Ladies' Night (33 page)

Grace knew Kennedy’s backstory by heart. She’d been an interior designer, like Grace, and then, in the late eighties, after her children were off to college, had gone to work in the magazine world. Along the way, she’d weathered a divorce, remarried, and, within the past five years, lost her adored second husband and then her job at
Southern Accents.

Kennedy had reinvented herself as one of the first professional lifestyle bloggers, writing witty, original posts; posing question-and-answer sessions with big-name designers; and sharing photos of the transformation of Hedgehog Cottage, her own small farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Eleganza, which featured her very personal take on interior design, cooking, entertaining, and affordable luxury, was hugely influential in Grace’s world.

Grace held her breath as she clicked on the e-mail.

Congratulations, Grace, for landing on your feet again. The little house on Mandevilla is a gem, and I can’t wait to see what clever tricks you’ll come up with to make it shine. I was sorry to hear of the end of your marriage, but as I know all too well from past experience, endings are really all about beginnings. I’ll be happy to add you to my blog roll. As soon as you get one of your rooms furnished, please send me pics and we’ll discuss you doing a guest post for Eleganza. All best, K.

If the room had been larger Grace would have turned a backflip. A guest post on Eleganza was at the top of her blogger bucket list. Kennedy Moore’s blog was the biggest-drawing lifestyle blog in existence, with more than three million subscribers. Her advertisers ranged from Home Depot to Tiffany to Coke. And now, TrueGrace would be on the very short, very select Eleganza blog roll. She flopped back on her bed, kicking her legs in celebration.

Quickly, she read the other responses. All but one were warm welcomes from bloggers who’d formerly included Gracenotes on their blog rolls.

The sixth e-mail contained a sobering message.

Dear Grace. I’d be only too happy to add TrueGrace to my blog roll, but I just can’t. I think you should know that certain people are out there making veiled threats to anybody who gives you a hand. Since my husband was laid off his job last year, my little blog and the money it generates is our family’s sole income. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to make any enemies right now. Wishing you all the best, PeanutButter&Jedi.

Grace blinked. Was Ben actually contacting other bloggers and threatening anybody who helped her? Obviously, the others who’d agreed to add her name to their rolls either hadn’t been contacted by him or just didn’t feel threatened.

PeanutButter&Jedi was an emerging mommy blogger from Denver whose blog had been one of the first Grace added after establishing Gracenotes. Susan, its author, was the mother of four young boys, including a set of triplets, and Grace loved reading her wry accounts of decorating their home on a budget, thrifting, and her inventive recipes.

She felt a tiny stab of fear. What, exactly, was Ben threatening? His contacts with their advertisers were extensive. Maybe he’d casually dropped a hint to those same advertisers that anybody associated with Grace was poison? Whatever he’d done, it was enough to scare off Susan at PeanutButter&Jedi. And how many others?

It didn’t matter, she decided. Ben would do whatever he could do. J’Aimee could preen and poach off her blog, but she would never be anything more than a poser.

Suddenly, Grace’s path seemed very clear. She thought back to that first house she and Ben had restored together. They’d had nothing but sweat and perseverance. It was a cliché, but they’d made lemons out of lemonade back then. She would do it again, she vowed. Without Ben, without his connections, without money. And without fear.

34

Grace stood in the paint aisle at the hardware store on Friday morning, staring at the huge display and its thousands of one-inch color chips. What she wouldn’t do for her trusted paint fan-decks, with all the notes she’d scrawled on the backs of the cards and the yellow Post-it notes reminding her what paint strength and finish she favored for all her favorites. But the fan-deck, along with all her old files and design library, in fact, all her old life, were back at Sand Dollar Lane.

She knew she wanted the equivalent of either Farrow & Ball’s White Tie or Pointing, two very specific whites for the walls at Mandevilla. Farrow & Ball itself was out of the question. Imported from England, it was just too expensive. She liked Benjamin Moore, too, which was what she’d used at Sand Dollar Lane, mostly because the Benjamin Moore paint store in Sarasota was one of her blog sponsors. She had shelves and shelves of BM paint at her old house. Now, however, neither paint would work for her tiny budget on Mandevilla. She sighed. Cheap paint always just looked shoddy to her eye, and using it would require at least three coats, which would take up too much of her precious time.

She walked around to the clearance endcap and scanned the assorted cans of “oops” paint cramming the shelves.

There was a logical reason these cans were marked down; they were mistints, custom colors that had been rejected by the original customer. Most of the gallon cans were in shades she deemed either truly heinous—a neon bubble-gum pink, a muddy-looking taupe, a sickly green that reminded her of gangrene—or they were just unsuitable for a simple vernacular cottage like Mandevilla.

She did, however, find six gallons of an innocuous white in Benjamin Moore’s low-VOC paint, marked down to ten dollars a can. That she could afford. Grace pulled a can from the shelf and studied the dab of paint on the tin lid. This paint had been custom-tinted, so it didn’t have a color name or a formula. The shade was what she’d always thought of as a “dead white.” But maybe if she had it tinted?

The clerk at the paint counter was a middle-aged man in a red apron. Grace set the oops can on the counter. “Help you?” he asked.

She gave him her sweetest smile. “Hi there. I’m wondering if you can add a little something to this paint to brighten it up a bit?”

He looked puzzled. “Like what?”

“Well, I was thinking you could add a little black to tint it, to see if I like it better.”

The clerk took a closer look at the paint can. “Sorry. This is an oops paint. See, the sign says all paint is “as-is.” That means we don’t remix or add tint.”

Grace sighed dramatically. “Look, it just needs the teeniest amount of black paint. I’m trying to match it to Farrow and Ball’s Pointing shade. It wouldn’t take very much time, and I would be soooo grateful?”

This approach had always worked for her in the past—at furniture showrooms, fabric houses, plumbing-fixture showrooms. A sweet smile and a plea for mercy, especially with men, had always been a winning formula in the past.

The hardware store clerk, though, seemed immune to her charms. “Sorry. Store policy. Can’t help you.” He went back to working on a display of weed killer.

And Grace went back to the clearance counter, where she loaded up all six gallons of the dead white, along with a pint of black latex paint. She would just have to experiment with mixing her own paint. She added in two gallons of white latex enamel for the trim, a paint tray, a five-gallon plastic bucket, canvas drop cloth, and rollers and brushes, sighing, again, at the thought of her workshop back at Sand Dollar, where all of her painting equipment and tools were lined up neatly, ready for her next project. At the last minute she plucked six Benjamin Moore paint cards from the display, to give herself an idea of the shades she was trying to achieve.

When the cashier added up all her purchases and applied them to the account Arthur Cater had set up for her, she was shocked that she’d already managed to make a four-hundred-dollar dent in her five-thousand-dollar budget.

*   *   *

It was nearly nine by the time she pulled up to the new cottage. Wyatt’s pickup was parked out front, but he and Sweetie were walking around the yard, inspecting the property.

Grace’s heart skipped a little beat. She told herself it was because she was happy to see her dog. But maybe Wyatt Keeler had a little to do with it, too.

He was dressed in his khaki Jungle Jerry’s safari shirt, cargo shorts, and work boots, and he was bare-headed, stooped over, examining some kind of weedy shrub near the right edge of the porch. He had, Grace reflected, a fine-looking butt, tanned, muscular calves and thighs, and an admirable set of shoulders across a nice, broad chest.

“Sweetie!” Grace called. The dog turned and looked at her and, after a moment, came bounding over. She gave an excited little yip and jumped up into Grace’s outstretched arms.

Wyatt followed in her wake, but he did not jump into her arms. “I was just checking out the yard. Hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s a disaster,” Grace said, “like the inside of the house. If you’ve got any landscaping advice, I’d love to hear it. How’d Sweetie do last night? I hope she wasn’t too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all. I would have been here sooner this morning, but I had to bury a coyote.”

She raised an eyebrow. “A coyote? Around here?”

“In the park. My dad heard the parrots raising a ruckus last night. Turned out to be a coyote. By the time he got to the old amphitheater, where we have the aviaries, the damned thing had already finished off two of our parrots.”

“Oh no! Not Cookie. Please tell me the coyote didn’t get Cookie,” Grace said.

“Fortunately, no. Cookie’s cage was locked up tight. But our macaws, Heckel and Jekyll, weren’t so lucky,” Wyatt said, his expression grim. “Dad shot the varmint before he could do any more damage.”

“That’s awful,” Grace said, feeling a chill go down her spine. She hugged Sweetie closer and shivered, despite the ninety-degree heat. “Could a coyote attack a dog?”

“Maybe,” Wyatt said. “But after what happened with the macaws, I won’t let her roam around off a leash at night. She doesn’t seem inclined to go very far from me anyway, which is probably a good thing.”

“You’re not kidding.” Grace breathed. She set Sweetie down carefully in the yard. “So. What do you think of my little project?”

“Great house,” Wyatt said. “I love these old Florida cracker places. Not too many of them left around here.”

“I know,” Grace said, warming to her subject. “Do you want to see the inside?”

He glanced at his watch. “Can I have a rain check? Dad’s a little worn out from his big adventure last night. I need to stick pretty close to the park today.”

“Sure,” Grace said, feeling a little let down.

“This yard could be really pretty with some work,” Wyatt said, gesturing at the shrub he’d just been examining. “You’ve got some nice specimen palms in the front here, and that hedge of gardenias by the porch is in pretty good shape. Might want to spray it for aphids and trim it a little.”

“What about this pathetic yard?” Grace asked, stubbing the toe of her sneaker into what was left of the crabgrass- and sandspur-infested patch of sand. “What could I do with it that won’t eat up my fix-up money?”

Instead of answering, Wyatt walked away, pacing it off. He bent down, kicked at something in a patch of crabgrass, stood, and grinned. “You’ve got an old sprinkler system here, did you know that?”

“No!” Grace said, bending down to look. “You think it works?”

“I’d have to take a closer look,” Wyatt said. “But if the lines are intact and the system is in place, that’s half the battle. You can replace the old sprinkler heads and even buy new timers if necessary, but with those in place, you’d be able to replace the lawn with something hardier and keep it watered until it’s established.”

“A new lawn would do wonders for the curb appeal,” Grace said. “But that’d cost thousands and thousands. And I don’t even have hundreds and hundreds. Maybe that’s something Arthur would be interested in doing down the line.”

“Arthur?”

“Arthur Cater. He’s the owner. He’s kind of a tightwad, but my big hope is that once he sees what I’ve done here, he’ll loosen up give me a little more money to work with.”

“This yard isn’t that big,” Wyatt said. “I was walking around before you got here, just kind of brainstorming. You’ve got a lot of planting beds and borders that are all overgrown with weeds right now, but if you weeded and mulched them and put an edging around them, you’re left with just a nice little swath of green up front here and one in the back. The sides of the house are mostly shaded by those oaks, and they’re underplanted with some beat-up old hostas and leather-leaf ferns and begonias, but again, get that cleaned out, separate the hostas and give them some breathing room, and it’ll be fine.”

“What about the backyard?” Grace asked. “Pretty disgusting, huh?”

“It needs work, yeah. But it’s not impossible. I’d get rid of that old tin storage shed first thing. It’s falling apart and you don’t need it anyway with that big garage. You’ve got the start of a nice fruit grove back there.”

“Really? I just thought they were a bunch of old half-dead bushes. They’re all overgrown with moss and half the branches look dead.”

“They need some help, for sure,” Wyatt said. “But you’ve got a couple of tangerine trees, a ponderosa lemon, a lime, a grapefruit, and a kumquat.” He laughed. “You could set up your own fruit stand.”

“I might if it were my house,” Grace said. “But it’s Arthur’s. And it’s a rental house.”

“Have you thought about asking him if he’d rent to you?” Wyatt asked.

“Only since the first minute I saw it,” Grace said wistfully. “I could do so much with this place, if it were mine…”

“But?” He crossed his arms over his chest.

“I told him when I’ve finished with it, it should rent for at least $1,500 a month, this close to the beach and being on Anna Maria. That’s more than I could afford.”

“But you’re doing all this work, essentially for free, right?”

“So that I can photograph and write about it for TrueGrace,” she said. “It’s that kind of trade-off. Essentially to get material for my new blog.”

“Maybe you could work out some kind of arrangement with the guy,” Wyatt said. “You don’t know until you ask.”

“Maybe…” Grace said hesitantly.

He glanced at his watch again. “Okay, gotta go. What time should I pick her up this afternoon?”