Hissy Fit (7 page)

Will sipped his coffee
slowly while Daddy lit into the banana pudding. “Hey now,” Daddy said, pointing at me with his spoon. “Come on and eat your dessert. I been cooking all afternoon. If you don’t eat this pudding, I will. And you know I’m trying to watch my girlish figure.” He jiggled the spare tire under his shirt and chuckled at his own joke.

I obediently dipped a spoon into the banana and cookie parfait and looked expectantly at Will.

“This is going to sound crazy,” he repeated. “I’m in love with…this woman. She has a very successful career in Atlanta, and probably has no interest in moving to a place like Madison.”

“Well, she’s a damn fool then,” Daddy said flatly. “Why’d anybody want to put up with all that traffic and crime and mess in Atlanta when they could live someplace like this?” He spread his arms out, indicating not just our kitchen but all of Madison and greater Morgan County.

I took another bite of pudding just to keep from having to explain life to my father, who has happily lived his whole fifty-five-year existence within two miles of the place he was born.

“She’s a lawyer with one of the biggest law firms in Atlanta,” Will said. “She probably likes going to the theater and museums, you know, parties, all that stuff.”

Daddy snorted his disapproval. “We got a museum right here in Madison. And when that multiplex opens up this fall over on the highway, she can have her choice of six theaters.”

“I think he means she likes live theater,” I said gently. “Anyway it sounds like this woman is a confirmed city girl.”

Will just nodded. He didn’t give any additional information.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” I said. “And let me just warn you right up front. I have had my fill of lying, cheating, double-dealing—”

“She loves old houses,” Will blurted out. “She’s nuts for anything old. And I thought maybe. Well, Mulberry Hill was built in 1858.”

“You thought if you fixed it up she would come?” It sounded stupid, even to me.

He took another sip of coffee. “It sounds weird when you say it that way.”

“It’s not only weird, it’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” Daddy said. “You don’t get a woman to marry you by fixin’ up a house, boy.” He scraped the bottom of his bowl with his spoon, pushed his chair back, and got heavily to his feet. “If y’all are done, you can clean up the dishes. I got some phone calls to make.”

I tried to shoot him a look, but it was too late. He put his bowl and coffee cup in the sink and left me alone with Will Mahoney.

Will stacked the remaining dishes and ferried them over to the kitchen counter.

“Just leave them there,” I said. “I’ll load the dishwasher later. After you’ve gone,” I said pointedly.

“I’m not going until you agree to take the job I’m offering you,” he said, leaning up against the sink. “Might as well let me stay and help.”

“What do I have to do to get rid of you?” I asked. “I can’t make it any plainer. We’re busy. I can’t take this job. It’s impossible. Even if we weren’t busy, nobody could do what you want done over there in six months.”

“You aren’t that busy. Your asshole ex-fiance and his family have taken care of that. Anyway, you haven’t even seen the house,” Will said. He craned his neck and looked out the back door toward the patio. “There’s still a good hour of daylight left. Come on, Keeley. Just take a ride over there with me. It’s an amazing house. Did you know it was used as a hospital for Federal troops wounded in the siege of Atlanta?”

“Every kid who grew up in Madison knows that stuff,” I said.

“The doorknobs are all hand-etched silver,” he said. “We found ’em in a packing crate up in the attic.”

“Why were they up there?” I asked, despite myself.

“For safekeeping, I guess,” he said. “People broke in over the years, kids, maybe homeless guys. We found a mattress and a sleeping bag in one of the back bedrooms, and evidence that somebody had made a little wood fire in one of the fireplaces.”

“It’s a wonder the place didn’t burn down,” I said.

“The last owners had the sheriff checking on it pretty regular,” Will said. “He ran folks off and notified the owners who came out and kept it boarded up.”

He smiled then. “We discovered the original parlor mantelpiece was down there in the basement, covered up with old feedsacks. And you’ll never guess what we found out in the old smokehouse.”

“A side of bacon?”

“Crystal chandelier,” he said smugly. “I took it to a place in Atlanta to see about having it cleaned up and fixed. The restorationist says he thinks it might be Waterford.”

“That could be,” I agreed. “I think the Cardwells—the original owners—were pretty successful cotton merchants.”

“Very successful,” he said. “I’ve done some research at the historical society. There are some photos taken back after World War I of the parlor and dining room. Pretty fancy for a backwater place like Madison.”

“Photos?” I asked. “Can you tell anything about the way the rooms looked?”

“You can see the flower pattern on the wallpaper,” he said, sensing he had me hooked. “I’ve got copies of everything. Over at the house. I could show them to you.”

“Not interested,” I said, looking away.

“Thought you said you were tired of liars,” he said.

“I’m tired, period.”

“Come on,” he said. “Just look at the place. No commitments. Just let me show it to you. It’s really something to see. This time of early evening, the sun hits the front room, and it gets this, like, golden glow to it. And I’ve got all the old pieces of wallpaper saved up. I thought you, or somebody, might want to copy them for when we redo the dining room and parlor.”

“This is just a look-see,” I warned. “No commitments.”

I walked out into the hallway and hollered up the stairs. “Daddy?”

He poked his head over the railing. “What’s up, shug?”

“We’re going to take a ride over to Mulberry Hill,” I said. “Just to have a look, that’s all.”

“It’s not a date,” Will hollered up at him. “So don’t worry.”

Daddy walked down three steps and gave him a level look. “What would I have to worry about, son?”

“Nothing,” Will said, blushing. “I just didn’t want you to think I was hitting on your daughter or anything like that.”

“Will Mahoney,” Daddy said, shaking his head again. “Pretty summer night like this? If you’re not hitting on a good-looking girl like my daughter, you’re dumber than you look.”

“Daddy!”

“Just making an observation, that’s all,” Daddy said.

Will had left the top down on the yellow Caddy. I had to move a stack of files from the front passenger seat and kick a huge flashlight out of the way before I could sit down, and then we were off to the races.

“You’ll have to excuse my father,” I said, running my hand over the leather upholstery. “He seems to think I’m some two-door late model V-8 sedan he has to clear off the lot. He pretty much never quits selling, and he’s pretty used to saying whatever comes to his mind.”

“That’s all right,” Will said. “I like that.”

“You haven’t had to live with it your whole life,” I pointed out. “He sure seems to like you.”

“I think he mostly likes this car,” Will said, patting the dashboard.

“Yeah, that’s a possibility. My grandparents always drove Caddies, so he’s got a weak spot for the old ones. And he doesn’t trust anybody who drives a foreign car.”

“I notice you drive a Volvo.”

“He took it as a trade-in on an SUV,” I said. “Nobody else in town would have it, so I picked it up cheap.”

“What about A.J. and that BMW of his?” Will asked, grinning.

“We never discussed it,” I said lightly. “What kind of car does your girlfriend drive?”

“I don’t really know,” he said. He flipped on his turn signal and made a left into a barely marked driveway that had been hacked out of a six-foot-tall boxwood hedge. He stopped the car short of a thick, new-looking chain that stretched across the driveway.

“You don’t know?”

“I’m having a new set of wrought-iron gates and a sign made for the entrance here,” Will said, pointing to the sun-faded wooden plaque that hung from a rusted-out steel pole on the right side of the driveway. He put the car in park, hopped out, and put a key in the padlock fastening the chain. “Scoot over and pull on through, will you?” he called to me. “I wanna lock up behind us. Now that we’ve started construction, the house is wide open. I don’t want people coming in and helping themselves to my tools and building materials.”

I edged the car through the narrow opening in the hedge, and waited until he got back in on the passenger side.

Gingerly, I let the car roll down the driveway. Trees pressed in on both sides.

“I gotta get this underbrush cut back pretty soon,” Will said, wincing after a sapling snagged the flesh of his arm. “But I don’t want to do too much until I get my landscape designer in to flag the stuff he thinks we should keep.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Landscape architect? Who’d you get?”

“Some guy my architect recommended. Kent Richardson.”

“La-di-damn-dah.”

“You know him?”

“I’ve seen his work. He specializes in historic preservation projects. Our client at Barnett Shoals Farm used him, but I never got to meet him in person.”

Will nodded approvingly. “That’s why we hired him. That horse farm project.”

“You really are planning on spending some bucks,” I said.

“It’s got to be done right,” Will said.

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

He nodded, not taking his eyes off the drive.

“How’d you get this rich so young? I mean, was your family in this business?”

He grinned. “Dumb luck. I was working at a hosiery mill in Greenville, South Carolina, and we were having problems with the Japanese knitting machines. Every time one broke down, we’d have to send off to Japan and sit around and wait for a replacement part to be shipped. I tinkered around with their designs a little bit, and came up with something better. It did pretty well for me.”

“Looks like it,” I said pertly, steering the car around a hairpin turn. Suddenly the drive widened out into a broad green meadow. A huge pair of water oaks seemed to mark the end of the drive and the beginning of the meadow. At the far end of what once must have been a rolling emerald lawn, the house loomed, pale white in the gathering purple dusk. Fireflies flickered in the canopy of the trees, and whip-poorwills chirped from the high grass. Without thinking, I let the Caddy roll to a stop and put it in park. It would have been sacrilege to drive any farther.

Red clover
carpeted the meadow, and fat fuzzy bumblebees hovered in the air. The scent of grass and wildflowers wafted up as we neared the house.

“This was all cotton fields at one time,” Will said, picking his way through thickets of blackberry brambles. “The house was originally set much closer to the road, but it was moved back, to give it a grander entrance and driveway, sometime in the late forties.”

“Before my time, needless to say. But there’s still a lot of cotton grown around here,” I pointed out. “Have you given any thought to doing that with all this land?”

He laughed. “Not a chance. I’ve done my research. Cotton’s too much work. Too much heavy machinery, investment. I am having the meadow planted with millet, so we can do some dove hunting this fall, and I’m also thinking about doing a little cattle farming eventually.”

I glanced over at him. “You? A gentleman farmer?”

“Maybe not that much of a gentleman,” he admitted. “And I don’t know a damn thing about farming, but I’m a pretty quick study.”

“You should talk to Dallas Pope, the county extension agent,” I said. “We went to high school together. He won all the 4-H livestock prizes back then, and I think he still raises cattle on the side.”

“I’ll do that,” Will said. We’d been tramping steadily toward the house, but he stopped now, a few yards away.

Up close the house looked more silver than white. The old cypress clapboard walls had shed most of their paint. Seven two-story-tall fluted Corinthian columns swept across the wide porch of the house, curving around on the east side to another porch. The porch stopped abruptly on the west side, where a framework of old joists was all that
remained. An elaborate pilaster and pediment arrangement framed what had probably once been a massive carved front door, which had been replaced with one of cheap, nondescript plywood. A pair of divided light windows, each five feet tall, flanked the doorway, some still retaining their original wavy glass.

On the second floor, directly above the front door, hung a small wooden balcony. Its rail was rotted in places, and most of the carved balusters were missing.

“Here it is,” Will said, gesturing toward the house, like a prized coon dog. Pride shone in his eyes. “What do you think?”

“Impossible,” I murmured, shaking my head.

He frowned. “You haven’t even seen it. We put a new roof on this week. My architect found a warehouse full of slate tiles that came off an old elementary school they tore down in Covington a few years ago. It’s watertight now.”

I pointed up toward the roofline. The cornice boards were missing in places, and pigeons fluttered in and out of gaping holes under the eaves. “You’ve got some tenants.”

“That’s being taken care of,” he snapped. “Are you always this negative?”

“All right,” I said. “Show me the house. I promise to try to keep an open mind.”

He pulled a ring of keys from his pants pockets and stepped up a set of cracked concrete-block steps to the front porch.

“Careful,” he said, stepping gingerly on a zigzag route to the door. “Some of these boards are nearly gone. I’ve got somebody coming in this week to start ripping the whole porch off, but we’ve got to stabilize the foundation first.”

I took a closer look at the aforementioned foundation. Crumbling three-foot-high red brick piers seemed to be the only thing holding the house off the ground.

“Is it safe to go in there?” I asked. “You forget, I’ve been in a lot of these old houses around town. My aunt broke her ankle stepping
through a rotted board at the old Lively place out on the highway a couple of years ago.”

“I’ve had workmen in and out for weeks now, and nobody’s had any injuries,” Will said, fitting the key in the front door. He opened it with a flourish. “Come on. I never would have taken you for such a sissy.”

I scrambled up the steps and tiptoed across the porch. “Nobody calls Keeley Murdock a sissy.”

Still, I took a good long look at the floorboards once I stepped over the threshold of Mulberry Hill.

My concerns were needless. The floor was heart pine and rock solid.

“Not bad,” I admitted, straining to see more in the dim interior.

Will played his flashlight around. “Not bad? That’s the best you can do?”

I took the flashlight from him and swept it around the entryway. The old plaster walls were cracked, but mostly intact, which was a small miracle for a house this age.

The ceilings were high, probably twelve feet, and had a treatment I’d never seen before, four-inch heart-pine tongue-and-groove boards arranged in an intricate parquet pattern.

“Did you have this ceiling stripped?” I asked, walking around with my head turned upward.

“Nope. It was like that when I bought the place. Pretty amazing, huh?”

“We’ll want to have the beadboards cleaned thoroughly, and then sealed,” I said. “It doesn’t really fit with the formality of a house like this, where it’s more conventional to have plaster, but—”

“I’m keeping it,” Will said. “It’s one of my favorite things about the house.”

I kept the flashlight moving. The rest of the entryway was what I had expected to find. Twin parlors opened off either side of the wide hallway. Each parlor had a brick firebox, although there were no
signs of any mantels or other moldings or baseboards, or even window casings.

I walked into the east parlor and looked out an awkward boxed bay window with a view to what looked like a backhoe and a metal construction shed. “This bay probabably isn’t original to the house.”

“No. The architect said it was probably added on when the house was moved.”

“We could have a new window custom milled,” I said, thinking out loud. “With the four-over-four configuration of the original windows. Keep the bump-out, put in a nice window seat, maybe box the whole area in with bookcases.”

“Great,” Will said. He pulled a small spiral-bound notebook from his back pocket and started jotting notes.

“There’s a place down in Savannah, they sell old cypress boards salvaged from the river. We can get new millwork to replicate what was here originally. You said you have some of the old baseboards and moldings?”

“Down in the cellar,” Will said, writing as he spoke. “It’s just an old dug-out root cellar, really, but I can take you down there and show you.”

I’d been in plenty of those old cellars too. They were always full of spiders, crickets, mildew, and mouse droppings. “No thanks,” I said, repressing a shudder. “If you’ll just have somebody gather it all up and put it somewhere dry, so I can make sketches, that will be fine.”

He continued writing while I went through an open doorway into a large square room adjacent to the parlor.

“Dining room,” I mumbled, walking off the room’s measurements. Another gaping firebox stood on the far wall. Three windows on the opposite wall were tall enough to walk through.

“French doors, maybe? Opening up to this side veranda?”

“Great,” Will said, scribbling. “The garden designer said something about a perennial garden out that way.”

“With a fountain,” I said, nodding. “Definitely a fountain. So you
can leave the French doors open and hear the sound of the water trickling.”

I aimed the flashlight at the ceiling and frowned. The plaster here was crumbling, revealing large patches of bare wood lathe. A naked black cord dangled from the center of the ceiling.

“The Waterford chandelier should hang here,” I said. “Unless you want it in one of the parlors?”

“What do you think?”

“Here,” I said. “And we’ll find a wonderful table, maybe a set of Irish Chippendale chairs. And a fabulous sideboard. There’s an auction house in New Orleans, they put pictures of upcoming items on their webpage. They always have nice things. We’ll want some Georgian silver to splash around too. It makes a room so handsome.”

“Okay,” he said. “That sounds good.”

“Unless your lady friend likes French,” I said, hesitating. “We can do French, of course, but personally I think a lot of Louie-Louie is going to be too fussy for a house with such masculine bones.”

“Masculine?” he said, gazing around the room. “A house can have a gender?”

“Absolutely. And your house is butch. See how all these ground-floor rooms are big and square? What moldings remain are nice, but fairly simple and classical. And the house itself hasn’t been tarted up with a lot of Victorian gingerbread.”

“Victorian is bad?” he asked, puzzled.

“Not on a Victorian-era house, like a lot of the ones you see in town,” I said. “But it doesn’t belong on an antebellum Greek Revival house like this one. Lots of times, after the Civil War was over, when people got a little bit of money, they wanted to tack on a lot of scroll-work and doodads, just to keep up with styles and show the neighbors they weren’t flat broke anymore.”

“But not the Cardwells,” Will said. “When cotton went bad, they never really recovered.”

“Fortunately for you,” I said. I tugged on a door in the wall opposite the windows. “What does this lead to?”

He batted my hand away from the doorknob. “A four-foot straight-down drop.”

“Really?”

“It does now. There was a jerry-rigged kitchen wing, but we ripped that off this week.”

I went back out into the entry hall and walked rapidly through the west parlor. It was the twin to the other parlor, except that it lacked the bay window.

“Do we really need two living rooms?” Will asked.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Lots of times, in a house of this era, we make one room a formal living room, and the other one functions as a library or study.”

“A library,” Will agreed. “I’ve got a storage shed full of books I haven’t unpacked since I moved to Georgia three years ago.”

“Moved from where?” I asked, running my fingers across a cracked piece of marble on the parlor hearth.

“South Carolina,” he said. “And before that, North Carolina.”

“And before that?” I asked. “You don’t really have a recognizable accent, do you? I know you’re not really a Yankee, but you’re definitely not a cracker boy either.”

“Nashville,” he said. “Although I went to school at Georgia Tech. Mechanical engineering, although I took a lot of textile classes too.”

“My daddy is a Tech man,” I said. “Maybe that’s what he likes about you.”

“That and the Caddy.”

A doorway on the far wall stood ajar. I pulled it open to reveal a narrow rectangular room with the stubs of old water pipes protruding from the floor.

“The bathroom?” I asked. “I haven’t seen a sign of another one anywhere.”

“Bathroom-slash-washroom,” Will said. “There was an old laundry
tub in there that the workmen hauled to the dump. This room had the only semimodern plumbing in the whole house. There’s not a bathroom upstairs at all.”

“We’ll have to fix that,” I said. “We can probably steal some space from the library and build a nice powder room.” I pointed to another door on the other side of the room. “What’s that lead to?”

“Originally, it was the maid’s room,” Will said. “It had been tacked on along with the kitchen wing. The architect’s plans call for a pretty sizable addition on the back here. Kitchen, butler’s pantry, laundry room, and a breakfast room overlooking a new back porch. With another full bathroom.”

“Good,” I said approvingly. “Some people would have added on one of those monster ground floor master suites with those hideous garden tub things and a couple of dressing rooms. But that would totally mess up the scale of this house, make it look like you’d slapped a Motel 6 onto the rear.”

“Glad you approve,” he said, smirking.

“Want to see the upstairs?” he asked.

“Just a quick peek. It’s getting pretty dark out.”

He led the way up the stairs. A makeshift banister had been constructed out of cheap pine boards. “We’ve got the original out in the workshed,” Will said. “The trim carpenter’s making new spindles and refinishing the banister. It’s one continuous piece of solid mahogany. Really beautiful.”

Another large squarish entry hall stood at the top of the stairs, with two doors on each side. I poked my head in the first room. It had the same generous proportions as the downstairs rooms, and large windows looking out into the now starry sky.

“Nice,” I said admiringly, walking inside. I opened what looked like a closet door, but found instead a small room, maybe six feet by eight feet.

“A cradle room,” I cried.

“It’s not a closet?” Will asked.

“Well, some people call them trunk rooms. But Aunt Gloria always says these rooms were used for the family’s babies, when they were still in a cradle, but too young to go in a proper nursery.”

“But it could be used as a closet,” Will said stubbornly.

“What’s the matter? Doesn’t your lady friend want any children?”

He blushed. “We haven’t discussed it. But I’d like to have lots of kids. What’s the point of having a big place like this if you don’t have a whole tribe full of kids running in and out?”

“I’d have to agree with you,” I said. “There’s nothing sadder than putting all this time and effort into a wonderful old house like this, then seeing it run like a mausoleum. We think a home that’s full of love and life is the most beautiful home of all—even if the curtains are faded and the rugs are stained, and there’s dog pee on the kitchen floor.”

“Dog pee?”

“You know what I mean,” I said, moving back out into the hallway and into the next bedroom and then the next.

“I’m assuming the architect’s plans call for closets and bathrooms for each of the bedrooms?” I asked, following Will back down the stairs.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “The landing area will be kept as a big informal seating area, and we’ll put a master bedroom wing over the kitchen addition.”

“Five bedrooms?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “Does this woman know what she’s in for?”

“The new bedroom wing will balance the addition on the ground floor,” Will said, ignoring my jabs. “And I come from a big family. Two brothers and a sister. And they all have kids.”

“You’ll have room for everybody,” I agreed.

The downstairs was now cloaked in darkness. Will shone the flashlight out in front of us as we picked our way to the front door.