Sheila said to follow her to a different room, which I did. That’s when I realized that the place had been remodeled in a major way. The most noticeable change was the new paint job, which coated the walls in a soft tan and the highlights; the molding, trim, staircase rails and so on; a dark mahogany. I reacted with a big smile. I was pleasantly surprised. She seemed to like it too.
What she didn’t like was that “they”, the remodelers, put a light outside where the trash dumpster was. “I don’t need people seeing me take out the trash,” she complained, maybe in those exact words. I took that to mean she thought it would make her more visible to potential muggers or rapists. I thought the area being well-lit would make such dangers less likely, but I didn’t say anything.
Her concern didn’t seem to last long anyway. Her emotions sway that way in real life too. After a few seconds, she was smiling again, as happy as I was to be in a place that was suddenly more elegant. I don’t know how long we’d been working there; it seemed she’d been for years; but it felt like a new job altogether, in a huge house freshly built just for us. It was almost as if we lived there.
At one point, she offered me a free curtian rope. There were unopened packs lying under where the new drapes were hung. They’d apparently been in storage to replace the ones used for the old curtains. But since we had new ropeless drapes, they weren’t needed anymore. So we each took one for ourselves, though I didn’t have curtains at home. “I think I can find a use for these,” I said.
2015 [ April 01 ]