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“Great. How much?”
She stared.
“
¿Cuánto cuesta esto?
” (How much does this cost?)
She slouched back to her desk, consulting a chart. “Four dollar. Each.”
“Ouch.” This was Michael.
“We'll take them!” I exclaimed, all but throwing my credit card at her.
We made our flight by twelve minutes.
☼ ☼ ☼
This time Jane met us at the airport in Vieques, clearly feeling that we needed a little extra
TLC after our floor trauma.
“We found the tile!” I exclaimed, giving her a quick peck on the cheek.
“Great,” she said, smiling from ear to ear. “But I don't think you're going to need it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Pablo had a brainstorm a couple of days ago. We took all the chipped tiles—there were
boxes and boxes of them—and laid them down on the diagonal with little squares of darker
tile in the corners. It looks great.”
It sounded horrible, but I held my tongue. Her excitement wasn't exactly contagious but
it was clearly genuine and I wasn't about to rain on her parade until I'd seen the finished
product.
It was fabulous.
The corners of every second row of larger tile had been cut away, and much smaller
squares of tile in a contrasting color had been slotted into the open spaces on the diagonal.
If possible I would've asked the workmen to pull up the living room floor and start all
over again based on this new and improved model, but in the interest of preventing apo-
plexy on Michael's part—and mutiny on Jane's—I decided to keep this thought to myself.
Of course, we'd need to cancel our tile order in San Juan, but since we'd paid with our
credit card that could be done with relative ease.
In the meantime, it was hard to believe that the highly-finished rooms we were walking
through today had emerged, under Jane's hawk-eye, from the “bomb site” we'd seen in
photos just six weeks earlier.
She was a magician. Everything was just as we'd hoped. The white-framed doors and
windows popped brightly against the yellow walls, which weren't too pale or (as I'd feared)
too mustardy. The kitchen's poured-concrete counter, though not exactly to my taste, was a
success and certainly durable.
Last, and perhaps best, the bathroom was crisp and sparkling and boasted a view from
the shower straight down to the ocean.
We clucked and fidgeted around the newly-renovated space, though in truth there
wasn't much we could accomplish. Although a few pieces of furniture for the space had
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