Orange You Sorry? - The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House - page 73

“All part of the service,” he said.
But the conversation went downhill from there.
In response to my idle question, “How's everything?” he launched into a tirade about
some guests he'd quarreled with earlier that day.
“The woman actually complained about insects !” he moaned. “I told her if she doesn't
like bugs she's in the wrong place.”
Hmm. If there was one thing I'd learned from my days as a hotel concierge, it was that
you should always treat guests as if they were, uh, guests.
“Maybe no one warned her,” Michael suggested. “The mosquitoes can get pretty fierce
down here.”
But Rod wasn't having it.
“I dropped off a can of bug spray, but she said she didn't like covering herself with
chemicals. I felt like spraying it in her face.”
It was beginning to dawn on me that Rod wasn't a kinder, gentler version of Daniel
after all.
We arrived at the house. After watching us wrangle our suitcases up the back steps (and
pointedly not offering to help), Rod unlocked the door and stood aside for us to enter.
Everything was more or less the way we'd left it in February. The only change was that
the walls had been painted the wrong color.
I walked through all three upstairs rooms before commenting, determined to make sure
I had my facts straight. Not that the facts were particularly difficult to comprehend—the
walls had been painted light orange instead of yellow.
Back in the great room, Rod was standing at the glass doors gazing down towards the
ocean.
“This isn't the color we chose,” I blurted out.
“Yes, it is,” he said without turning around.
Michael spoke up.
“Actually the color we chose was yellow. This isn't.”
Rod turned towards us now, his face flushed.
“This is the color the hardware store said you chose. That's all I know.”
I couldn't help wondering how many times he'd rehearsed this little speech.
“But I actually painted our color on the wall,” I said, pointing to the wall that had previ-
ously boasted a patch of my favorite yellow but was now painted the color of orange sher-
bet. “I registered the color at Nales . I even left the can of paint with the label on it so there
wouldn't be any mix-ups. I'm not sure what else I could have done except paint it myself.”
Rod sighed dramatically and looked around the room.
“I like the color,” he said as if that made all the difference.