Free Cupid's Confederates by Jeanne Grant Page B

weeks since her mother had been with them, Bett hadn’t often been able to escape. The ceilings were now all washed. Grout sparkled in the bathrooms. Cans of soup were lined up in the cupboard. Everything was put away. Bett couldn’t find a thing, but her mother couldn’t conceivably take on another project that involved scaling heights, acquiring blisters or expending great amounts of elbow grease. Luckily, Bett had intervened in most such instances. Since even the closet corners now reeked of disinfectant, Bett had felt reasonably safe in leaving the house that morning. Her mother couldn’t possibly find anything more strenuous to do than make a peach pie.
    “Mom?” she called absently as she let herself in the front door. Still humming, she took off her boots and made her way to the downstairs bathroom to wash her hands, using the same hand cleaner Zach did, the only product that really worked on grease. Unlike Zach, though, she finished the job with apricot hand cream. Still rubbing it in, she wandered back to the kitchen.
    “Mom?”
    With a slight frown, Bett poured herself a cup of coffee and took a sip as she wandered back out of the kitchen toward her desk. Setting the cup down, she curled up with one leg under her and reached for the week’s receipts for orders of peaches and plums. Three receipts into the pile, Bett reached for the coffee cup, then set it down again. “Mom?”
    The prickling up her spine felt like a mother bird’s instinct of danger to its young. Bett stood up, knowing full well Elizabeth’s Lincoln was in the yard. Her mother generally considered fresh air a trial one had to endure in order to go to and from shopping. Hence, the lady was in the house.
    And the lady was not answering.
    Bett took the stairs two at a time. She peered first into her mother’s bedroom, then her own, then the bathroom. The door at the end of the hall was closed, that spare room that was eventually to be the nursery.
    Bett opened the door, stopped short and swallowed a long, deep breath.
    Her mother was wearing her pink tennis shoes, aqua pedal pushers and an orange bandanna. A ladder was perched in the middle of the floor, surrounded by tarps and old sheets. A jumble of rollers and paintbrushes dripped paint. Mint-green paint. Three gallons of it.
    “Brittany! How could you come in here! I had planned this to be a total surprise!” Elizabeth glared at her daughter in comic dismay, though somewhere in those doe-soft eyes was a bouncing anticipation of Bett’s sure response.
    Bett, for the moment, couldn’t give it. “Mom.” She rushed forward as Elizabeth came down the last two steps of the teetery ladder. “What are you doing? ”
    “You can see what I’m doing, silly one. Honestly, Brittany, I knew you had this room in mind for a baby sooner or later, and I thought this was one way I could pay you and Zach back. Zach just will not take any money from me, and here I am staying in your house, eating your food…” Elizabeth rubbed the knuckles of both hands into the small of her back, a gesture that indicated how physically difficult such a project was for her. “Aren’t you pleased?” she asked suddenly, the smile on her face fading as she noted Bett’s stillness.
    Pleased? If she’d known her mother was using the most rickety ladder on the farm, she would have been developing ulcers. “Mom. I don’t want you doing anything like this—”
    “I know that. What does that have to do with anything? Brittany?” Elizabeth’s face rapidly took on an unsure look. “You don’t like the color?”
    Bett hated the color, but that was neither here nor there. She felt possessive about this room. Her mother could have absolutely anything Bett had, but this room had been a private thing for Bett from the instant she and Zach had made plans for the house. She and Zach were going to do it together, when it was time for the baby. A gentle cream color for the walls, with murals of kittens and raccoons and