A Builder's Tale - Chapter Four
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CHAPTER FOUR
If you cannot sleep-work!
CHAPTER FOUR - Of A Builder's Tale, by J. Matson Heininger
If you cannot sleep
Work!
In Grand Rapids, the night filled with storm, there were no stars. Daphne slept on her couch amidst her piles of magazines. At her feet dreaming with slight snorts and quiet growls was her dog, Jimmy, asleep on his dog poof. She rolled and dug her head into the couch’s shoulder, then pulled the blanket and cushions about her. The wind howled. Daphne did not hear it.
To the south, in Holland, the wind roared equally loud as Tim lay awake, thinking he had it all wrong. Was he getting old? Was age holding him back? Now was not the time to worry, but to expand... To venture forth... To renew himself. His thought, one that had somehow arrived at the doorstep of his whisky puddled brain, was a new restaurant chain, one to justify the Mighties. It was just as well that the secretaries had laughed and that the sweet Charlene had not arrived. He might never have had this new idea. The Mighties were not for selling. They were for leverage, for the bankers, for his great idea—Gourmets Everyone.
Why had he not thought of this before, wallowing in Big Mighty despair? Branch out, move forward, a franchise empire to suit his current tastes. And this could only increase his wealth, his stature, his position in the community. He saw himself in Aspen, a speaker at the Wine and Food, a taster and participant, also lecturing on the founding of that great chain of restaurants, Gourmets Everyone. A franchise enterprise which had brought cuisine and fine wine to the Common man, at a bargain price.
His new idea — Someday they would speak of it at the nation’s elite business schools, and of the genius behind it, speak of it and him in the same reverent tones as Bezos and Amazon or Smith and Federal Express…Tim Stevens the entrepreneur who founded Gourmets Everyone.
With visions of class and newfound riches, while imagining his new employees—Svelte young waitresses clad in slinky black and beckoning. He fell into that deep but frantic sleep that sometimes washes up on liquor’s shores.
***********************
In contrast, Wilson was awake and fueled by coffee. In Beauville, the night was clear and warm, with stars. No winds blew, no rain fell. The only sound was the occasional night creature in the forest, scurrying about, and the early or late hooting of an owl. Wilson was awake because the ideas had come again. In his office, drawing, working on the Stevens home, which had been growing larger, as he’d slept.
He had awakened with a mild eureka insight, a solution for the garage. The Stevens, especially Tim, wanted it big enough for three cars…and this, if attached as a separate wing or a giant gabled box, would overwhelm. A solution had pulled him from sleep. He was now downstairs, making sure of its efficacy. Another turret–Why not? Let it flow, give it porches and turrets... Columns and stone... Make the building what they wanted. Wealth on the Hillside...Chateau Du Lac. Break up the mass with this addition. Let it house more stairs—A cylinder to balance the one to the south, with carpet covered steps, not near so grand, leading to servants’ quarters above the garage. And with this solution the servant, chef, maintenance man, laundress, whomever, would not need to go farther into Tim and Daphne’s world than this border, unless their services were required. It would be perfect for them...a separation of space and class and service.
The Stevens had placed this desire high on their list, separate housing for the help, and this turret solved the problem. And as far as ascetics, by stepping the Garage in and out, and the roof lines up and down, he had reduced the mass to acceptable proportion. Especially if landscaped with some fine Maples and Birch, perhaps one pine tree on the mounded sand trap shape he envisioned dividing the garage and main entry drive. And the space above the three cars would be large enough for a nice little apartment. He had given it a deck and a beautiful view across the lake.
He could live there in comfort. Well...only if Tim and Daphne were not next door. Let’s give it a fireplace, in case the occupant decides to burn the mansion down. ‘It started in the servant’s quarter’s officer. We treated her so well. She had every other Sunday off’ ... Maybe a gas stove too.
His plotter drew. They made large printers now, but he liked the quality of the plotter. It drew with a Fine Ink pen, faster, quicker, and more accurate than any draftsman. And if needed, his plotter held eight pens for different colors and line thickness. He was using only a single pen. The page rolled up and back, and the pen scratched over the paper from side to side as the windowless shape appeared. Four views—two feet by three. He took them upstairs and placed the drawings on his hardwood floor, sipping coffee, and looking for errors in the design.
It worked. He had thought so — two floors up, awake in bed for half an hour before he finally rousted himself from bed, moving to his downstairs office. He put on Peter and the Wolf and walked back and forth on the natural red oak, staring at the drawings. Not as real on the floor as they were in his head, but he was the only one who could look around in there.
After walking about his home, inside, outside, on the deck, thinking, he returned downstairs…Ok, now design the windows. Eyebrows perhaps, and no half circles, none of that Palladian shit. Great for the Romans, and the Renaissance, but no longer for the 20th century. Personally, he hated them, thinking how on his travels across the country he had observed the same half circle, stamped, misplaced, hung on and in terrible building after terrible building, east and west across America. Wilson imagined the conversation. ‘I want a round window,’ meaning a half circle. ‘Well, you can’t have one.’ He would hit them with the ‘they’re too common’ card if Tim or Daphne asked. He could read Tim, that would persuade him, thirty-five Mighties…absolutely. The man feared appearing common with their greasy stamp upon him… Eyebrows and stone, shingles and a slate-gray roof, the shingles would turn gray, and white trim... Chateau de Beauville, Chateau Du Lac!
Harnessing these thoughts, he returned to drawing and built the three-dimensioned windows, placing them in the plan view of the building. After this, it took only a click of his mouse for 3D windows to become part of a 3D elevation, and if he zoomed in and copied, also a detailed window section.
Now—the hatches, the shingles, the stone, the trim, the columns. This would take until morning, then the rest of the day and part of the next, to get it right. But he was no longer concerned. Except for slight adjustments, the plan was finished. All that was left to happen was the movement of fingers and mechanical pens. Wilson grabbed his empty coffee cup, went upstairs and made an omelet. Breakfast. It was still dark, but the sun would soon rise out his eastern windows. And as soon as it was light, he planned to return to the Steven’s lot, plans in hand, to check, to think, and to examine.
Below, he could see the anchor light of his boat on the surface of the water. Quiet as a calm, reflecting star.
*****************
Wilson stood on the lot, looking up the lake, north towards the town of Beauville. Pine Lake before the town fathers, at the end of the 19th century, thought to change its name, selecting a long dead French explorer priest, then changing their minds, but keeping the French, renaming Pine Lake, Beauville, while re-christening the lake…Arnaud. Lake Arnaud. It was a famous Lake and one of Northern Michigan’s grand lakes. Not great, but grand, similar to Torch and Walloon, but larger and contiguous by channel, harbor, town and drawbridge, to that much larger body of water, a freshwater sea, Lake Michigan.
Generations had summered here. Hemingway had roamed the hills as a boy. And Wilson was standing on one of the old plots that young Hemingway might have known and wandered, and then later recalled while writing the Nick Adams Stories.
Once, two hundred acres with two thousand feet of shore, it had been subdivided by the real estate ‘entrepreneur’, Longbottom, into tinier parcels, still costing a fortune, intended for cottages, grand houses for the pleasure of those who gleaned new wealth from the late 1980s and the nineties. People like Tim and Daphne, sometimes born rich, but more likely citizens who hustled and schmoozed while stretching this rule a bit, and that principle a bit more, in an acquisition quest for the American Dream, during the great boom that followed the last crash, the savings and loan bust of 1987.
Wilson had been certain he would be building now. It was almost two months since he first lined up the carpenters, the masons, the concrete company. And since then, he’d been holding them off, stretching their commitments of time, day by day, and week by week, making up excuses, so he did not lose them. Imagining a future…‘Ok, we’re ready to build, it’s approved we’re ready… go, go, go’… but oops, no one to build but Wilson, no plumbers, no electricians, no carpenters… all of them moved on. He had experienced such a loss of subs before, slowing his project down and sending it into winter. Too bad Daphne had not liked that first plan. It was still the best, and it had been ten weeks since his return from Colorado.
Yep, he had been certain that first morning, that first day back, that he would have been building now... studying, analyzing, observing, walking the site from lake to shore, to forest and back. It seemed longer ago than ten weeks.
The ice had been breaking up—cracking like momentary gunfire in the air. And the lake had still been covered white, except along the shore and down its middle, two miles out, where a clear blue corridor of ice-free lake meandered, expanding and shifting with the current, sparkling in the sun against the white bright of the winter’s remaining ice and snow. He recalled listening to the ice cannon crack as he walked from the pine forest, sweet with spring sap, out into a sloped meadow and a shallow hillside that met the Lake two hundred yards before him, thinking. What a magnificent lot. What a morning. What a lake. What fortunate people the Stevens were to own it.
There had been no wind and even though cool and only in the mid- twenties, spring was everywhere. Seagulls soared and bobbed on the lake’s clearing center. Ducks walked and dipped along the shore. The occasional Robin, having returned perhaps too early, spoke to the sky. Early April, spring, no blooming flowers yet, no foliage, not even buds returning to the oaks, maples and birches that mingled with the pines. Early spring, he could smell it. There was no question then that he would have been building now!
No question at all, as he had tromped through spring mud and snow, up and down the property, his shoes getting wetter and wetter, soaking up mud and muck, pant legs turning dark from moisture released from the last year’s weedy grass. His compass in hand borrowed from his boat- looking for South and West, North and East, the views and what the daily passage of the sun through days and seasons would do to them. It was the first step. The first day, mid-April...no question at all that he would be building, now.
How could it be that he was not underway? Here he was in shorts and worried for cold fingers. He could see the future before him. Slowly moving waddled humans, his crew bundled so tight they could hardly function, clanking and tool belt ridden, a builder’s Marley ghost. Slow, expensive…costly, when one built too late and into winter; and the house would be less well-built because of it. It was not yet the fourth of July and he was already feeling his future lost circulation. No one that sat in offices could know or appreciate the bitter humid winter cold of Northern Michigan. Winds howling off the lake. A Nordic ice Giant’s blast, dripping frozen noses, windchill so cold that the weather fellow.... warm and toasty in his studio, did not even mention it.
Bitter cold! Not cold enjoyed in recreation, happy, smiling, skiing, snowmobiling cold. Not crisp, red cheeked, hot chocolate, and wassail imbibing cold. But painful cold, when you were trapped and fucked for money, with freezing frozen fingers. It never had to be so, and it so often was. And then, of course… the question, ‘Why is it going so slow?’ He knew that question, he knew it well. ‘Up yours. Fuck you Assholes.’ That is what you wanted to say. But you never did! Yes, he was already worried, and the temperature was seventy-seven, standing in the bright sunshine.
*********************
Only moments before, Daphne had entered the confines of Philippe’s office-residence, welcomed by George, who had taken her coat and moved away. She looked about at the fine salmon-pink Botticino marble floor and the dark varnished slightly crooked antique entrance table holding a bowl of cards and a small dish with red and pink candies. A mirror was to her right. She looked into it... Pretty good girl. You’re holding up ok, shouldn’t have smudged the makeup though.
“Hi there,” a voice bright with charm said. She turned, embarrassed. “You caught me.” Philippe laughed, “No problem, dear, that is what the mirror is for. Looking, come.”
He gestured with his hand toward another room, then walked on, trousers creased and cuffed above brown shoes. Philippe’s hair was dark and shiny. He pushed it aside repeatedly as he walked, inhaling on a dark thin cigarette… a straight line of a man, no shoulders, no waist. You could have drawn him with one vertical penciled slash. Probably to compensate, he wore a shirt that billowed about him as he gestured from side to side pointing here, there, describing this piece and this photo and that house to Daphne, that and the beauty of his office... Down the hall, burgundy walls with a cherry wainscoting, and Persians on the pink marble. Of course, what he was really describing was the beauty of himself... See it, C’est moi, I’m magnificent.
“So, you know, Joanie, what a delight to work with. Her ideas helped, and we achieved a beautiful kitchen, perfect, just for her. It is almost too pretty to cook in.”
He laughed softly, then gestured to a table, completely clear, empty of anything. They sat down.
“So, what shall we look at? I have kitchens assembled down the hall. Did you know I am doing the DeGroot’s?”
Philippe again ran his fingers through his hair.
“We already have a designer,” she said, “But, I really liked that kitchen of Joanie’s.”
“Who is he?” said Philippe.
“His name is Wilson Abernathy. He’s a builder. He also does the designs. Tim, my husband, hired him.”
“That’s unfortunate.” Philippe got up and returned with some pictures.
“Unfortunate! Builders never know design. They are usually just carpenters or businessmen. Does this fellow work on the jobs?”
“Yes,” said Daphne, “Tool built and everything, he builds the stairways, sometimes the cabinets.”
“A craftsman,” said Philippe. “That’s good, but can he design? I doubt it. Have you seen any?”
“Yes,” she said. “They were nice, but contemporary. And his first plan was contemporary, I think. I don’t know what it was. It was just too different. I like these.”
She pulled pictures from her purse, the same pictures she had shown Wilson, handing them to Philippe, who arrayed them on the table.
“Oh, that’s gorgeous,” he said. “And I love this. Look at this room, delightful. Do you have exterior photos?”
Daphne handed him her exterior shots.
“Wonderful.”
Philippe pulled a sketchpad from the shelf behind him and started drawing… long strokes filling the page…slash, slash, bent elbow - stiff arm, extending with the pencil.
“Here.”
He thrust this two-minute endeavor in front of Daphne, who had been watching, impressed. He’s an artist.
“Oh my. That’s beautiful.”
She was looking at a vague impression of a house, which might have been impressionist art modeled on a renaissance ruin, columns and arches, colonnaded walkways, porches, a tree, roofs soaring to nowhere, a bird above it all.
“Wonderful,” she said. “I want to see your ideas.”
“Give me a day or two and we can meet again. Can you leave the photos?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Come look at the showroom.”
Daphne followed Philippe down an extended hall until they reached a room with two kitchens and samples of tile and moldings, swatches, design books on shelves, and against the wall.
“Wonderful,” she said. “That’s what I want.
It was stainless and new oak, made old, distressed to look like generations had rubbed away the paint in places.
“We can give you that,” he said. “But let’s get the house right first. Can we meet tomorrow... late? That will give me time.”
Daphne left thinking; he’s the one, excited about their coming meeting. Progress, she was making progress. This was what would be required. She needed to assert herself. It was her house. She would be in charge. Not that Wilson. He would just have to build what she and Philippe designed. And if Tim didn’t like it, this would show him. She was in charge.
*************************
A couple of days passed; Wilson was still the puppet of his thoughts. He had risen early, way before daylight, his body aching, his mind alert. The plotter had been racing along for hours, changing tasks and tempo on its own, and at the direction of the Cadd software, drawing tiny shingle scratches, boulders, trees and stairs, and columns, walls and roofs and landscaping. The elevations were finished, for the moment, and the floor plans too. Also, a rendering showing the house on the hill, a view from the water. He had scattered trees and bushes here and there to give it scale, even some meandering paths, and a dock.
Wilson knew where the loads would fall and where he could move walls and where he could not, but over all, windows and interior room size, closets… all could be changed within the spaces and loads specified. Even the building could be stretched and jogged and probably would be before the final plan. Still, this was close and with some structural drawings added, and a couple of sections, it was enough for a Building Permit. Just as it lay- level-by-level, and view-by-view, scattered on his living room floor. He would be able to commence construction now! And with his thoughts on paper, he had fallen back to sleep on a couch in his living room.
Wilson snored in opposition to the morning. Light dappled on the walls, white then green from reflected leaves, direct sun here and there. He was not aware—solidly and dreamlessly sleeping. There was a thumping outside. He heard it first, not at all, and then filtered through a half sleep. Which direction to go? Back to sleep. Within moments, a different decision was made for him...a panting, slobbering great tongue was licking him! A red, monstrous, sticky, pebbly thing of a tongue and then a scampering slide and a bark, and a human now, a female voice.
“Wilson, Wilson.” His door slamming shut, heavy feet, junk dumped on the counters. She was singing, and then shouting. At least it seemed like shouting!
“What are you doing? Get up, where’s the coffee filters?”
“Where they used to be,” he coughed.
“Coffeepot? Never mind, I found it. Get up! Get Up! You can’t be sleeping. I’ve come to visit. Barney, stop that!” she shouted at the dog, racing and sliding around the room—Barney’s tail rapidly, powerfully, wagging, like the sheet of an out-of-control sail.
There was a crash. What was that? He was sitting up now. It had only been two of his chairs. But then, in seconds, the dog Barney was back and leaping at him...the vase, flowers from the coffee table falling and spilling to the floor, water soaking the rug. This all in less than three minutes.
“Jesus,” he said. “What are you doing? Can’t you be civilized? Where is the peaceful morning? You know you’re a damned army. Where’s Patton?”
Barney was trying to lick his face again. He kicked the dog away.
“Stop it. Stop it. Get this beast out of here.”
“Barney, Barney,” she said.
Barney left, running and skidding on the shiny oak, scattering his drawings. She kicked him out the door.
“Want some coffee?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
“Toss me a towel,” he said, looking towards the woman.
It was Grace, a former lover, still a girlfriend. He had not seen her in a year.
“I tried to call you when I got back,” he said.
“I was in Europe.”
“Doing what?”
“Museums, I went to a cooking school.”
“By yourself?” he asked.
“I wasn’t, had a guy, but I left him there, so now I’m back. Want some croissant? They’re lousy, I forget, but I bought them… some strawberry jam, too.”
This was Grace...never had figured that her name matched her nature. A driver of storms and shaper of tides, a force of nature moniker, would have suited her better...Catherine, Elizabeth, Demeter. But since he had known her, the feminine name Grace had come to mean...female, do whatever the hell you feel like, carefully planned or on a whim...Dominance.
She was about five nine, near his height. Long and sleek as a dancer, in shape, if not in affectation, with a stretched Modigliani neck and face, and incongruous Anglo-Saxon coloring, currently red tan beneath straight graying hair. She was forty-five, and the hair, gray as it was, oddly, made her look younger, while adding to her intrigue. And none of this fit the hiking boots, the baggy legged shorts, or the knotted work shirt with the arms rolled up, unbuttoned to show small but shapely cleavage. Grace was a statement all her own, and she knew it.
With rapid clattered confusion she slammed cabinet doors, locating plates and cups, and glasses. In moments, spreading her petite dejeuner on the counter of the open kitchen. Jam, croissant, fresh butter she had found somewhere, and nutty bold coffee from some obscure Island. She looked at him, blue eyes over her thin slash of a nose.
“Well?”
The performance was arrayed. He knew the look. The ‘what are you doing just sitting there? Look at all I’ve done for you,’ look. Wanting to oblige, he stood leaning against the counter, sipping her powerful coffee, peeling the croissant, remembering, from his own travels, French bread, baguettes of a different texture.
“Good, very good.”
“Of course it is. What’s this all scattered about?”
She moved from the kitchen towards his drawings and started rearranging them with her foot, pushing them into order, in line on the floor.
“What’s this? This doesn’t look like you. It looks like that stuff you used to pooh-pooh as ‘old saddle’, made fun of.”
“I know, but it’s what they want, my knew clients. I need the work, you know.”
“Yeah, you were an idiot to build this house, all those payments. I told you, but you needed your statement. And now you feel trapped, don’t you?”
She knew him too well. That had been their problem. She could read him as a book, and she had often let him know it was a poor one.
“But this is what you do. This!”
She gestured her hands about the room. Its angles and space and immense laminated fir beams looking like they were floating, corner glass beneath a soaring roof, located where, in a normal structure, a post must be.
“This!”
“You hate that. She kicked his plan for emphases.
Well, never subtle...Grace, who spent some more time studying the plan. “But you know, as those ‘old saddle’ houses go, this one’s not too bad. It’s not all cobbled up. What is that you used to call them?”
Wilson shrugged.
“Mr. Potato Head.”
“That’s it, I remember, well it’s not that. There is some design here, but why?”
“Because they did not like the first one.”
“Let me see that one.”
“I’ll have to get it, it’s downstairs.”
“Never mind, I can look there.”
She followed him down the stairs, past the planters and the gardened windows that made the stair seem as inside as it was out. Sometimes deer would stand outside the glass, looking in, and you could see them from below, almost expecting clattered hoofs, deer leaping forward into the hall. This is what he liked to design, nature in and out, planters, special places, and she had reemphasized, what he already knew...what he had been fighting... fighting since he had seen Daphne’s first hideous pictures, realizing he had made a terrible mistake. Grace was correct. He was trapped. Well, keep fighting.
“Here,” he said.
Pointing toward one of the office tables; oak doors he had converted, and superior to anything else for his purpose. Oak doors on a craftsman style frame of legs he had built in his garage. Grace pushed the plans about.
“This is much better.”
“I know,” he said sorrowfully. “But they did not like it,” hitting the table for emphasis. She grabbed his arm.
“Hey, I’ve been insensitive. The other one is fine, good for what it is. I like the stone.
“Want to see the lot?” he asked.
“Sure,” she replied, “but you’ll have to sit in the back. I have the Sportster. Barney will only sit in the front seat.”
“We’ll take my jeep,” he said. “And Barney sits in the back.”
They traveled out onto the dusty drive, passing pines and cedars left and right, until gravel met the asphalt of Boyd City Road... Then, four miles and turning towards the Lake... then another dirt road.
“This,” she said. “This! I know this! Janet lives next door. She and Conrad.” Grace pointed northeast.
“I know them too, said Wilson.”
“They tried to stop this development…petitions, lobbies, adds, meetings…while you were in Colorado. For two years, they tried to stop it! Janet was the leader. Do they know what you are up to?”
“No,” he said. “They’re busybodies. And that would figure. Use the environment to preserve your own backyard at someone else’s expense. Yeah, I know them. Gossipmongers too. She and that fossil of a husband with their liberal values hinged on old money. Odd for Yankees.”
“Not their generation,” said Grace. “They think they’re Kennedys, but better than them, because Janet’s D A R.”
“Elitists, old family snobs, liberals. All the time living at that old porched rattletrap relic. What is it they call it, Deer Haven, more like the bat cave?” said Wilson.
“I’ve seen the bats,” she said.
“Remember, we had dinner there.” he replied. “You took me to meet them, crap everywhere, and dirty, bats flying around, that old Conrad, drunk, wearing that silly moth-eaten Yale sweater of his, attacking the bats with a tennis racket. I remember… Environmentalists as long as it is someone else’s money. If it’s theirs, not so much.”
“They’re just trying to hang on,” she said.
“Not for long. They’re the type to protest this subdivision and, in a couple of years, divide their own. Remember, I mentioned their polluting septic. They were all about clean water, clean air, until they became horrified as soon as the subject of spending their own money was involved.
“And who made You—God!”
Well, who did, he wondered? Was this some Deist God she spoke of? Or was he the one true God, the head Curmudgeon? He looked down to see if he was floating. He wasn’t... his feet firmly stuck in the soft earth beneath him.
“And she’ll be watching. They’re getting back from Europe soon. I saw them there.”
“Then I’ll like them even less.”
“What are the flags?” said Grace, changing the subject.
“The lots,” replied Wilson.
“Which one is it?”
He pointed north.
“There, at the top of the meadow.”
Grace marched out before him, paying no mind to the tall grasses brushing against her bare brown legs. Wilson watched her muscles flex. Nice legs, nice shape… no, no... that’s over... distant... past. He followed, gazing at the water while observing a seagull squawk across the sky.
“I can see it. Where’s the center?”
He showed her.
“Here, you’re standing in the living room. Imagine yourself up five feet.” He turned her West. “That’s the view.” Wilson then expanded the view with the sweep of his arm, south and north, north-west toward the lake and water and at cottages two miles away on the Western Shore, where high meadows met trees and then a stone beach.
“Let's go to the water.”
They stood at the shore.
“Let me see that rendering.”
She stared at the rendering, then at the property...at the rendering... at the hillside. Twisting and turning the page, walking back and forth along the sand.
“I take it back; this will fit great here. You did it! But it will look like the lord of the lake lives here. Janet is going to hate this.” She pantomimed a gaze into the future. “I can see Conrad over here, telling his old Yaley stories, while she drools and tries not to show it.”
Mischief pulled her face, her eyes alive with jest.
“That’s what they wanted,” he said.
“Well, it’s what you’ve given them,” she laughed.
“All this stone and the shingles, the way you stretched and stepped the structure, and still kept it looking like a mansion.”
“It looks Carnegie, Rockefeller, stately and not too nouveau...Tall, though. I can see it thrusting at the sky. The center here, this gable...and this!” She pointed to the adjacent massive stone fireplace chimney.... “Like a great penis!”
“I’m sure they’d appreciate that reference.”
“I know, she said, a bit much, but it’s going to stick right up there,” she laughed some more.
Grace shoved the rendering toward him.
“Needs some lions, right here.” She pointed at the main stone patio... “Great, gushing fountain... library lions.”
“I think I’ll leave them out for the moment.”
“They should love it,” she added, sweeping the vista with her hands. “People will see this from everywhere. The stepped stone patios. This one’s going to get you more work...more than your special houses. The unique ones like yours, all hidden in the woods. People don’t want that. They want a statement. They want this! Can you get some mold and ivy growing right away?” Grace laughed again.
“I’ll have to talk to the Ivy man.”
He remembered how much fun she could be.
Grace turned abruptly. She looked at the sun. The moment passed.
“I’ve got to go. I have a rendezvous this afternoon, someone I met last night. I think he’s rich.” Wilson shook his head; she had thought that of him once until he had told her the bank owned everything. Oh well, rich or not, it would never have worked. “Let’s go, come on,” she said. He followed her long tan legs back up the hill.