Page 46 of The Happy Month
I dipped my rag into the paint, squeezed it out and began rolling it up and down. Pretty quickly, I realized I was going to have a problem. I couldn’t raise my right arm much above my head, hadn’t been able to for a very long time. I stopped.
“We have to do this three times. Isn’t this harder than regular painting?”
“It’s about satisfaction. How satisfying it’s going to be to remember that we painted this ourselves.”
I had a strong feeling we’d hang pictures over the paint job and forget completely about it. I mean, sure if someone came over and said, ‘Wow this is great,’ it would be fun to say we did it ourselves. But I wasn’t sure how likely that was to happen.
I did the best I could for a while, but it wasn’t much. After a while, I looked over at Ronnie. He’d managed to do about eight feet, starting at his knees and reaching above his head by a couple of feet. Even though I was taller, he was able to reach much higher.
He looked over and saw how I was doing.
“This is bothering your shoulder, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. A bit.”
Okay, a lot. Of course, Ronnie knew I’d been shot. Iremembered the first time we had sex—well, not the first time. The first time we had sex without our clothes on.
“What happened there?” he’d asked, touching the scar on my chest.
“I fell on a nail.”
“No, you didn’t. There’s a hole in the front and one in the back. Nails don’t do that. Even big ones. That’s a bullet hole. Someone shot you.”
“I told you I used to work at Denny’s. Someone tried to rob us one time and I ended up getting shot.”
“You took a bullet to save the Grand Slam?”
Obviously, he didn’t believe me, but he did stop asking questions about it.
There was a ladder, so when we finished the middle part of the wall, Ronnie got onto it and worked on the top part. The ceiling was about nine feet at its low point and maybe fifteen at its highest point. There were beams across the ceiling. The previous owners had painted them white to match the rest of the ceiling.
“I got to see unit 20 the other day. They have the original beams, which are brown and have symbols painted on them in different colors. I’m thinking of finding an artist who can duplicate them.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, hovering around the bottom of the ladder in case he started to fall.
“You don’t have to stand there.”
“I know.”
Then he asked me what was going on with Patrick Gill. I said, “I had to spend most of yesterday working on the Larry Wilkes case. I did find out a little about Ivan Melchor. He was a set designer. His obituary mentioned that he died at his Holmby Hills home, so he was probably living with Patrick. For how long I don’t know.”
“He was a set designer for the movies?”
“Yeah. It mentionedThe Girl From Albany.”
“Oh my God, I love that movie. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It has that song, ‘I’m Too Blue to Be Blue’.”
“That I remember. My mother used to sing it when she did the dishes.”
“We should rent it. Since you know someone who worked on it… sort of.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to actuallyknowdead people.”
He’d finished the top, so he climbed down from the ladder. He still needed to do the bottom around the baseboard, but he stood back and took in what we’d done.
