“News flash. You’re not in California. You’re on Tybee, and out here, real men sand floors. And tile bathrooms. And anything else that needs doing.”
Hattie retrieved the tool caddy she’d placed on the bottom stair landing. “Okay, since you’re a newbie, I’ll be the sander, and you’ll be the detail man.”
She handed him a putty knife and a claw hammer. “I need you to go around and remove all the shoe molding. Then, make sure we don’t have any exposed nail heads anywhere that can rip up my sander.”
Hattie produced a dusty boombox that a member of the framing crew had left behind. She punched a button and loud mariachi music flooded the high-ceilinged room. After a moment of fiddling with the tuning dial she found a radio station playing ’90s oldies.
“Watch and learn,” she said. She donned a set of goggles with an attached breathing apparatus and switched on the sander. She turned up the volume on the radio, flipped the sander’s long power cord over her shoulder, then, lowering the drum until it touched the floor, she began making a slow, methodical, diagonal sweep across the scarred heart pine surface. When she neared the corner of the living room, she stopped and switched off the sander. “See?”
Trae was kneeling on the floor, attacking the baseboards with the putty knife and hammer. “You don’t follow the grain of the wood?”
“Not at first. There’s ninety years of old varnish on these floors. I’ll do the diagonal passes first, then I’ll go back and go with and against the horizontal grain of the planks, then I’ll go back and do it again with a finer grain of sandpaper, until I get all the way down to bare wood.”
“This is gonna take all night,” Trae groused, sitting back on his heels. “I still don’t get why you don’t just let your subs do these floors.”
“There isn’t time,” Hattie repeated. “My guys can be working on something else Cass and I don’t have the skills to do, like finish carpentry. But anybody with a little muscle can sand floors. It just takes time, and willpower. Tonight, I’ve got both.”
Two hours later, Hattie was making the next to last pass on the dining room floor when the sander suddenly stopped. She whipped around and saw Trae, standing a few feet from the wall, having unplugged the power cord.
“Hey!”
“Hey yourself,” he said, shouting to make himself heard over the Spice Girls. “It’s almost nine. Aren’t you hungry?”
“Yeah, actually, I guess I am kinda starved. What did you have in mind?”
He turned the radio volume down.“What I had in mind was a quiet dinner in a white tablecloth restaurant downtown with a jazz pianist playing in the lounge. Maybe some pre-dinner cocktails, sea bass or poached snapper, a nice bottle of wine…”
“Too late now,” Hattie said. “Would you settle for pizza and beer?”
He let out an exaggerated sigh. “Lighthouse or Huc-a-Poos?”
“Surprise me.”
* * *
When Trae returned he had a large flat box and a brown paper sack that clanked as he walked. “Let’s eat out on the porch,” he suggested. “I’d like to get the taste of sawdust out of my mouth, if it’s okay with you.”
He spread the pizza box on the makeshift sawhorse table the carpenters had used earlier in the day, laying out paper plates and napkins. Then he lifted a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne from the paper sack, followed by a pair of paper-wrapped glass flutes. Tiny beads of condensation had already formed on the chilled bottle.
“Champagne? With pizza?” Hattie raised a bemused eyebrow.
“Trust me.” Trae walked off the porch and returned with a small cooler of ice he’d borrowed from the craft services tent. With practiced ease, he uncorked the champagne, poured some into each flute, and shoved the bottle into the cooler full of half-melted ice.
He took his phone from his pocket and scrolled through the apps until he came to the one he wanted, tapping an icon. The mellow tone of a saxophone floated out into the thick night air.
“Nice,” Hattie commented. He handed a glass to Hattie, then divvied up the pizza, placing a slice on each paper plate.
“Dinner is served,” he said. He sat down on the top step of the porch and patted a spot beside him. “Be my guest.”
She took a cautious sip of the champagne, and smacked her lips in appreciation. “Gotta tell you, I’ve never had champagne this nice. I usually go for the $9.99-a-bottle stuff.”