Starting Over On Blackberry Lane. Sheila Roberts

the house that you haven’t finished.”

      “I’m gonna get to them. Give me a break, Stef.”

      Stef, not Sweet Stuff. Okay, he was pissed. Well, so was she. She’d given him sex and pancakes, and this was the thanks she got? “All right, you had your chance,” she growled.

      “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “It means you can be replaced.”

      His brows dipped down. “You shouldn’t even joke about stuff like that.”

      “I meant as a carpenter. I’ve had it, Brad. I really have.”

      “Oh, come on, now. Don’t be like that.”

      Yes, don’t be so demanding. Be happy your house looks like a war zone.

      “Is Mommy mad?” asked Petey, looking from one to the other.

      “Not at you, sweetie.” She leaned over and kissed the top of Petey’s head. “So, guess what?”

      “What?” he asked eagerly.

      “You and Daddy get to hang out this morning and watch cartoons while Mommy goes out for a little while.”

      “Are you coming to my game?” Petey asked.

      “Of course. I’ll be back in plenty of time. We’ll have lunch and then we’ll all go together, and maybe Mommy can get in some batting practice with Daddy,” she added, giving Brad the faux sweet smile that telegraphed you’re in deep kimchi, dude.

      That made Petey giggle. “Mommy, you don’t play T-ball.”

      “I know. I won’t have to worry about hitting the ball. I’ll have a much bigger target.” She drained the syrup out of her voice and said to her husband, “See you later.”

      “Where are you going?” he demanded.

      “Someplace where I don’t have to look at this,” she said and grabbed her purse.

      “Didn’t your mother ever teach you that patience is a virtue?” he called after her.

      “And didn’t yours ever teach you to finish what you started?” she called back, then stormed out the door, slamming it after herself.

      Honestly, he made her so mad. She needed a sympathetic ear, and that sympathetic ear was only a few houses down Blackberry Lane. The front room curtains at Griffin’s house were open, and as Stef walked up the front walk, she could see signs of home improvement—a ladder, a drop cloth... She got closer and saw her friend sitting on the floor, holding what looked like a package of frozen vegetables on her wrist and rocking back and forth.

      She banged on the door. “Griffin!” She anxiously turned the doorknob, found the door unlocked and rushed into the living room, where Griffin sat, tears racing down her cheeks. Her jeans were covered in paint and she was whimpering.

      Stef knelt down beside her friend. “What happened?”

      “I fell off the ladder,” Griffin said through gritted teeth. “I think I broke my wrist.” She moved aside the frozen peas to reveal a very swollen purple mess.

      “Oh, not good,” Stef said. “We need to take you to the emergency room.”

      “The paint spilled. Everything’s a mess,” Griffin wailed.

      It was. There was paint all over the floor. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll clean it up. Let’s get you taken care of first.”

      “I can’t go to the hospital like this.”

      “Okay, I’ll find you some new pants,” Stef said.

      “In my bedroom dresser. Ooh, this hurts.”

      Stef fetched a clean pair of jeans, and between the two of them, they changed Griffin out of her paint-covered ones and into the new pair. Then they got into Griffin’s car and Stef drove her to the Mountain Regional Hospital emergency room.

      Fortunately, not too many people were having emergencies on a Saturday morning, and Griffin was admitted right away. The doctor who examined her was an older man, a kindly father figure, who strongly suspected a radial fracture. “But we’ll do an X-ray and a CT scan to be sure.”

      “If I’ve broken it, I’ll never get my house painted,” Griffin lamented.

      Stef wasn’t in a hurry for her friend to get her house fixed up and on the market, but she certainly didn’t want her to have a broken wrist. “I’m sorry,” she said.

      The doctor’s final prognosis was, indeed, a broken wrist. “I’ll prescribe something for the pain, and we’ll put it in a cast to make sure it stays immobile.”

      “A cast?” Griffin repeated weakly. “For how long?”

      “Plan on six weeks.”

      “Six weeks,” she groaned as they went to the pharmacy for her painkillers. “My house will never get painted at this rate.”

      “Not unless you hire someone,” Stef said.

      “Looks like I’m going to be bidding on that handyman, too,” Griffin said with a sigh when they got back to her house.

      That made three of them, Stef mused as she mopped the spilled paint off the floor for her friend.

      “Just leave the rest,” Griffin said. “Maybe I’ll be able to at least paint the bottom half of the wall.”

      “Okay, but I’m thinking you’d better leave this for the handyman. I wonder how many people are going to be bidding on him.”

      “Probably a lot,” Griffin said with a frown.

      “This could get ugly.”

      * * *

      Sure enough, on the night of the Raise the Roof fundraiser at Festival Hall, a day’s work provided by Grant Masters, owner of Honey Do, was a popular item. In fact, it seemed there were more people mingling by the two long tables filled with silent-auction items than there were over at the table with all the cupcakes and cookies for sale. The majority of them were women, many of whom kept circling the table and checking the numbers on that sheet of paper beside the gift certificate with the graphic of the hammer.

      “This place is a mob scene,” Brad grumbled as Petey bounced between him and Stef, clamoring for a cookie.

      “That’s good, since it’s a fundraiser.”

      He scowled at the paper where her name already appeared three times, each with a higher bid. “That’s too much.”

      “Nothing’s too much to get my house back,” she retorted.

      “Mommy, I want a cookie,” Petey begged.

      “All right, let’s get you one,” she said. She left her husband standing at the silent-auction table frowning and walked with her son over to where the goodies were being sold.

      Next to that two more tables displayed the baked items that were competing for a first-place ribbon and a dinner for two at Schwangau. All these items would be going up for auction later. Janice Lind, the reigning queen of this competition, had entered a three-layer cake that made Stef’s mouth water. She heard that Janice won every year, but some of the other entries looked good enough to give Mrs. Lind a run for her money. Cass had created an entire gingerbread town, a miniature of Icicle Falls, with colorful icing murals on the shops and a gazebo downtown. Maddy Donaldson had entered some kind of cream pie topped with coconut, and Bailey Black had entered a three-layer cake labeled as Chocolate Orange Delight that was decorated with chocolate-and-orange-tinted roses. Pies, cinnamon rolls and elaborately decorated cupcakes all cried out for attention. How did the judges manage to pick only one grand prize winner?

      She bought Petey a snickerdoodle cookie and herself a brownie, then wandered back to see if anyone new had outbid her. Brad had drifted away and was talking