Doing It at the Dixie Dew Read Online Free PDF Page A

and … the list was endless.
    â€œUh-huh,” Ida Plum had said when I came in the kitchen. “You got a live one now.”
    â€œWho is he?” I asked. I thought Scott looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure.
    â€œYou know him,” Ida Plum said. “You’ve known him all your life.”
    â€œMe?” I asked. “Not really.” The name rang a faint bell, but I think I’d remember that face, those eyes so blue they took your breath away, those dark curls. “He would be better looking if he didn’t have that smart-aleck smile pasted on his face,” I said.
    â€œHe married Cedora,” Ida Plum said as she rinsed a dish.
    â€œOhmygosh,” I said. “Not the Hollywood Princess. Not Miss Broadway Bound. Not Miss Talent Running out Her Rear End.”
    â€œThat one. Nobody ever understood it. Both sets of parents tried to have it annulled.”
    â€œSo what then?”
    â€œShe went to Broadway and took him along.”
    â€œShe went to Hollywood and he came home. I think I get the picture now,” I said. Cedora Harris, who called herself Sunny Deye, could now be heard singing commercial jingles: dishwashing liquids, body soaps, floor mop stuff. You had to know her voice, that clear, distinctive, lovely voice, to know it was Cedora. I had been two years behind Cedora in school. Her presence was so strong it probably still had an aura in the halls of Littleboro High. She was like something God dropped in the wrong place. That red-gold hair, green eyes and a figure the boys fell over. Poor Scott.
    When he found me later, I was on the sunporch scraping paint off one of a million windows. “Tearoom,” I said. “The rest of the house will be a bed-and-breakfast and this will pick up some of the lunch trade, the garden clubs, bridge groups, that sort of thing.”
    â€œYou an idealist?” he asked. “The world eats idealists for breakfast. I’ve been chewed up and spit back out a few times.”
    I felt like taking my paintbrush to his face, that smug, know-it-all, sardonic look. “Does that mean you’re out? You won’t take on this job?”
    â€œIt means I will, but on my own terms.”
    I waited, didn’t look at him, just scraped paint as hard and fast as I could. I turned my back to him and scraped as if he had left, as if there were no one in the room but me and my life depended on getting off this old paint. Dry shards flew in my face, made me cough. I didn’t have to hire him and it didn’t cost me anything to listen.
    â€œI’ve got a couple of good people I call on from time to time, but mostly I’ll do a lot of the work myself,” he said. “I’m versatile and I’ve restored a half dozen or so of these big boxes in a couple of the counties around here. I’ll work it flextime. Which means I may come in early and leave late or come in late and leave early. I may work nights or Saturdays or Sundays or holidays or whenever I’ve got materials on hand and time. My time is by the hour and I’ll show you a weekly running tab on where we are. Can you work with that?”
    Could I refuse? It wasn’t like a dozen stood in line bidding for the job. I’d hired Jake Renfroe and for two months all he’d done was order materials, smoke his pipe, go around knocking it against the walls and say, “Miss Bethie, your grandma was some fine lady.” Sometimes I felt like going to Verna and just asking why the heck she had ever recommended Jake Renfroe to do the work. Was she trying to set me up for failure? If so, why? She and Mama Alice had been close as sisters. Or I thought they were.
    There was nobody else in town to take on something like this. Littleboro was a do-it-yourself or do-without town. “You’re on,” I said.
    He reached for my hand, which was covered with dust and paint flecks. I extended my hand and he took it. “You just hired