Ladies' Night by Andrews Mary Kay

Author:Andrews, Mary Kay [Andrews, Mary Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-06-03T22:00:00+00:00

34

Grace stood in the paint aisle at the hardware store on Friday morning, staring at the huge display and its thousands of one-inch color chips. What she wouldn’t do for her trusted paint fan-decks, with all the notes she’d scrawled on the backs of the cards and the yellow Post-it notes reminding her what paint strength and finish she favored for all her favorites. But the fan-deck, along with all her old files and design library, in fact, all her old life, were back at Sand Dollar Lane.

She knew she wanted the equivalent of either Farrow & Ball’s White Tie or Pointing, two very specific whites for the walls at Mandevilla. Farrow & Ball itself was out of the question. Imported from England, it was just too expensive. She liked Benjamin Moore, too, which was what she’d used at Sand Dollar Lane, mostly because the Benjamin Moore paint store in Sarasota was one of her blog sponsors. She had shelves and shelves of BM paint at her old house. Now, however, neither paint would work for her tiny budget on Mandevilla. She sighed. Cheap paint always just looked shoddy to her eye, and using it would require at least three coats, which would take up too much of her precious time.

She walked around to the clearance endcap and scanned the assorted cans of “oops” paint cramming the shelves.

There was a logical reason these cans were marked down; they were mistints, custom colors that had been rejected by the original customer. Most of the gallon cans were in shades she deemed either truly heinous—a neon bubble-gum pink, a muddy-looking taupe, a sickly green that reminded her of gangrene—or they were just unsuitable for a simple vernacular cottage like Mandevilla.

She did, however, find six gallons of an innocuous white in Benjamin Moore’s low-VOC paint, marked down to ten dollars a can. That she could afford. Grace pulled a can from the shelf and studied the dab of paint on the tin lid. This paint had been custom-tinted, so it didn’t have a color name or a formula. The shade was what she’d always thought of as a “dead white.” But maybe if she had it tinted?

The clerk at the paint counter was a middle-aged man in a red apron. Grace set the oops can on the counter. “Help you?” he asked.

She gave him her sweetest smile. “Hi there. I’m wondering if you can add a little something to this paint to brighten it up a bit?”

He looked puzzled. “Like what?”

“Well, I was thinking you could add a little black to tint it, to see if I like it better.”

The clerk took a closer look at the paint can. “Sorry. This is an oops paint. See, the sign says all paint is “as-is.” That means we don’t remix or add tint.”

Grace sighed dramatically. “Look, it just needs the teeniest amount of black paint. I’m trying to match it to Farrow and Ball’s Pointing shade. It wouldn’t take very much time, and I would

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