a two-foot square of floor. My wrists were aching, and I'd somehow burned a dimesize spot on my right thumb. Waves of depression and self-pity washed over me. I'd graduated from undergrad school second in my class, been editor of the law review in law school. I'd landed a prestigious job with the most influential lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. But now, from the looks of things, I might well spend the rest of my fleeting youth on my hands and knees on the floor of a decrepit old house in a one-horse town in Mudflap, Georgia.
I flopped down on my back and stared up at the ceiling. The sight of water stains and peeling plaster did little to dispel the cloud of gloom hovering over me.
Stop it! I told myself fiercely. It was just a kitchen floor. Just three hundred square feet. Before tonight, I'd never so much as hammered a nail in place. And now, in just a few short hours, I'd already pried up an entire roomful of linoleum.
Groaning, I rolled myself to my feet. I brewed a strong pot of coffee and went back to work.