"That's okay by me. Let's go over to the House of Seven Mabels and see if she's around."

Jane didn't understand why this pun tickled Shelley so much. Shelley usually didn't even understand puns.

"And that Mel isn't there," Jane said. "That's understood, isn't it?"

"Did Mel happen to mention whether the house is open to us yet when you were with him last night?"

"Are you insane?" Jane said, hoping she wasn't blushing. "We didn't talk about that at all."

"Guess we're going to have to go over there, then," Shelley said with an expression that on a less refined woman would have been called a smirk.

They took a few minutes to put on their jeans and boots so they'd fit in with the workers. Shelley was getting used to being seen in public in jeans, as long as they were freshly pressed. They were greeted at the locked front door by Bitsy, who looked as if she hadn't slept for a couple of days. "I want you two to meet Joe Budley. He's now our contractor."

She led them to the old dining room, where new, sturdy plywood was being installed by a group of men they'd never seen. Strong young men, most of whom sported goatees, which Jane thought was one of the most unattractive facial attributes a man could choose deliberately.

Bitsy introduced them to Joe Budley, who was an enormous, burly-looking man with violently red hair and matching eyebrows that nearly met in the middle of his face. He, too, wore jeans, boots, and a plaid shirt, but had on a sport coat as well that strained at the armholes and across his burly shoulders.

He shook their hands with a paralyzing grip and said, in an accent straight from Oklahoma, "Glad tuh meetcha, ladies."

"Jane and Shelley are our decorators. Or they will be when I can get around to preparing their contract for their agreement."

"Women are good at that," he said. This was apparently a dismissal of women being good at other things, or so it seemed to Jane. Then she realized, to her horror, that she was thinking like Sandra. That any man who spoke about women was automatically deriding them. Immediately upon the thought, Joe blew her theory.