Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
IRIS
The third-floor bedroom, destined to be the Magnolia Suite if my grand plans ever came to fruition, currently resembled the aftermath of a plaster-eating Tasmanian devil convention.
Thick, gritty dust coated every surface and hung in the hot, still air like a shroud.
Piles of shattered lath and crumbling plaster formed a miniature mountain range in the center of the room.
Chalk lines, white against the dark, aged floorboards, optimistically delineated where a luxurious en-suite bathroom would one day exist.
“Okay,” I said to the echoing emptiness, my voice small against the vastness of the room and the task ahead.
I clapped my hands, sending up another puff of dust. “This is progress. Definitely progress. Demolition is always the messy part. It has to get worse before it gets gloriously, beautifully better. Right?”
The silent, dust-mote-filled room offered no argument, which I took as a resounding yes.
I tried to visualize the finished room. Delicate floral wallpaper would complement the view of the ancient magnolia tree outside the future French doors.
A ridiculously comfortable king-sized bed piled high with pillows.
I could almost see the happy, relaxed guests sipping mimosas on their private balcony.
“All part of the process,” I chanted, a mantra against the rising tide of overwhelm clawing its way up my gut. “Aunt Constance said it demanded resilience. And I am nothing if not resilient-ish.”
It had been a week since Austin’s grudging, almost-compliment about my coffee cake. And his warning about Mick. A week where I’d continued my pastry offensive with mixed results.
After the initial chocolate chip cookie and coffee cake success, I’d ambitiously attempted a batch of lemon-lavender scones, picturing them as elegant accompaniments to afternoon tea at my glorious future Heron House B&B.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for lavender had apparently outweighed my sense of proportion.
Austin had returned the plate the next day with only half a scone missing and a look on his face that suggested I’d tried to poison him with lemon furniture polish. I’d quickly sought a second opinion.
“Iris, honey,” Liv Markham had said with gentle diplomacy when I’d brought her a sample at Sweet Dreams Bakery, her brow furrowed as she took a tentative nibble.
“These are, um, intensely flavorful. A bit like eating an expensive scented candle.” She’d then kindly shown me how to properly infuse cream for a subtler floral note, bless her practical, baker’s heart.
I followed up the Great Lavender Debacle with a batch of foolproof, decadently rich double-chocolate-chip brownies to restore my somewhat battered baking reputation.
Austin hadn’t returned the plate for that one yet, which I was choosing to interpret as a good sign.
Or possibly that he’d just thrown the whole thing, plate and all, into the sea.
One could never be entirely sure with Captain Grumpy.
But his warning about my contractor had stayed with me, a persistent stone in my shoe. I’d been watching Mick more closely, trying to reconcile Austin’s grim assessment with the man who always sounded so confident, so reassuringly in control.
Which was why my stomach twisted when I heard hammering start up outside the Magnolia Suite’s boarded-up window. Not inside, where they were supposed to be framing the new bathroom walls.
“What in the… sugar-coated saints are they doing out there now?” I muttered, already heading for the stairs. Not even my almost-automatic swear substitution could overcome the cloud forming over me.
Mick and I had this conversation yesterday.
Focus on the guest rooms, get them framed and ready for the plumber and electrician.
That was the plan. Yet they worked outside yesterday.
I’d let it slide, sure they’d be back in this demolition derby first thing today.
This constant, inexplicable jumping between tasks was inefficient, disorganized, and it was making my already frayed nerves sing a very off-key tune.
I found Mick Riley propped one dusty boot on a stack of lumber and surveying his two-man crew as they wrestled with a long, unwieldy piece of new siding on the west-facing wall. The sun, already high and hot for mid-morning, beat down on them.
“Good morning, Mick.” I kept my voice even, professional. You’re the client, Iris. You have a right to know what’s going on. “I thought we agreed the priority was framing the upstairs bathrooms this week. Getting those interior walls up?”
Mick turned, his expression one of mild, put-upon surprise, as if I’d just asked him to explain the theory of relativity in Swahili. “Yeah, uh, supplies for that got delayed, Miz Holloway.”
I frowned. “What about the stack of two-by-fours sitting in the room?”
“Ran out of nails. Hard to put up walls without nails.” Before I could respond to that ridiculous statement, he gestured vaguely toward the sky with a sawdust-covered hand. “Figured we’d get a jump on this siding while the weather’s holding. Can’t let a sunny day go to waste, right?”
“But the siding on this section wasn’t scheduled until much later,” I pressed, a knot of frustration tightening in my chest. “And you didn’t mention any delays when we talked about the bathroom layout.
The upstairs bedrooms still look like a tornado went through them.
I was hoping to see actual walls this week. ”
Riley let out an exaggerated sigh, the kind usually reserved for dealing with particularly dense children. “Look, I know how to manage a project. Sometimes you gotta be flexible, roll with the punches. Materials get held up. It happens.”
His tone made my blood boil. He was treating me like an idiot, a clueless woman who wouldn’t understand the first thing about construction.
Austin’s quiet competence, his direct, no-nonsense assessment of Riley’s history, was a beacon of sanity compared to this man’s blustering excuses. For some inexplicable reason, I trusted Austin’s grudging, almost-mumbled warnings more than I trusted Mick Riley’s loud, confident pronouncements.
Just as I was about to argue further—perhaps demanding to know why, for mercy’s sake, he couldn’t trot down to one of the many stores that sold nails—one of Riley’s crew members let out a yelp.
The end of the long siding board he was holding slipped, gouging a fresh scratch in the piece below it.
Riley swore, a sharp expletive that made me wince.
“All right, boys,” he barked, his brief display of professional patience evaporating like morning mist. “That’s it for today. It’s a furnace out here. Too goddamn hot to be wrestling this stuff. We’ll come in special tomorrow.”
It was barely eleven o’clock.
“Wait, what?” I stared at him, aghast. “You can’t just leave! That piece isn’t even properly secured! It’s just hanging there! What if it rains? Or the wind picks up?”
Riley just scowled, already turning toward his beat-up truck. His crew immediately started to pack up their tools. “If you hadn’t interrupted, it would already be up. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. Nothing a few extra nails tomorrow won’t fix. Or Monday at the latest.”
“You’re just quitting for the day at eleven a.m.?”
He offered a wave over his shoulder as the three of them walked away. “Heatstroke’s no joke. Gotta look out for my guys. We’ll fix it when it’s cooler.”
And then they were gone, old trucks rattling down the drive and leaving me standing in the blazing sun, staring in disbelief at the half-finished, unsecured length of siding flapping gently in the breeze. A cold knot of dread formed in the pit of my stomach.
For a full minute, I just stood there, paralyzed by a mixture of fury and helplessness. “That… that son of a biscuit! Leaving it like this. Unprofessional. Dangerous!”
What if that heavy board came crashing down? It could hit someone. It could damage the house further. It couldn’t wait until tomorrow, let alone Monday.
As I stared at the waving board, determination filled me, making my spine stand straighter.
Fine.
If he couldn’t be troubled to do his job, if he was going to treat me and this project with such disrespect, then I’d figure it out myself. How hard could it be to tack up one measly piece of wood? Secure it properly until tomorrow? I refused to believe he wouldn’t return, even if it was Saturday.
The thought, born of pure, adrenaline-fueled indignation, seemed almost reasonable in that moment.
I marched into the dilapidated carriage house that served as a makeshift tool shed, rummaging through a collection of rusty implements left behind by previous, equally unsuccessful renovators.
I emerged with a hammer too heavy for my hand, a handful of nails that looked suspiciously bent, and an ancient, rickety wooden extension ladder.
Setting the ladder against the side of the house was a challenge in itself.
It scraped against the old paintwork, its feet sinking unevenly into the soft, sandy soil.
With a grunt, I eventually had it positioned.
The siding board, when I reached it from the upper rungs, was even heavier and more unwieldy than it looked from the ground.
It was long, at least twelve feet, and made of some kind of composite material with all the flexibility of a granite tombstone.
And the darn thing was heavy.
My first attempt to lift it into place nearly sent me, the ladder, and the siding crashing to the ground in a tangle of flailing limbs and G-rated expletives.
“Oh, for the love of pelicans!” I gasped, clinging to the ladder as the board swayed dangerously. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage.
Okay. New plan. Maybe if I just tried to secure the loose end first?
Sweat trickled down my face, stinging my eyes.
The sun beat down relentlessly, turning the air into a shimmering, suffocating blanket.
I fumbled with a nail, trying to hold it steady against the wood while simultaneously wielding the ridiculously oversized hammer.
The first swing missed the nail entirely, grazing the side of my hand with a sickening rush that sent a yelp of pain tearing from my throat.
Tears of pure frustration and agony welled, blurring my vision.
“Shit!” I hissed, shaking my throbbing hand.
This was harder than it looked. Austin, with his reserved competence and easy way with tools when he’d repaired the hedge, would have had this sorted in five minutes flat, without breaking a sweat or resorting to invoking baffled seabirds.
My determined B&B-hostess professionalism began to crumble like the ancient plaster in the Magnolia Suite.
I tried again, my movements clumsy and jerky.
The nail bent in half under a poorly aimed blow.
The siding, instead of becoming more secure, seemed to sag even further, pulling away from the house with a groan of protesting wood.
I grabbed it quickly to keep it from falling.
A wave of dizziness, born of heat, exertion, and panic, washed over me. I clung to the ladder, my knuckles white, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
I can’t do this.
The thought, cold and sharp as an icicle, pierced the fog of my frustration.
“I really can’t do this. What was I thinking? Taking on this house? This town? All by myself?”
Self-doubt, that cold and familiar companion I’d tried so hard to leave behind in Abingdon, reared its ugly head, whispering its insidious, poisonous truths. Aunt Constance believed in me, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe she saw a spark that wasn’t really there.
This was just like the studio in Virginia. The brilliant idea, the initial burst of energy, then the first major, impossible hurdle where I quit. The moment it stopped being fun and started being hard, I always found a reason to walk away.
Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.
Maybe I was just a disaster, like Austin no doubt thought. A walking, talking, hibiscus-drowning, siding-dropping catastrophe.
I made one last, desperate, sobbing attempt to shove the siding back into place.
My hands were shaking too badly. The heavy board slipped from my grasp with a sickening scrape of wood against wood, swinging wildly for a moment before one end crashed against the side of the house with a splintering thud, hanging even more precariously than before.
The hammer clattered from my nerveless fingers, bouncing off a rung of the ladder before landing with a dull thunk in the overgrown grass below.
A choked sob escaped me. Then another. The cheerful house of cards I called optimism came tumbling down as I gripped the unsteady ladder with both wildly trembling hands.
It was too much.
The only sound was the gentle, mocking creak of the loose siding in the afternoon breeze and my ragged, increasingly panicky breaths.