Page 1 of August
CHAPTER 1
Working in New Orleans during the summer, when her job involved being outside at times, was one way to test Myra’s patience. Her crew today consisted of four of her regulars and two of the temps, whom she sometimes called for a big job or one that needed to be done faster for them to come in at budget. That was always her goal. She wasn’t the kind of contractor who tried to milk clients for every dime they had just to make more money for herself. She had more integrity than that. She took pride in the work her company did, and yes, she wanted and needed to make money on the jobs, but she never gouged her clients just to make a quick buck.
Today, she and her team were working on a screened-in porch in the Garden District. Over the years, she hadn’t worked on many homes in this very nice part of town. She’d grown up in New Orleans and had chosen to spend most of her company’s time helping people in the not-as-nice parts of town, and she’d spent some time working in the Ninth Ward at her previous company post-Katrina. Everyone who had been alive at the time had heard of the damage there and the levees breaking. She had been younger then, of course. Myra had gotten her job as an intern in construction management. She had been the first person in her family to go to school. Her uncle Henry had his own sandwich shop, and a lot of the family worked there or in food service around the city because they’d grown up in it, but Myra had been more interested in construction and had managed to get into a tough program for management.
That internship had been a great experience for her, and it had come at both the best and worst time for her city. Hurricane Katrina had torn a lot of it apart, but there had been other hurricanes since. While she had worked for someone else, she had had no say in what jobs they took, but now thatshe owned her own company, she spent at least some time each month working on repairing homes damaged by those hurricanes, and she didn’t charge crazy amounts of money to do it. In her opinion, if she sometimes did things at cost for a few people, they’d come back later or refer others to Myra’s business, and that was what kept her around.
The screened-in porch wasn’t one of those jobs, though. Thanks to her friendship with Melinda and Kyle, who lived in the Garden District, she had gotten several referrals here. After completing the work on the house that Kyle had inherited from her grandmother, both Melinda and Kyle had recommended Myra to others who lived here because they’d been happy with how she had managed to combine the past and history of their house with the modernity of the present.
This job had come at the last minute, which was why she had such a large crew here today. The client had planned on adding on to their house the following year, but when an elderly relative got sick and needed to move into the house sooner than planned, the owners had requested Myra and her team get the work done by the beginning of August. Apparently, the woman loved sitting outside in her backyard in her current house, so they wanted to make sure that she could do that here as well, and they wanted the porch screened-in so that she could do so day and night without worrying about the mosquitos or any other pests that made their home in Louisiana during the summer months.
Myra was proud of the work they had done so far. One more day or so, and they would be finished. It would’ve been done already, but she had talked the client into getting windows as well as screens. This would allow them to have the screens and the breeze when they opened the windows, and it would offer some extra protection for the furniture when it rained or worse than rained, which was common around here. They weren’t glass windows and were incredibly cost-effective because everyone who had screened-in porches forgot to cover furniture or other items out there at least once a year right before it rained, ending up regretting it, and hersuggestion would help prevent rain damage in the structure as well and save them money on dealing with mold later.
Finished with her work for the day, Myra left her crew there to clean up and went home for a quick shower. Once done, she changed into clean clothes and headed to the Quarter, where she was meeting Melinda to talk about the office Melinda was surprising her fiancée, Kyle, with. Stopping off at her uncle’s shop first, she picked up her favorite Po-Boy, said hello to her cousin Henry Jr., and made her way to the NOLA Guides office.
“Are you two actually still talking about this office thing or just using it as an excuse to hang out?” Jill asked when Myra walked into the back office.
“A little of both,” Melinda replied with a smile. “Want to go on up?” she asked Myra.
Melinda had lived in the apartment right above the tour guide company up until meeting Kyle. Kyle had been a client first, but Melinda had moved in not long after, and the three of them had worked on updating the Garden District house together. Now, Myra considered them both, as well as Jill and some others, her friends as a result, and that was important to her because she was forty years old and hadn’t had many friends prior to meeting this group. Making new friends was already hard as an adult, and typically, people made friends at work, but that was a challenge for Myra because she owned the company, so all of her would-be friends were also her employees. Friday night drinks, where she bought everyone a round, sipped her beer, and headed out early, were fine, but she wouldn’t cross any of those lines. Normally, she wouldn’t even make friends with the clients, but Melinda and Kyle had been so great to work with, and when the work had continued for several months because they kept finding something else to update or fix, it had happened without her noticing, really.
Most of these women she had come to be friends with were quite a bit younger than her. She thought Jill was around twenty-six. Melinda was the same age, and Kyle was thirty-one. Bridgette was only about twenty-eight, but her fiancée,Monica, was Myra’s age, at least, and she had gone through a divorce as well. Asher was thirty-seven, while her girlfriend, Linden, was thirty-five. Rory was almost the youngest of them all, in her early twenties, so Myra and she didn’t have much in common, but Rory was very sweet and clearly in love with her girlfriend, Logan, whom she talked about all the time at NOLA Guides. Myra had spent a little time with all of them at this point.
Enid and her new girlfriend, Caroline, were at NOLA Guides often, too. Enid worked at the office part-time, and Caroline was a student. Myra had spent a little time with them at the office or at the bar where they all sometimes hung out, but she didn’t talk to them much one-on-one. Caroline was only twenty-one, so she reminded Myra more of her younger cousins than anything else. Since Enid worked at the office, though, Myra had interacted with her and Caroline more than with Sophie and Bryce, who were also in this ever-expanding friend group. Bryce lived in Tennessee, so she and Sophie were dating long-distance. Bryce was probably the person she was the least connected to as a result, but Sophie was a close second. Still, they had both been very nice to Myra, and she enjoyed having a group of women who were into women in her life for the first time in a while. It helped with the loneliness she had felt since her divorce and the loss of the friends she’d had throughout her marriage.
“Okay. So, Ky mentioned something new the other day, and I don’t know if we can make it happen now,” Melinda said once they were upstairs in the apartment, sitting on the sofa.
“What’s that?” Myra asked.
“She wants this recliner.” Melinda pulled out her phone to show her. “I have a link for it. I can buy it; that’s not the problem. But with the room not being overly large, I think we would have to get rid of the built-in bookshelves you were going to build to make room for it. It could go in front of them, but it would block the shelves behind it. I measured this morning. I worry it would look weird.” She held up thephone to Myra. “What do you think?”
Myra scrolled down to the chair’s measurements and thought about how it might look once reclined. Melinda was right: it would lean back into the shelves Myra was going to custom-build for the office unless they pulled the chair out, and then, it would run into the open door.
“There’s that linen closet behind the office,” she said, handing the phone back to Melinda. “We could knock down that wall between them to push the shelves back about three to four feet. I’d have to take a look at the plans to get the real measurements.”
“The linen closet?” Melinda asked.
“There’s space in the guest room for me to add a new one. It would be smaller, but you have storage in the other closet we added when we updated the main bedroom.”
“True,” Melinda replied. “Could that still be done while we’re on our honeymoon? It’s more work… I just still want this to be a surprise for her.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem. There’s nothing load-bearing in there, so it’s just knocking it down. I might be able to save some of it and make it a bit smaller to still get you the chairandthe bookshelves, or I can also draw up a couple of different versions of the shelves for you. Maybe you’d like a different configuration, and we keep the closet. The bigger question is, how are you going to keep Kyle from buying the chair for herself now so it’s still a surprise?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m going to buy it for her for her birthday or maybe for Christmas; I haven’t decided yet. She’s spent a month looking up furniture she wants and finally found something she likes, so I don’t want her to not have it until the wedding, but the rest of the space will be a surprise. My soon-to-be wife is getting more and more successful by the day, and I want her to have a real office. She has one employee now, but she’s thinking about a second and maybe another one.”
Myra looked around the apartment then and had an idea she hadn’t thought of before. She wasn’t sure why it hadn’t hit her earlier, but maybe it was because the apartment wassomeplace where she and Melinda only met to keep the plans for the office a secret from Kyle, not because she had ever really considered the apartment at all beyond that.
“Have you thought about this place?”
“What about it?”
“Well, we’d be building Kyle a home office, but she’s going to have employees.”
“The one employee she has now is in Portland, so she doesn’t come to the office or anything,” Melinda replied. “I assume she’ll probably keep hiring remotely.”
“But would Kyle ever want to have an office outside of the house? If she adds other employees, would they need a place to sit? Or is sheonlyhiring remotely?” Myra asked.
“You know, I don’t know that we’ve talked about that officially,” Melinda replied, looking around, too, now. “This isn’t technically my building. The owner of NOLA Guides left me the business, but she still owns the building. I know I don’t live up here anymore, but I’ve always expected her to rent this out to someone else. She’s losing money by just leaving it up here vacant like this. I mean, I love it because I can use it for secret meetings about my future wife’s home office, but it’s not really mine to make over.”
