Tina had offered to help when she got wind that the third day had been particularly chaotic, but Bette assured her that “everything is under control, baby.”  She wanted to surprise Tina when it all came together, after all the lights had gone up.

Tina could hear crewmen shouting in the background as they spoke on the phone, with one woman’s voice rising above the rest cursing bitterly in Italian.

“Really honey?” she asked Bette drily.

They heard something crash in the kitchen area.  “You sure we won’t need to do another remodel when everyone’s done over there baby?,” Tina asked in jest, to try to keep Bette’s spirits up.  She wasn’t worried that Bette would stress out about something like crashing equipment, but was worried about how Bette was faring, physically.

As the whole project wound down, she and Bette had ceased to be bothered by the sound of crashes, drops, nicks on walls, and other things that had initially caused them to jump whenever they’d heard something crash, or noticed a dent in the wall.  As the contractor would say calmly whenever Tina or Bette would call, agitated, “We can fix that!”

Indeed, everything could be painted over, smoothened, or redone quickly.  They’d become regulars at the hardware store, and Bette had become quite expert in mixing the various types of paint that she’d selected for the various rooms and spaces. 

As the reconstruction project wore on, Bette had begun to keep sets of overalls at the construction site, no longer put off by having to change in a barely walled off area that she’d had set up in the office space just for that purpose.  There had been countless times when she’d been called away from a meeting by the contractor, asking her to come by and mix “a few more batches of paint because we ran out of that particular color for the room we’re working on.”  So the overalls were necessary. He’d given up trying to have his in-house paint expert mix it.  Bette always complained something was off, and she’d ended up mixing a batch anyway. 

So off she’d go whenever the contractor called with an emergency, with either Mark or George shaking their heads as they watched her retreating (sexy) figure.  George had remarked in a teasing voice once, “I’m willing to bet that guy is the only man in this whole world who can make you drop whatever you’re doing and come running whenever he calls.”