“But why does she cook like a 1970s housewife from Minnesota with eight children,” the Great Puffin whined to Tom as she reviewed Rose’s detailed instructions for preparing the next day’s menu: bread pudding, glazed carrots, and baked ziti.
“You’re lucky to eat like one of Rosie’s eight hardy prairie children,” Tom said, because Rosie had several times planned the dinner menu around the palate of Seth’s toddler, only for her cousin to beg off at the last minute. If he didn’t come tomorrow, Tom was going togethim.
Tom was still not wild about the number of barely legal girls roaming around the inn, but as Boyd had been a model of restraint and they were certainly at no risk of exploitation byTom, he had to admit they’d been surprisingly handy so far, and not just at eating the food Rosie had planned to serve her delinquent family. The whole place had been patched, primed, and painted; Boyd was prepared to start cleaning the gutters tomorrow; and the fangirls apparently knew how to sew, so the window treatments were being replaced and the linens repaired. Big progress! But it also brought into focus that Tom himself had not been getting anything done.
“Can we at least have something with seasoning?” the Great Puffin begged. “I can take a turn cooking.”
Tom looked at the kitchen. Rosie was in there baking sunbutter cookies. She’d been very quiet all through dinner, but in a way that was more thoughtful than hostile. Tom couldn’t tell if she’d noticed that he had nothing to show for his whole day’s effort.
“Okay, okay, fine,” Tom said, tearing a sheet of scrap paper from one of the notebooks. “I’ll write down some things Rosie isn’t allergic to. Don’t get anything else. First person who brings a tree nut or an avocado into this building gets fed to the turkeys.”
Boyd nodded at Tom’s warning, impressed, even though Rosie had prepared and served him aspecialdinner of two whole roast chickens and grilled zucchini, which was on the list of forbidden foods.
Tom would never have asked Rosie to cook him something she couldn’t eat, but Boyd had beamed at her and praised her cooking and made her smile and everyone else coo. The big dork.
After all the girls had cleared out, Tom looked back at hislaptop, where he’d opened the budget spreadsheet Rosie had prepared before her arrival.
The amount allotted to the roof sounded like a big number, but as Tom had spent many hours on the phone with the insurance company and various roofers over the past couple of weeks, he’d learned that this number was deceptive. The inn’s roof was fifteen years old, and it needed to be replaced due to the storm damage. According to the claims adjuster, it had only ever been a “twenty-year roof.” Tom wasn’t sure what happened when roofs turned twenty: Did they pack their bags and move to the city, leaving the bunk room exposed to the heavens? Did they retire? Did they simply vanish? But per the insurance company’s calculus, they only owed Rosie a check for 25 percent of a roof.
Tom was having difficulty procuring 25 percent of a roof. Roofers did not want to install 25 percent of a roof. They were in the business of installing entire roofs. Tom had asked whether they might install 25 percent of the roof and allocate those new shingles to the portions of the roof that leaked. He had asked whether they might buy shingles for the entire roof, install some small portion of them, and teach Tom to lay the remainder. No luck so far.
He was from Florida. Roofing was in his blood. He would just have to figure it out, he thought gloomily, deciding to copy and paste the painting budget and add it to the roof budget, the concept moving through his resistant brain like a marshmallow through Jell-O salad.
“What color do you want to have the outdoor trim painted?” Ximena asked, sliding some paint chips across the table.
“Rosie said she wanted it to be pink. Pink like flamingos,” Boyd rumbled.
Oh, now she wasRosieto him, Tom thought with a glower.
“This is a classic Cape Cod–style building,” Ximena objected. “Pink trim’s for the Victorian gingerbread cottages up in Oak Bluffs. You can do white, eggshell, or ecru here. I’d go with ecru. It’ll wear best.”
“Did she really say flamingo pink?” Tom asked Boyd.
“Yeah. She said she wanted to do the same color as the interior of the little place you two are staying,” Boyd said. “Her vision is feminine but playful.”
“Then we’ll do flamingo,” Tom said.
Ximena made a noise of exasperation. “I thought you asked me to come out here to apply my good taste and sophistication,” she objected. “It’ll look weird with pink trim.”
“Do it how she wants,” Tom said, pulling back in his chair. “If her family doesn’t like it, I’ll just tell them I screwed that up too.”
Tom’s tone was perhaps sharper than he’d intended, and the other two fell silent.
Boyd was the first to move. He put one of his big paws on Tom’s knee. “You’re not screwing this up,” he said sincerely. “Everyone sees you working really hard.”
Which was all well and good, but Rosie probably planned to lodge her future dairy-fed children in an inn with a roof.
She came out of the kitchen just then carrying a tray of cookies and a wooden trivet. She set them down on the center of the table and waited for due expressions of admiration.
“I made them with honey instead of sugar, so they shouldbe lower on the glycemic index,” she told Boyd, who gave her a doting expression and immediately shoved a cookie into his mouth, the first dessert Tom had ever seen him consume.
“Is the honey—?” Tom began to ask, putting his most appealing expression on.
“Yes, it’slocalhoney,” Rosie said.
Tom grinned at her and took a cookie for himself. She was coming around on his trash honey. The cookie was delicious, of course, because if Rosie decided to do a thing, she decided to do it perfectly.
Tom shut the laptop when he saw her leaning in to squint at his budget spreadsheet. Instead, he stuck out his arm, realizing only after he’d extended it that he couldn’t assume Rosie would let him put his arm around her, especially in front of Boyd and the others.
