back. The girl was going to the nearby junior college and was a hard worker. Jenna hoped she’d at least be able to keep her for a couple of years.
She knocked on the door of the motel room Pete got, supposedly in exchange for his work. No answer.
She knocked again. Still no answer.
She went from knocking to banging. “I know you’re in there, Pete. Your car’s outside.”
“Okay, okay,” came the muffled voice. A moment later a bent-over Pete opened the door, a pained expression on his face and one hand on his lower back.
Jenna pretended not to notice. “I want room six painted today. You’ve stalled long enough.”
He glared at her. “Did your eyes stop working?”
“No,” she said. “In fact, I can see right through you.”
“My back’s killing me. I could barely get off my bed to open the door.”
He’d managed to get to the kitchen for breakfast.
“Not that you care,” he added.
“Playing the guilt card won’t work,” she informed him. That only worked when her daughter did it.
“I’m not playing,” he growled. “And I’m not painting today. I’m in pain. It’ll have to wait,” he said, and hobbled back to bed. He let out a nice loud groan as he lay down.
“Oh come on, Pete. How stupid do you think I am? Your back only acts up when I need you to do something you don’t want to do.”
“That’s a coincidence,” he said. “If you want your damned room repainted you’re gonna have to wait ’til I feel better.”
The man was so irritating. “You’d better not feel better in time for dinner,” Jenna warned as she shut the door on him.
Wait for Pete’s back to get better? That was a joke. She’d be waiting until the thirteenth of Never.
She’d offered to give him a free massage once when he was claiming to be near crippled and he’d turned her down. “Lie there in my skivvies and have some strange woman pawing me?”
“I thought men liked getting pawed,” she’d said.
“Only by certain women and in certain circumstances,” he’d informed her, and that had been that.
She sighed, resigned to her fate. A few moments later, wearing an old T-shirt and jeans, she fetched the stepladder. Like the little red hen her grandma had read about to her when she was a child, she’d have to do the work herself.
The ladder was an unwieldy metal thing, and she banged her shin hauling it out of the storage room. She hated ladders. They were scary, especially to someone with a fear of heights.
But she didn’t have to go that high to repaint a wall. It wasn’t like she had to get up on a roof. She’d been there and tried that. Never again.
Maybe it was just as well Pete wasn’t doing the painting. At his age, even falling a few feet could result in something getting broken.
Seth usually picked up the slack when Pete failed her, but Jenna didn’t feel right always bugging him to do things. Unlike Pete, he paid rent for his room. Anyway, she was a capable adult. She could do this. She sure wished she didn’t have to though.
Wishes were useless things. She got to work.
The day was far from balmy but at least the sun was out. She left the door open to bring in fresh air. Then she spread plastic on the floor against the wall opposite the bed and set up the ladder. She grabbed the paint bucket that had been sitting by the door for the last few days over to the ladder. She pried it open and poured some into the paint tray. It was the same light blue she’d used in some of the other rooms and would look lovely with the beachy bedspread and lamp with the blue crab vase she had on the nightstand. It also offset the very dark blue carpet, making the room appear a little bigger.
Like the carpet in the rest of the rooms, this one was a remnant she’d gotten on sale when she first refurbished the motel. It didn’t show the dirt like a lighter carpet would and worked well with the lighter color on the wall.
Two of the walls in the room had taken a beating, especially the one she was starting with. One young guest had created a work of art in permanent marker. Another family had managed to dent the drywall in places. Pete had at least gotten around to filling in and sanding the damaged spots. She supposed she could be grateful