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kind of cold without your shirt?” she blurted. The amusement in his eyes as they roved over her puffy, brightly colored down jacket made her want to squirm, although she couldn’t have said precisely why.
    “No,” he replied politely enough, but Aunie still had the impression he was laughing at her. “Sanding is warm work.” His eyes lit on her coat again. “Maybe we should give you a patch of plaster to smooth out. A little physical exertion and you wouldn’t have to bundle up like a kid on the first day of snow.”
    To James’s astonishment, her eyes lighted with interest. “Really?” she asked. “I’ve got homework to start, but I could give you about twenty minutes. Do you mean it?” When he didn’t immediately say no—primarily because he was too dumbfounded to speak—she smiled in pleasure. “I’ll be right back.” She whirled around and raced down the hallway to her apartment like a kid unexpectedly let out of school. The door slammed behind her a moment later.
    “I was kidding,” James said in amazement to the carpet between his crooked legs.
    Otis’s teeth gleamed whitely. “You were bein’ sarcastic,” he corrected his friend. “You thought she was too hoity-toity to take you up on it, so you figured you were safe to embarrass her a little. Maybe yououghtta get to know that little gal a tiny bit better, Jimmy, before you jump to any more conclusions about her.”
    James muttered an obscenity beneath his breath and turned away, feeling unaccountably small-minded. Okay, so maybe he had intended to knock her down a peg or two. She rubbed him the wrong way. Aunie’s glowing face when she reappeared a moment later—her jacket replaced by an Emerald City sweatshirt—made him feel even lower yet, and perversely he laid the blame for it at her door.
    “What do I do?” she asked him.
    “Put a piece of sandpaper around a block of wood and sand the fu … uh, the wall,” he muttered unhelpfully, and when some of the glow dimmed in her eyes he felt like snapping at her to stop making him feel like such a shit.
    “Okay,” she murmured and looked around. She picked up a sheet of coarse grit and ran her thumb over it. “This must be the sandpaper.”
    James’s mouth dropped open. She had never seen sandpaper before? “Where the hell have you been all your life?” he demanded incredulously.
    “In various cities in Georgia, suh, bein’ totally useless,” Aunie replied with surprising cheer. “But all that’s gonna change, Mistah Rydah, just you wait and see. I’m learnin’ all sorts of new things every day.”
    “Here, Aunie,” Otis said gently as he wrapped his ham-sized hand around her elbow and steered her down to his section of the wall. He stooped to pick up a block of wood on the way, shooting James a sour look over his massive shoulder. “You can work down here with me. Just wrap the paper around the block like so and stroke the high spots on the plaster likethis.” He demonstrated for an instant then handed her the block. “Here, you try it.”
    Aunie applied herself industriously. Several moments later she stepped back to view the results. She shot an uncertain glance down the hall at James, then turned to Otis. “It’s not as flat and smooth as the patch you did,” she said in a low voice.
    “You don’t have my upper body strength, girl,” Otis said with a smile. “It’s just gonna take you a little bit longer, is all.”
    “Okay, good.” She flashed him a smile that expressed gratitude for his forbearance in not making her feel as inept as she knew she most likely was and then applied herself once again with renewed vigor. She didn’t stop until Otis tapped her on the arm.
    “You’ve been out here for nearly an hour,” he said and removed the block from her hands. “You’d better get started on that stack of homework you were tellin’ me about. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for preventin’ you from getting a good grade.”
    “Oh. I suppose