There is a song from a Broadway play that describes minutes that seem like hours before a pair of star-crossed lovers are to meet. Then there are those times when hours seem like seconds.
That pretty well describes how quickly the time flew by in between when I told Barney I would bring all the design stuff for his house over to show he and Lauren and the actual time for my arrival. Perhaps it was a good thing the hours passed like minutes as it was impossible to eat or sleep. I was up in the wee hours of the morning going over every detail of the designs and deciding nothing looked right. There was a lot of questioning of myself on why I couldn't just be happy baking bread, cupcakes for school parties and playing Candyland with the boys?
The good thing about the time going so quickly was that Dennis was not happy with my making plans for a Saturday. He was going to have to take care of Wes and Wally which he was not good at and seldom ever did. It seemed like if we did not start on redoing the basement that very day we could not do it at all. By the time it was time to load the car and go to the appointment time could not fly by fast enough. All I needed to do was to try to remember how to find the house.
I think I was actually shaking as I rang the doorbell but when Barney opened the door with that smile of his I regained some of my senses.
Meeting Lauren went fine. She was perhaps ten years younger than I, very skinny with long blonde hair and sort of cute but there appeared to be an air of indifference about the whole decorating thing. I think I began to feel much better when she did not look like Rachel Welch.
Barney helped me carry in all the stacks of wallpaper books, paint colors and fabric samples from the car to the dining room table. We went room by room with what I had picked out. Actually I did have a couple of choices for each each room in hopes that something would be right. It was pretty surprising when they agreed to the same things I had picked as my first choice. Maybe I was better at this than I thought. The big hit were the tri-fold screens for each side of the sliding glass doors instead of drapes that are always in the way. No need to tell them that I had no idea at the time how I would make them.
It was decided I would start in a week which would give me time to get things ordered. Barney carried the stuff back out to the car for me and told me I was amazing. Then he told me I forgot something. He informed me that REAL decorators would have asked for a deposit at which point he pulled out a check for $500.00 and said any time I needed more money just let him know. So I guess I now have a real job.
Driving home I must admit the appointment went much better than I expected. Of course it was nice that I was able to put together the designs that they liked but I was really surprised at how well I handled meeting Lauren. What panic I felt before the meeting was more about how I would react to Lauren than worry about the design concepts. There were a couple of reasons why meeting her after all the time Barney and I spent together that made it go smoothly. One was that we did not spend our time together talking about Lauren or Dennis. What kind of a relationship would we have had if we spent all our time bashing the people we were married to? More importantly even though we both joked a lot about going off to a hotel for an afternoon we didn't.
My happy mood did not stay too happy after my arrival home. Dennis had not seen Wes for a couple of hours and had no idea of where the almost nine year old had gone to on his bike. My philosophy was he would come home when he was tired, it got dark or he was injured in some way. Actually it was very easy to look down the street and see his bike, the only one in the neighborhood with a wing and a parachute, laying in the front yard of a house two doors down the street.
That solved he moved on to the basement. I was about to start my lesson in Drywall 101. Dennis had to help his Dad build things growing up in Warner, Oklahoma. Some of the things they built were called apartments and a motel. Notice I am using the term apartments and motel rather loosely. Anyway, he had passed Drywall 101 many years before. My Dad built a fence once out of 2x4's and some sort of wire and a flagstone patio so I did not know much about building things. The only thing I really knew was the time Dennis and I built Wes a really cool L-shaped bunk bed. I think that was when I got the new name, God Dammit, Donna since I never could be in the right place at the right time to hold something in the right manner.
Anyone get the idea that we might not really work too well together? Laying in the basement was a huge stack of 5/8 drywall each sheet weighing 82 pounds that I was supposed to hold up to the ceiling while he put in the screws. Oh, this
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