The next morning, Trae stopped Cass as she was walking through the dining room toward the kitchen.
“Hey,” he said, grabbing her arm. “Hattie’s giving me the cold shoulder, and I think it has something to do with you. I bet you tattled to her about those goddamn kitchen lights.”
Cass pried his fingers loose. “Your relationship with Hattie is none of my business, but this house—and the quality of the work being done here—is my business. Now I’ve gotta worry about what else we didn’t catch before our final inspection.”
“No worries there,” Trae said. “I took care of things.”
Cass took a step backward. “Are you saying you bribed the inspector?”
“That’s how stuff gets done,” Trae said. “You grease some palms and suddenly you don’t have to order more kitchen cabinets and wait for them to be installed. You don’t have to tear down light fixtures and wait for some idiot to run into town to buy junction boxes. You need to wise up, Cass. It’s done all the time.”
She shook her head emphatically. “It’s not how we do things. One bad wiring job, this whole house—which is made of hundred-year-old heart pine, which is essentially kindling—could go up in flames. What if someone was here when the fire started? It’s our reputation on the line, not yours. And what happens when that sleazeball inspector decides the only way he’ll pass our next inspection is if we pay him off? Again and again?”
“Not my problem,” Trae said. “My job is to make this place look fabulous, despite all the fuckups by you and your lamebrain crew.”
He started to walk away, but the door to the hall bathroom opened, and Hattie walked out, wiping damp hands on the back of her jeans.
Her face was still, but her voice crackled with barely suppressed anger. “It is your problem, Trae. Now I’m going to have to get Erik’s guys to pull down every single light fixture you had them hang and do it over the right way.”
“No! That’ll totally screw up everything,” Trae protested. “We’ve got the walk-through in less than forty-eight hours. You take those fixtures down, every ceiling will have to be patched and repainted. I’ve got furniture being delivered, window treatments to install, and art to hang. I can’t have electricians on ladders in the middle of all that.”
“That’s your problem,” Hattie said, her tone icy.
Trae stared at Cass. “Could you let Hattie and I have a little privacy here, please?”
“Gladly,” Cass said. “I’ve gotta go fix your screwups.”
When they were alone, Trae clasped Hattie’s hands between his. “Look, Hattie. This is just a little snag we’ve hit here. It can be worked out. I know you’re pissed, and okay, maybe that was the wrong way to handle things, but I was just thinking of us, of getting the house done and hitting a home run with the network.”
“There’s no us,” Hattie said. “There never really was.”
“What about the other night?” He nodded his head in the direction of the living room. “What was that about? You’re telling me that wasn’t real?”
Hattie turned around and looked at the living room, where one of the electricians was on a ladder, removing the ceiling fans that had been installed only a few days earlier.
“That was about you getting me drunk so that you could get laid,” she said. “And when Mo busted in on us, interrupting your plan, you walked off and left me here. Did it occur to you to wonder how I’d get home after you drove away?”
“You weren’t that drunk. I figured you’d get an Uber or something. You’re a big girl. I knew you could handle yourself.”
Hattie gave him a grim smile. “I was that drunk. Mo had to pour me into and out of his car, and then I passed out on my sofa when I got home. After he did what you should have done yourself. But nothing is ever your fault, and nothing is ever your responsibility. You really are a big fucking man-baby, Trae. You and I both know you only pursued me to get publicity for Homewreckers. Mission accomplished, right?”
He opened his mouth to protest, and then closed it again.
“That’s what I thought. Now that the air is cleared, let’s get back to work. I need to get this money pit fixed up and sold.”
Construction workers swarmed over the house on Chatham Avenue. A tractor-trailer load of Lumberlyke planking had arrived and was unloaded, and Hattie’s framing crew set about rebuilding the old dock. The electricians removed, rewired, and reinstalled four more light fixtures with faulty wiring. The painters repaired and repainted the ceilings.
As soon as the kitchen fixtures were replaced, Trae shut himself off in the kitchen. On his hands and knees, he measured and taped off the checkerboard diamond pattern he’d designed for the wooden floors.
Hattie and Cass spent an entire day working with the finish carpenters to complete the upstairs bedrooms and bath, installing new baseboards and window trim, and painting the heavily scarred wooden floors with a coat of milk-white deck paint.
“Amazing,” Cass said, standing in the doorway of the guest bedroom, where the afternoon sunlight cast warm streaks of light on the pale, gleaming floors. “I think this was the smelliest, gloomiest room in the whole house. Now, I just want to move in.”
“It looks and smells a lot better now that the roof isn’t leaking, and the ceiling has been replaced. And look at the view out those windows,” Hattie said, pointing to the bay windows on the east side of the room. “Can you imagine lying in bed in here, watching a Tybee sunset?”
“I can’t imagine lying in bed, period,” Cass said, groaning and clutching the small of her back. “I feel like I’ve been working nonstop for the past eighteen hours.”
“That’s because you have.”
They moved down the hallway and the stairway, pausing to take in the living room below. The new mantel had been installed, and the brick fireplace with its light coat of limewash gave the room a mellow dignity. The floor had received two coats of matte polyurethane. “Looks awesome,” Hattie said. “We’ll come back later and give it another light sand and a couple more coats. We’ll just have to warn anybody who walks through here to take off their shoes.”
They moved downstairs and opened the door to the new bathroom that had been tucked under the staircase. “What else are we doing in here?” Hattie asked. “It looks so bare.”
The floors were covered in a vintage-looking gray-and-white basket-weave tile, and a painted wooden wainscot extended halfway up the walls, with unadorned sheetrock above.
Cass leaned against the doorjamb. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Trae ordered some fancy custom wallpaper, but he waited until yesterday to tell me it hasn’t shipped yet.”
Hattie sat down on the closed seat of the commode and glanced around. She’d found an old pine dresser with a marble top to use as a sink vanity, but the rest of the room was bare.
“It definitely needs something,” she mused, and then snapped her fingers.
“Nautical charts. I bought a whole barrel full of them at an estate sale down in Brunswick last year. They’re great colors, and a lot of them are of the South Atlantic coast. We’ll glue them right to the walls with wallpaper paste.”
“Sounds good.” Cass picked up one of a pair of antique unvarnished brass sconces that had been laid out on top of the vanity. “Trae found these out in the boat shed, beneath that old farm sink. They’ll look good in here, right? But what should we do for a mirror? He said that hasn’t shipped either.”
“Didn’t we save a dresser mirror from one of the upstairs bedrooms?” Hattie asked. “Seems like that would be about the right size.”
“But it’s mahogany. Don’t you think it’s too fancy with this primitive pine piece? What if we wrapped the frame with rope?”
“I like it. No, I love it,” Hattie said.
“What’ll Trae say about us taking over his design decisions?” Cass asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Who cares? Get ’er done. That’s my new mantra.”
The two women spent the rest of the day measuring, cutting, and gluing nautical charts to the walls, and even the ceiling of the bathroom. They were almost finished when Leetha arrived to check on their progress.
“Ooh, I like it,” the showrunner said. “Thinking outside the box. I just came from the kitchen. Saw Ashtray down on his hands and knees taping those floors.” She held up her cell phone. “Had to take a photo to commemorate the occasion.”
“Did Trae say when he thought he’d be done?” Hattie asked.
“He swears it’ll be done by morning,” Leetha said, looking dubious. “Said he’s going to paint it himself, because he doesn’t trust y’all’s painters not to muck it up.”
“Good,” Cass said. “Our guys already have enough to do fixing his screwups. Let him spend the whole night crawling around on the floor.”