“Garvey?” Clea lost her smile. “Any relation to Stephen Garvey?”
“I’m his daughter,” Rachel said. “Um, I came out to see if you could use some help.”
Clea shook her head, but before she could say anything, the screen door slammed, and Rachel looked
up to see a redhead in tight jeans and a pink T-shirt knotted above her belly button.
“Hi.” The redhead looked at Rachel with naked curiosity. “I’m Amy.”
“I’m Rachel. I came out to help.” Rachel held out her hand and then noticed that the redhead’s hands
were full of paint scrapers. “You’re painting?” she said, hope rising.
Amy jerked her head to the right side of the porch. “Just the porch wall white for a background.” She
handed one of the scrapers to Clea, who looked at it as if she’d never seen one before.
“No,” Rachel said. “First of all, the paint’s almost off that wood, so it’s going to suck up the first six
coats of white paint you put on. You need a coat of primer.”
“Oh.” Amy squinted at her. “Listen, we don’t want this to be a good paint job, we just want a nice
background.”
“Then you don’t want white, either. White isn’t very flattering.” Rachel smiled sweetly at Clea. “You
want something warm that will bounce color back at you.”
“She’s right.” Clea reexamined Rachel, head to toe, and Rachel stood with her smile fixed, thinking, I
don’t like you, but if you take me to Hollywood, I’ll learn to deal with you.
“So what do you suggest?” Amy sounded wary, and Rachel turned back to her, figuring she’d be easier
to charm, anyway.
“I can get you a great deal on some peach paint,” she told Amy. “We ordered a lot for a project that got
changed in the middle. I’ll get it for you at cost, and I’ll help you for free. I just want to learn to do what
you’re doing.” Rachel smiled up at Amy again, grateful Amy was on the top step so it was easier for
Rachel to look small and innocent and appealing.
“You’re hired,” Amy said, and handed her the other scraper.
Rachel handed it back, sure of herself now. “You scrape, I’ll go get the paint.” She turned to go before
Amy could argue, and Amy called, “Wait, do you need money?”
“Oh, no,” Rachel said. “I’ll set up an account for you at the store.”
“Fantastic,” Amy said.
“That would be Garvey’s Hardware, right?” Clea said deliberately.
“What?” Amy said, and Rachel waved and left, determined to be such a treasure that Amy wouldn’t
dream of letting her go.
The peach paint turned out to be too dark for the porch, but mixed half-and-half with the white Rachel
had brought, it was perfect, so pale it was more blush than peach. Rachel primed the wall, and while
Amy and Clea talked out in the yard about reflectors and camera angles, she listened and learned and
began to paint the porch rail. Peach for the posts and rails, blush for the spindles, white for the detailing.
“Wow,” Amy said when she came up to the porch at noon. “That looks good. It’s even pretty.”
“Thanks,” Rachel said, but she watched Clea closer because Clea was frowning.
“We should do the whole house,” Clea said finally, and Amy said, “No, we should not. Are you nuts?”
“This film is a business expense,” Clea told her. “Tax-deductible. This paint therefore becomes part of
that business expense. And I want to sell this house.” She nodded to Rachel. “Do the whole house.”
“No,” Rachel said. “We can do the whole front porch if you want to film on both sides, that won’t take
long. But I do not paint whole houses. I can call the Coreys for you, though. They’ll paint anything.”
“Are they expensive?” Clea said.
“It’s a tax deduction,” Rachel said.
“Let me think about it.” Clea walked out to the edge of the yard to see the porch from a distance.
Rachel turned back to find Amy grinning at her. “I like you, kid,” Amy said. “You remind me of me.”
The screen door banged again and a brunette came out, saying, “If you want lunch—” She stopped
when she saw Rachel, and Amy rushed to fill in the silence, saying, “This is my sister, Sophie,” to Rachel,
explaining Rachel’s ideas and the paint to Sophie, all without ever mentioning the name Garvey.
Sophie smiled politely at Rachel. “Well, it’s nice of you to offer to help, Rachel, but—”
Rachel went tense, but Amy said, “Wait a minute. Come here.”
Amy towed her sister out into the yard, and Rachel thought she’d never seen two more different women
in her life, Amy in tight pink and Sophie in loose khaki. Then Amy turned Sophie around and said, “Look
at the porch.”
Sophie folded her arms and studied the porch, and Amy did the same beside her, just like her big sister,
and that’s when Rachel saw how alike they were. Same big brown eyes, same curly hair, same full
mouth, same incredible concentration, even the same white Keds, although Amy’s had pink shoelaces
and were painted with gold spirals. They stood close, leaning into each other a little, and Rachel was
struck by how together they were. She’d never stood that close to her sisters, ever, but Sophie and Amy
were a team.
“You think?” Sophie said.
“I think,” Amy said.
“Your call,” Sophie said. “The color is wonderful.”
“Just one thing,” Amy said. “Her last name is Garvey.”
Sophie started and Rachel thought, That’s it.
“Give her a chance,” Amy said. “Why should she pay for her father’s crimes?”
“Hey.” Sophie stepped back. “Don’t pull that on me.”
“I’ll work really hard,” Rachel said from the porch.
Sophie came toward her. “I know you will, honey.” She looked at the painted porch rail, gleaming warm
in the sunlight, then nodded. “Come have lunch with us. Then you can paint the porch wall this afternoon
and help Amy with whatever she needs. But if your father shows up, you’re fired.”
Rachel relaxed as relief flooded through her. “He won’t ever know. And I’ll be a huge help, you wait
and see. I’ll make things so much easier for you.”
But after lunch, in spite of Rachel’s best intentions, things got difficult because Rob Lutz showed up with
his parents. Clea almost had a heart attack when she saw Rob, and Rachel could understand why, since
it was hard to see he was a moron when you looked at that face. That was how Rob had talked Rachel
out of her virginity, by not talking, just by smiling at her with that face. There was a lesson learned, for
sure.
Clea had said, “This is your son?” to Rob’s dad, Frank, and Frank had grinned down at her like a
dork, standing really, really close to her. That made Rob’s mom, Georgia, mad, which Rachel could also
understand except that if she’d been married to Frank, she’d have been looking for somebody to take
him away. Then Clea put her arm around Georgia and called, “Sophie, meet Georgia.”
Georgia squinted at the porch where Rachel and Sophie and Amy were standing, and she looked about
twenty years older than Clea, probably because she’d been baking her skin into shoe leather all her life
so she could be a Coppertone Blonde. That was what she’d said to Rachel every summer since Rachel
had started dating Rob: “Come on and lay out with me, honey, and we’ll be Coppertone Blondes.
People will think we’re sisters ”Right.
Then Clea said, “Georgia and I graduated together, Sophie! Isn’t that something?” and Sophie said,
“And neither one of you has aged a day,” and glared at Clea to make her behave, and Rachel liked her
more.
Clea just laughed and called back to Rob, “Why don’t you come up on the porch?” and that must have
been the first time Sophie saw him because she said, “Oh, Lord.”
“What?” Amy said.
“Look at the way he’s looking at Clea,” Sophie said.
Amy nodded. “Like she’s whipped cream and he has a spoon.”
Well, that was Rob for you. Always looking for sex. Rachel didn’t know if sex in general was bad or it
was just bad with Rob, but as far as she was concerned, Clea could have him.
Sophie moved to the top of the steps and called, “Come on up to the porch, we have lemonade,” and
when she had Clea, Frank, and Georgia settled on the right side of the porch with a warning to stay away
from the blush-painted wall, Amy began to shoot.
Rachel handed Rob a scraper and said, “We need to scrape the other side of the porch,” and Rob said,
“Cool.” As he worked, he kept his eyes on Clea, who sat perched on the porch rail looking adorable.
Clea watched Rob from the corner of her eye while Frank sat opposite her, laughing and flirting, and
Georgia sat between them on the porch swing, looking like a Coppertone Toad.
Sophie had gone out into the yard to talk to Amy, and she looked concerned. Even after a few short
hours, Rachel knew Sophie liked things calm and organized. So when Phin Tucker walked up behind her
and said something, and she jumped a mile, Rachel could have told him that was a bad move. He and
Wes had parked behind the Lutz’s van, and Wes had said something to Amy and gone in the house, but
Phin went to Sophie and stayed. So he wanted something—three guesses what—but he was doing it all
wrong. Well, he’d figure it out. Phin got everything he wanted sooner or later.
“Hey,” Rob said behind her. “Get busy.”
“Right,” Rachel said, and crossed her fingers that Phin would do his usual good work. Her future
depended on it.
“I’m a little worried about Clea,” the mayor had said to Sophie out in the yard. “I had nine stitches
because of her. She could put Frank in the hospital.”
Sophie watched Frank making a fool of himself on the porch in front of his wife, who looked homicidal.
“Clea’s not the only one who could hurt him.” She turned back to the mayor. “How did she give you nine
stitches?”
“I looked down her blouse and fell off my bike.”
Sophie looked at him with contempt and he said, “Hey, I was twelve. She leaned over. Not my fault.”
He was as immaculately handsome as ever in the sunlight, and it was even more annoying now that she
knew he’d been a pervert at twelve. She started to tell him so and decided she didn’t want to get
personal, she just wanted to get rid of him. “Did you say you wanted to look at the electricity?”
“No,” he said. “I said Amy wanted me to look at the electricity.”
“Right this way,” Sophie said, leaving Amy to handle the mess on the porch. Five minutes later, she was
in the dark farmhouse basement, wishing she was back on the porch. At least in the sunlight she could
see what the mayor was up to. “Uh, what are we doing, Mr. Tucker?”
“Phin,” he said. “And this is your fuse box. We’re looking at it to see if it’s going to burn your house
down.”
“Where are the little switches?” Sophie squinted around his shoulder in the dim light. She’d expected to
get a whiff of some expensive cologne as she leaned closer, but instead he smelled of soap and sun,
clean, and she swallowed and concentrated on the fuse box.
There were no switches, just little round things that looked sinister.
“Switches would be circuit breakers.” Phin said. “For which you need circuits not fuses. This is the old
way.”
“Is this better?”
“No. But it’s more exciting.”
“I don’t want exciting.” Sophie took a step back. “I want functioning, nonshocking, neat little switches.
I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. You do it.”
“That’s the problem with you city folk. No sense of adventure. Let me explain how this works.”
“No,” Sophie said firmly. “I don’t want to know. I want switches. I know how they work.”
“You can’t have switches. Get over it.”
Sophie shook her head. “I’ve heard about these things. You stick pennies in them, and they shock you.”
“You do not put pennies in them.” He sounded as if he were trying not to laugh. “If you put pennies in
them, you deserve to be shocked. Not to mention have the house burn down. Do not put pennies in
them.”
“Not a problem. I’m not going near that thing.” Sophie started up the stairs. “Thank you very much, but
no.” When she realized he wasn’t following her, she stopped. “You can come up now. The electricity
lesson is over.”
He grinned at her in the light that filtered down the stairs from the kitchen. “Quitter,” he said, and her
pulse skipped a little at the challenge in his voice.
“Only on the stuff that will get me electrocuted,” she told him. “I believe in safety first.” She escaped
back up the stairs and put on Dusty in Memphis to calm her nerves.
Phin followed a few minutes later.
“They’re all working,” he told her, washing his hands at the sink. “If you have trouble, yell, and Wes or I
will come out and fix it.”
Sophie blinked at him. “That’s extremely nice of you.”
“We’re extremely nice people.” Phin smiled at her, and Sophie had a brief moment where she thought he
might be a good guy after all before he said, “So tell me about this movie,” and she took a step back.
“I told you, it’s just an audition tape,” she said. “It was Clea’s idea, and she hired us because we did
such a good job filming her wedding. Amy’s shooting it on the porch because it’s easier to light.” Even as
she said it, the lights in the kitchen went out, and she heard Amy out on the porch say, “Oh, damn.”
“If there was a switch,” Sophie said, “I could go throw it now.”