Travis looks at the recipes. “Here’s one for meat loaf. I love meat loaf! Have you ever had a meat loaf sandwich?”
“No! Gross!”
Travis looks aghast. “You do not know what you’re talking about! A meat loaf sandwich with mustard on it is transcendent.”
Lauren grins, looking at him. “Do you even know what ‘transcendent’ means?”
“Yeah. It means meat loaf sandwich with mustard on it. Look it up.” Lauren smiles as Travis flips through the recipes. “Here’s one for peanut butter fudge. Peanut butter fudge! We could make meat loaf and peanut butter fudge tonight for dinner.”
“Meat loaf and peanut butter fudge? For dinner?”
“There are worse things we could eat,” Travis says, his face straight and serious.
She kisses his cheek. “I think tonight we will stick with hamburgers and try some of these other recipes later. Chicken enchiladas,” she says, reading through some cards. “Strawberry cake. Red velvet cake. Homemade caramels. Muffins. Chicken casserole. Poppy seed dressing. Mmm.” She lifts one of the cards, reading it: “Val Clemente gave me this recipe for shortbread cookies ages ago. She said she thinks it came over on the Mayflower with her ancestors (not sure if that’s true, but what a story!) and got passed down through the years. I always quadrupled the recipe because we ate these cookies like pigs! Enjoy!” Lauren skims each one and looks down at the table, dreaming of mealtimes around it with her growing family.
Miriam leads Gloria, Andrea, Travis’s cousin Gabe, and his wife, Amy, into Lauren’s kitchen, setting an armload of drop cloths she was carrying onto the table. “All right!” Miriam says, clapping her hands together as if back at Glory’s Place and getting the attention of the children. “First things first. We need to move the furniture into the center of each room and then put drop cloths on the floor.”
“Miriam, we know how to paint,” Gloria says, wearing a Grandon Tigers Baseball cap backward on her head. “We’ve had lots of experience with it over the years at Glory’s Place.”
“I am the supervisor, Gloria, and I am merely requesting excellence from all of you. I know that means that you will have to dig deep into your reservoir to find some sort of excellence, Gloria, but I simply must insist that you give us your best. Whatever that looks like coming from you.”
Gloria looks at all the others around her. “Is it too late to appoint someone else as supervisor?”
The room erupts in laughter as Miriam waves her arms in the air. “Dalton, would you please cover that kitchen table? We can set the paint up there. Gabe and Travis? Would you bring in the paint and the ladders? Amy, if you could please do something with Gloria, taking her somewhere else in the house where I don’t have to see that ridiculous hat, that would be wonderful.”
“Me and my hat plan on working right next to you, Miriam,” Gloria says, making Amy grin.
Dalton spreads a drop cloth over the table as Travis and Gabe set down the cans of paint. Gabe opens a can marked “Gray Harbor” and Gloria peers into it. “Is that green?”
“It’s gray, Gloria,” Miriam hisses.
Gloria shakes her head. “Well, it has green in it!”
Miriam points to the color of the paint. “It’s called Gray Harbor, Gloria!”
“I think that says gray herb, because many herbs are green,” Gloria says, winking at Gabe and Travis. “Where’s the gray herb paint going?”
Miriam straightens her shoulders and takes a deep breath, but Lauren steps in next to her. “That one goes here in the kitchen, Gloria.”
“Where you’ll be using lots of herbs,” Gloria says. “Smart choice!” She looks into the next can of paint. “Oh, blue!”
Miriam sighs loudly enough for the neighbors to hear. “It’s gray, Gloria. Do you see the name? Gray Dawn.”
Gloria bends closer as Travis stirs the paint. “It’s a beautiful shade of blue. Where’s this one going?”
“Our bedroom and the baby’s room,” Lauren says.
“Baby blue!” Gloria says. “I love it.” She looks down at the third paint color that Gabe is opening. “Oh! Brown! Or do you call that taupe?”
Miriam shakes her head. “It’s gray, Gloria! Gray Dream. Gray.”
“I think I would have called it Brown Heaven.”
Miriam purses her lips, staring at Gloria. “Brown Heaven?” Gloria nods. “That is so stupid! Who wants to go to a brown heaven?”
“Who wants a gray dream?” Gloria asks, opening her arms to everyone in the room. “No one here, Miriam. No one wants a gray dream. Only you. And frankly, I’m surprised your dreams have that much color.”
Lauren picks up a paintbrush from the table and says, “And this color goes in the living room and downstairs bathroom! So, who’s painting which room?”
“I’m painting wherever Miriam is,” Gloria says, raising a paintbrush high into the air.
“Then I will certainly be in some sort of brown heaven today,” Miriam says.
“Amy and I can go upstairs,” Gabe says, pouring some paint into smaller cans with grip handles for each of them.
“I’ll take the bathrooms,” Travis says.
“And I’ll take the kitchen,” Andrea says.
“With me,” Lauren says, smiling.
“No ladders. No lifting. No moving things around,” Travis says, instructing her.
“You’re as bossy as Miriam,” Lauren says, reaching for the container of paint he’s poured for her.
“I heard that!” Miriam says from the living room, making Gloria cackle.
Andrea climbs onto the ladder in the kitchen and dips her paintbrush into the paint, placing it at an angle right next to the ceiling line of paint. Lauren watches her with interest. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“We’ve moved five times in our marriage, and Bill and I have painted every room of each house! You just learn things.”
“Did you know how to cook when you got married?”
Andrea smiles. “Like I said, you learn things. A good recipe makes all the difference, I think. Do you like to cook?”
Lauren uses her paintbrush to cut in a straight line against the window. “Not really. I’m hoping to learn, though. We have to
