unless it’s a problem like reducing the acid content of a tomato-based sauce, or how to get a soufflé perfect. I’m better with food than people. People tend to piss me off.”
He glanced up at her with surprise. “But you own a restaurant. You must deal with people day in and day out.”
Alex waved that suggestion away. “I deal with my kitchen staff, who are intelligent and good at what they do. I don’t have to deal with whiny customers who order something they’ve never heard of like gazpacho, and then complain that it’s cold, not knowing that’s how it’s to be served.” She clucked with irritation. “And I certainly am not used to dealing with the ineptitude of salespeople who write down the wrong numbers and get completely inappropriate and unwanted goods sent to me like lime green carpet and paint, and screaming orange bathroom tiles.”
“Did that happen?” Cale asked with surprise.
Alex set her roller in the tray with a sigh, and then stretched her back and nodded. “Why do you think I’m painting? I hired men to do this, but by the time I gotback from the old restaurant tonight, the wrong paint had been delivered and the painters had almost finished painting the walls with it,” she explained with disgust and shook her head. “The walls looked like someone had puked green slime all over them.”
Cale glanced at the unpainted portion of wall and noted the green tint to the white primer they were covering. He ran his roller through the paint in the tray again and continued painting as he asked, “And the green carpet?”
“The same deal. I had a project manager then and was working at the other restaurant training the new crew. I stopped in here to check on things after closing and found the floor carpeted in a sea of pea green rather than the shade I had chosen. I nearly had a heart attack, and it was too late at night to do a damned thing about it. I spent most of the next morning making calls trying to get it straightened out.”
“Obviously you did,” Cale commented, glancing down at the dark carpet visible through the drop cloth.
Alex snorted. “Yeah. But it cost me. The project manager had signed for the carpet, and it couldn’t be returned because it had already been laid. Basically, I had to buy it all over again to get the right color installed.”
“Is that when you fired the project manager?” Cale asked, shifting his tray further to the right to continue painting.
“No,” Alex said on a sigh. “He said he’d forgotten what color it was I’d chosen and I hadn’t shown him. Ithought it was just a one-off. So I bit the bullet on that one, but then the same thing happened with the tiles for the bathroom and kitchens.”
“Screaming orange?” he asked, recalling her earlier words.
“Yes,” she said with displeasure. “And that time I had reminded him of what color the tiles should be that morning. I even called the store the night before delivery and made the store clerk read the numbers out to me to be sure they matched the ones on my receipt.”
“They did?” he asked.
“Oh yeah, so I went to work in the old restaurant sure everything would be fine, only to arrive to the orange tiles covering the kitchen and bathrooms that night.”
“The project manager allowed them to be installed?” Cale asked with a frown.
Alex snorted with disgust. “Turns out my project manager was a raging alcoholic and apparently off-site more than he was on. That day he arrived with a hangover, let the installers in, then left them to sign for the tiles and went to pass out in my office.” She shook her head with a sigh. “But I wasn’t about to bite the bullet this time. The tiles I had ordered were a ridiculously expensive Italian import. They cost as much as everything else put together.”
“What happened?” Cale asked.
Alex’s mouth twisted bitterly. “The head tile guy was smarter than the carpet installers. He thought the orange might be wrong and tried to wake up the project manager, but he was out cold. So he double-checked the tile numbers on the receipt against the numbers onthe boxes before accepting them, and the numbers were the same so he just decided I had bad taste and went ahead with it.”
She glanced down and smiled wryly when she saw Cale’s surprised expression. “I checked the numbers myself, and they were indeed