“The point is, that’s not just old junk from your attic, it’s merchandise from the shop. I can’t take good stuff you were intending to sell.”
“I will sell it,” Weezie said, fussing with the cushions on the settee. “To you, or somebody else, eventually. In the meantime, I brought back a whole truckload of furniture from Florida, and I don’t have room for all of it in the shop right now, so you’re providing me with cheap storage. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No,” I said meekly. “What were you saying about that stack of pictures?”
“Bring ’em on in, and then get me a tack hammer and a yardstick,” she said.
I didn’t dare voice any more objections to Weezie’s contributions. Maybe I flinched a little, though, when I saw the pair of gaudy pictures, one a heron, the other a flamingo, that she’d chosen to go above the bed.
Of course she saw right through me. “I know these are not what you’re used to,” she lectured. “These are just old fifties paint-by-number pictures. They’re not exactly Maybelle Johns. But think of it like this—they’re cute, they work, and,” she added ominously, “the price is right. Besides, paint by numbers is still very hot. These babies bring fifty bucks apiece in the shop.”
“You don’t have a velveteen Last Supper in that stack, do you?” I asked.
“No velveteen,” she said firmly.
Daniel came in then, carrying a rectangular table on his head.
“Over there, in the kitchen,” Weezie said before following him out to the truck to bring in the last of the load.
When they came back, they were each carrying a pair of aluminum-frame chairs with aqua vinyl upholstered seats whose color matched the Formica tabletop.
“Do you love it?” she asked, walking around and around the table. “Tell me you love it, or I’ll have to kill you.”
“I do love it,” I laughingly admitted. “It makes me smile. I haven’t seen a Formica dinette set like this in years.”
“Thirty dollars!” she crowed. “At the Bon Wille’ on Sallie Mood.”
“Bon Wille’?” Daniel asked. “Where’s that?”
“That’s Franglais for Goodwill,” I said, catching on. “It’s perfect, Weezie. It’s all perfect.”
“I know,” she said smugly. “I have the gift, the junking gene.” She tugged at Daniel’s arm. “Let’s go, sport. Our work here is done.”
I trailed out behind them to the parking lot. “Seriously,” I said. “I can’t thank you guys enough. As soon as I get some money ahead, I’ll pay you back for everything.”
“Not necessary,” Weezie said, hanging her head out the passenger-side window. “This is just the start. As soon as those other units are ready, I’m gonna junkify them too. And we’ll put my business cards in each room, saying the furnishings came from Maisie’s Daisy. This will be my own private showroom.”
“You’re crazy,” I yelled at the truck’s red taillights.
“Like a fox,” she called back
24
I crossed my fingers and turned the hot-water faucet in the bathtub. Tea-colored water trickled out at first, but cleared up after a moment, and after another moment or two, scalding-hot water gushed from the tap.
I’d taken a stack of clean bath towels and soap from the laundry room in the manager’s unit, and had even found a miniature bottle of bubble bath, so old that the paper label was yellowed with age. I dumped in the whole bottle, and sank deep into the hot froth, willing my aching muscles to relax.
Tomorrow, I thought sleepily, I would have to start all over again on the other thirteen units. More scraping, scrubbing, stripping, and sanding. But, I vowed, I would not be working alone. Harry Sorrentino, by God, worked for me, and by God, he would work with me too.
Finally, when the water had gone tepid and my knees weak with exhaustion, I toweled off and stumbled to bed, where I fell instantly to sleep.
Dazzling sunlight flooded into the room, nearly blinding me with its intensity. I yawned, stretched, and glanced at my watch. Six-thirty! Somehow, I would have to rig up some kind of curtains at the windows facing my bed.
Before my feet could even hit the floor, there was a soft knocking, and a more insistent scratching, then barking.
“Yeah?” I said groggily.
Harry opened the door and poked his head inside. “You didn’t lock up last night,” he said accusingly. “I came home and the place was wide open.”
I blinked. “Is anything missing?”
“No. But that’s not the point, damnit. You left the office open too. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Aware that I’d gone to bed wearing nothing more than panties and an oversize T-shirt, I wrapped the comforter around me and stood up, trying to summon my dignity.
“We didn’t finish working here until after midnight. I was tired. I haven’t had any sleep. So yes, I did forget to lock up. For which I apologize. But maybe if you’d come back at a reasonable hour, you could have given me a hand and I wouldn’t have been so absolutely sick with exhaustion.”
“I put in an eight-hour day of work here, yesterday, in case you didn’t notice,” Harry began.
“Yippee for you,” I snapped. “I put in sixteen hours. I’m likely to put in at least that today too. Not that you care.”
Jeeves let out a low, guttural growl. Harry gave me the human, visual equivalent of a growl.
“Just lock up, okay? I can’t get anything done if my power tools go missing.”
“Fine,” I said, hurrying toward the bathroom, and slamming the door hard behind me.
He apparently didn’t realize he’d been dismissed. I could hear Jeeves’s nails clipping as he trotted around my living quarters, followed by Harry’s heavy footsteps.
“Place looks pretty good,” Harry called to me.
“No thanks to you,” I mumbled to myself, assessing my looks in the wavy glass of the mirror. I still had flecks of white paint in my hair, which badly needed washing. I looked down at my hands. My knuckles were scraped raw, and the nail on my right forefinger was black and swollen from where Weezie had hit it with the tack hammer.
“I like the white floors,” he said. “You gonna do that in all the units? It’ll cut down on maintenance. We won’t have to vacuum, or worry about carpet stains, and sand won’t show on these white floors.”
“Yeah,” I called back. “I thought about that already.” What I didn’t tell him was that I had plenty of cheap paint, but no money for carpets anyway, or a vacuum cleaner, or somebody to run said vacuum.
“Where’d you get all the furniture?” he asked. “There’s some beds and dressers out in the storage shed, but nothing this nice.”
“It’s on loan from a friend.”
Why didn’t he leave already? I needed to pee, but I didn’t want him out there, listening to me.
“See you in a little bit,” I called, hoping he’d get the hint.
“You got any coffee?” he called back, still oblivious.
“No. No coffee, no coffeemaker, no mugs, no spoons,” I said.
“Oh. Well, I guess I could make us some.”
“You do that,” I said, turning on the bathtub faucets to drown out any embarrassing sounds.
“Okay.”
When I’d dressed in my work clothes, with my hair covered with the stocking cap again, I marched myself over to the office, where Harry was sitting at the table, sipping coffee and regarding a heap of metal parts in front of him.
“What’s that?” I asked, pouring myself a mug.
“The motor for the clothes dryer,” he said, poking at it with a screwdriver.
“Shit,” I said, sitting opposite him. “Can it be fixed?”
“Maybe. No promises.”
“We’ve only got the one dryer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it’s got to be fixed. I can’t afford to replace it.”
He took a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and perched them on the end of his nose, leaning in
closer to examine the motor. “I know,” he said. “I know all about your little problem.”
I felt my scalp prickle, and my hands started shaking so badly I had to set the mug of coffee down on the table to keep from spilling it all over myself.
“Which little problem is that?”
He sighed. “Tybee’s not Siberia, you know. People talk. They even talk about you. You’re a pretty hot topic over at Doc’s Bar.”
I grimaced. “Swell. So what’s the Doc’s Bar version of my little problem?”
Harry reached for a tin pie pan that contained a heap of nuts and bolts. He found the one he wanted, and carefully inserted it in a minuscule hole in the motor.
“Let’s see if I got it straight. You had yourself a little boy toy, some rich guy from Charleston with a yacht and a fancy car. Only he wasn’t really rich, or from Charleston, and the yacht wasn’t his either. And when the smoke cleared, the boyfriend was gone, and so was all your money. He sold your house, and everything in it, cleaned out your bank accounts, and blew town.”
He reached for his coffee mug and took a sip. “That about the size of it?”
There was no use in lying to him. Maybe it was time to put my cards on the table. “That’s about right. I wouldn’t exactly call Reddy a boy toy, but when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, yeah, he cleaned me out.”
“And now you’ve had to close your restaurant. And you’re broke.”
“Dead broke,” I said glumly.
“And basically homeless,” Harry said, ever helpful.
“Not anymore. I own this place. It’s oceanfront property. Extremely valuable oceanfront property that I own outright. I’m back in the game.”
“Nuh-uh,” Harry said. “Sandcastle Realty Associates has an option on the Breeze. Your lawyer’s fighting it, but in the meantime, you can’t do squat. You’re screwed, sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me sweetheart,” I said sharply. “I don’t know what all you’ve heard from the sages over there at Doc’s. But they don’t know me. And you don’t know me.”
“Don’t I?” He picked up the motor and went into the utility room, where he dropped down onto the floor in front of the disemboweled dryer.
I followed right behind him. “You think I’m just some bubbleheaded downtown ditz playing Motel Barbie, right?”
He had his back to me, so all I heard was a grunt.
“It doesn’t bother me what you think,” I said. “And I don’t care what a bunch of winos and losers think of me either. But here’s the deal, Harry. St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Monday, which means we’ll get a four-day weekend of guests who will basically pay anything to stay anywhere within a twenty-mile radius of Savannah. I’ve checked the rates at the B and Bs in town. The Gastonian, the Ballastone, the Planter’s Inn? They’re all booked. Have been since before Christmas. They all charge at least $350 a night at St. Patrick’s Day. For three nights minimum. We can make around a thousand bucks apiece, for fourteen units. That’s $14,000 for our opening weekend. So, you see, Harry, the Breeze is going to be open and fully booked by then.”
He laughed. “Lady, this ain’t the Gastonian. It ain’t even the Motel Six. Nobody will pay those prices to stay on Tybee Island. And especially at the Breeze Inn. I’m telling you, it can’t be done.” He rolled over onto his back to look up at me. “You saw what your unit looked like. And that was the nicest one. The rest of ’em are ten times worse. It’s not just a matter of time, either. I need materials. Roofing shingles, commodes, Sheetrock, lumber. Three of the units have rotted-out doors. None of that stuff comes cheap.”
“Let me worry about the money part. I’ve still got credit cards. You just make a list,” I told him. “I’ll borrow a truck, and meet you over at Home Depot in an hour.”
“Sure,” he said, going back to work.
“And there’s one more thing,” I added.
“I can’t wait to hear it.”
“No more taking off at three o’clock to go drown your sorrows at Doc’s Bar. I know you’ve got your troubles, but drinking isn’t going to solve them. And anyway, I need you here. All day. Every day.”
“Fuuuckkk.” He said it long and low.
He sat up. “You were checking up on me at Doc’s? Is that what this is all about? Well, fuck you, lady. What I do when I’m off the clock is my own damn business. And as soon as you pay me what you owe me, you can find somebody else to order around.”
“I’m aware of how much money I owe you,” I said calmly. “And you’ll get it back. Every dime. I swear. The police have a lead on my uh, Reddy’s, whereabouts. When they find him, I’m going to get my money back. And my house and my rental properties. My lawyer is very optimistic about that. And we’re working on resolving this Sandcastle Realty issue too. But in the meantime I can’t pay you anything until this place is up and running.”
“You’re living in a dream world,” he said. He put the front panel back on the dryer, stood up, wiped his hands on the seat of his jeans, and mashed the button on the dryer’s control panel. We both bent down at the same time to look inside the glass door. Whompa-whompa-whompa. The big steel drum started its slow rotation. It worked. At least one dream had come true for the day.
“My hero,” I said, patting him on the back.
25
Up until the day I realized that my second husband, Richard, had that unfortunate penchant for computer porn, I’d always thought of myself as somebody who was naturally lucky. My life had been mostly golden. Happy childhood, loving family, lots of friends, and a natural knack for business. There had been bumps in the road, sure, but I’d always managed to bounce back from adversity and come out slugging.
But the thing with Richard had rocked my world and thrown my self-confidence for a loop. It was all so tawdry. I remember thinking I’d been essentially living an episode of Geraldo. How could I have been so wrong about anybody? How could I not have seen what a sleazebucket I’d been living with?
After the divorce, I’d thrown myself into my work. Both my parents had died while I was in my early 30s, so I’d taken my small family inheritance and started two moderately successful small downtown cafes, and bought and flipped my first piece of residential real estate. I worked impossible hours, and had no social life, but I didn’t care. I was thirty, and driven to prove to myself, and everybody else, that BeBe Loudermilk was fine, thank you very much.
When Guale became the hottest restaurant in Savannah, I was certain my luck was back. I was still insanely busy, but I allowed myself a little time to kick back and enjoy the delicious sensation of doing and having it all.
Now, as I stood in line at the Home Depot for the fourth time in one week, praying that my last credit card would not be maxed out with this final load of joint compound and window caulking, I had little time to reflect on how my present lifestyle seemed like such a perverse reversal of fortune.
In two days, the Breeze Inn would be open for business. That is, if Harry and I didn’t kill each other first.
We’d come very close to physical violence on Saturday night. Harry had spent all day Friday and Saturday hanging Sheetrock in four of the units that were in the worst shape, and then he’d taught me how to tape and mud and sand the joints. I’d gotten pretty good at it too. But that Saturday afternoon, I’d made another run to Home Depot, and when I got back, he was gone.
I flipped. Three-thirty in the afternoon and he’d already checked out for the day. I sped over to Doc’s Bar. As I went through that door, I felt like a gunslinger in one of those old Westerns. I was ready for a shootout with Harry.
The trouble was, he wasn’t there. Four men sat at the bar, and all four swiveled completely around on their bar stools to take a good look at me when I walked in.
“Harry Sorrentino,” I said curtly. “Where is he?”
The bartender was an elfin-looking creature with short white hair and deeply tanned skin the consistency of beef jerky. Despite her age, which I judged to be mid-fifties, and the weather out
side, which was just about the same, she was dressed in skintight blue-jeans shorts and a low-cut bright orange tank top. She looked me up and down with light brown almond-shaped eyes before taking a deep drag on the cigarette dangling from her lower lip. “Harry’s not here, baby. Ain’t seen him since Thursday. Anything else we can do you for?”
“Any idea where else he might be?”
“You the lady owns the Breeze?” The speaker had a long, graying beard in the exact same shade as the long, graying braid that fell midway down his back. He too wore cutoffs, along with an army camouflage jacket with the sleeves hacked off, sunglasses, and a black ball cap that said “Tybee Bomb Squad.”
“I am,” I said.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Figures. Harry don’t usually date chicks as old as you.”
“And I don’t usually date men as old as Harry, so that works out just fine. Do you happen to know where he might have gone this afternoon?”
He shrugged. “I ain’t his mama. He don’t check in with me.”
The other men sniggered and turned their attention back to the television mounted over the bar, which was showing an old black-and-white John Wayne cowboy movie.
“Assholes,” I muttered under my breath.
I was outside, unlocking the Lexus, when the bar sprite materialized at my side.
“Don’t mind them guys inside,” she said. “They’re harmless. Listen, I don’t know for sure where Harry coulda gone, but I was thinking you might try Marsden Marina.”
“The place where they repossessed his boat?”
She looked surprised. “He told you about the Jitterbug?”
I shook my head. “Somebody else told me. Why would he be over there?”
“He’s trying to get the money together to get the Jitterbug back. If he’s not tending bar here, he sometimes signs on as a mate on one of the other charter boats.”
“Tending bar? Here?” Now it was my turn to look surprised.
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