to Stain or Not to Stain in #Santa #Fe

I repeated the words, then Bob, Grace and I all said, in unison, as if we were the Greek chorus from Ace Hardware, “NO STAIN.”

         Jesus looked at us and said, “OK, I get stain.”

         We repeated back and forth, “No stain,” to his “OK stain” response for several more minutes until both sides thought everything was perfectly understandable.

       Then, it took more than an hour for Jesus to come up with an estimate of what the job would cost, understandable, since the first bid was $1,000, considerably higher than what we pay Bob ($25/hour).  When we turned pale and loudly gulped, the price immediately went down to $800 (after a brief conversation between Jesus and his newspaper-reading uncle.)   Then we asked what would happen if Jesus didn’t paint the wall  outside the closet near the master bedroom. 

         So we settled on a no-stain, no-bedroom-wall price of $750.  Everybody shook hands, including Grace and the uncle.

         Then Jesus announced that his entire crew would have to leave to pick up equipment.  And the two trucks and the four men disappeared. That was 9 am.