The House of Seven Mabels

might have already been chewed. 'Is the contract awful?'

'It's probably fixable, and if it isn't…'

Shelley put the papers down and gazed at Jane for the rest of the sentence.

'… we don't really care if we take the job or not. Right?'

'Right.'

'So tell me the worst,' Jane went on.

'The payment, of course. She's offering us three percent over our cost. That's ridiculous.'

'It might not be in this particular business.'

'Jane, you've told me before that writers pay agents ten to fifteen percent. And after we took

that botany class I looked up a bunch of stuff on the Internet. Do you know that plant breeders who want someone to promote and sell their flowers and vegetables often pay as much as forty percent the first year? So three percent is peanuts. A downright insult.'

'So what do we ask for?'

'Why not twenty-five percent?' Shelley said with a grin. 'And be willing to come down to— oh, maybe twenty. Maybe even seventeen and a half?'

'What's this stuff going to cost?' Jane asked.

'Thousands and thousands of dollars. Have you priced wallpaper recently?'

'To my sorrow, yes. My disastrous front hall. Remember? And it was so dark when it went up on the wall that I had to buy a very expensive light fixture that would take a hundred-and-fifty-watt bulb without burning down the house.'

'We'll have to have a hefty advance,' Shelley continued, not even mentioning the outrageous figure it had cost to recarpet her guest room in a good Berber.

'According to this silly contract,' she went on, 'we're to be reimbursed for the goods and our fee is paid on the first of every month. That's unacceptable. We need a good five thousand dollars up front. And then there's this other clause that'll make you laugh. If we provide something unacceptable, we have to take it back ourselves. No way. Imagine having a sofa delivered and having

to cram it back in my minivan, or pay someone to haul it away?'

'But won't Bitsy go see the choices we've made beforehand? The ultimate decisions should be hers.'

'Nope. Except for paint chips, fabric samples, and such that we can bring to the project site. We're to provide digital pictures of everything big. At our own expense. Do you know what a digital camera costs?'

'But you already have one, don't you?'

'I do,' Shelley said with indignation. 'But that's not something Bitsy knows. Why should she assume we're willing to invest in one for her convenience?'

'On the whole, I don't like this,' Jane said. 'I never have.'

'I'm not crazy about the idea, I have to admit,' Shelley said. 'But we have nothing to lose by up-ping the ante. If she turns down our demands, we're home free and haven't lost anything but a little of our time. If she caves, we stand to have some fun out of shopping for this stuff and make tons of money for the pleasure. Jane, we have the upper hand here. That's what we have to keep in mind. This is just a first-try contract, to find out if we're stupid enough to accept it. But we're neither stupid nor desperate. And we've got time on our side.'

'Why?'

'She won't be ready for furniture for months.

Gives us lots of days to just hang out watching the work, pretending to take notes, deciding if we want to do this, while the clock is ticking for Bitsy. Sooner or later, she'll have to agree to our terms or look for someone else. Or, God help her, do the shopping herself.'

Jane pushed her plate toward the side of the table and sighed. When Shelley got the bit in her teeth, there was no stopping her.

Shelley took a sip of her soup. 'Ugh. It's awful and it's cold already. Let's go home and maybe we can get together this evening after you've read through this carefully.'

Jane was happy to abandon her choices of food as well. The macaroni and cheese must have been made from dried skim milk and the cheapest artificial cheese it was possible to purchase.

After she had fixed Todd, Katie, and herself a good dinner, Jane told the kids to load up the dishwasher and put away the leftovers. Then she went to her bedroom to study the contract. She was as disappointed as Shelley had been. The terms weren't good. What was more, it wasn't even written properly. There were words spelled wrong. Some of the conditions weren't even stated in full sentences. Bitsy had apparently pieced this up herself with no guide at all. And she didn't even know the difference between it's and its. All of the pronouns were feminine gender.

Jane wasn't normally a fanatic grammar cop, but the contract made her wonder if Bitsy wasn't

downright stupid. Or simply too stingy to consult an attorney to draw up a contract.

Either choice was scary.

As she reached for the phone to call Shelley, it rang.

'Have you read it yet?' Shelley asked.

'It's awful. There are sentence fragments about important things that don't even make sense,' Jane said.

'That's not all that's wrong,' Shelley said. 'May I come over and show you something else I've discovered?'

Shelley turned up minutes later with wads and rolls of paperwork. She had fire in her eyes. Even her hair was in disarray, as if she'd been trying to tear bits of it out.

'Wait till you get a look at this.' She unrolled the old floor plans as the house had been originally on Jane's kitchen table, and kept them from snapping back into a roll with a salt-and-pepper shaker.

Then she flipped open her notebook. She pointed to the total dimensions of the back of the house on the second floor in the plans. Then she showed Jane her own figures.

'It's a foot and half off. Where did we go wrong?' Jane asked.

'Jane, get a grip. We didn't go wrong. You can't have already forgotten how obsessively precise I was upstairs, could you?'

'I'll never forget.'

'Didn't Bitsy say this was done by an architectural engineer?'

'I seem to remember that she did.'

'Do you see the name of the firm anywhere on this paper? Much less an individual's name?'

Jane stared. 'Who really did this? Not Bitsy. She wouldn't even take the time to fake this up, however incompetently.'

'Now look at the finished plan for the first floor,' Shelley said, removing the salt-and-pepper shaker and replacing the old plan with the new plan and anchoring them down the same way.

Jane read the dimensions, then consulted Shelley's notebook. 'It's even farther off what we measured. Nearly three feet just across the back. And no name on this one, either.'

'So we figure Bitsy didn't do this herself, right? So who did?'

'Sandy,' Jane said firmly.

'Sandra, or some amateur friend of Sandra's, maybe,' Shelley qualified. 'One of her feminist gang, I'm willing to bet. Maybe she has a daughter studying architecture.'

'Shelley, we really should tell Bitsy this. She's not one of my favorite people, but I hate to see her being made a fool of.'

'You bet we will.'

Jane thought for a moment, then said, 'Shouldn't we just bow out and let them fumble through it themselves?'

'Jane, I've never heard you say a single cowardly thing,' Shelley exclaimed.

'Oh, of course you have,' Jane said with a laugh.

'Maybe once or twice,' Shelley admitted. 'But this is serious. Someone's ripping off a stupid woman. One, I admit, who never should have taken on something she knew so little about, but still, neither of us would ever feel good about ourselves again if we didn't at least try to warn Bitsy.'

Jane sighed. 'You're right. Damn.'