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She sometimes got the feeling that someone wanted her days to be numbered. It wasn’t often, and it wasn’t always very obvious things. Just...little things. Just a nagging feeling, a prickly sense that made the little hairs on the nape of her neck stand up from time to time. She’d felt it often in her life, especially in her career in the CIA and as a freelance assassin, when she’d had too many close calls to count.
Well, she had the last laugh. She was alive and kicking and she damn well intended to stay that way.
She rubbed her rather round belly and studied the walls around her. Oh, this was going to be a lovely room for a nursery...if it wasn’t for the damn wallpaper. She had no idea if the previous owners were color blind or had an odd sense of humour, but nevertheless it was the most garish plaid she had ever seen in her life, a clashing work of puke green and bright orange and turquoise blue and really, if the rest of their place hadn’t been so lovely this room very well could have been a deal breaker.
And today, it was coming down.
Mary looked over at John. “So we’re removing it all and then slapping on paint and then your artist friend is going to paint some lovely mural type paintings for our daughter, right?” she asked.
He nodded, opening up a can of the solution they were going to use to remove the wallpaper. “Yup. We just have to put this stuff on the walls, I believe, and then we can scrape this blasphemous paper off and then the wall should be underneath, and then it’s a few layers of primer and we’re all set for Hilda.”
“We’ve got our work cut out for us, then,” Mary said with a nod.
“You should sit this out, you know,” he said.
Mary waved him off. “It’s fine. I’ll use the brush with the long handle. You pour it into the tub thingy and I’ll slap it onto the wall.”
John gave her a small grin and shook his head. “Why can’t you take things easy?”
“Because taking things easy leaves me bored,” she said with a grin of her own. “Tell you what. Once I’ve slathered the walls, then I’ll lay down. Deal?”
“Deal,” he said. He opened up the tin with the solution and poured it into the container they were going to dip the brush in, and then Mary put the roller brush in and coated the roller in the solution and put it onto the wall. “You’re a pro.”
“Yes, I am,” she said.
“You know, apparently, in Victorian era times they used to have arsenic in the wallpaper,” John said, watching her.
“Oh?” Mary said, feeling the hair on the back of her neck tingle as she paused in her actions and turned to face her husband.
He nodded. “Yeah. People used to drop dead from poisoning from the levels of arsenic in the walls. I mean, they didn’t know what we know now, but it was a hazard for a long time.”
“I see,” she said. Then she started moving her brush again as the tingling at the back of her neck went away. “Good thing this place was built in the 1970s and not the 1870s.”
“Yeah. All we have to worry about is lead paint,” John said with a laugh.
“Don’t you dare joke,” Mary said, shooting him a glare before shaking her head. She swore, her husband had a morbid sense of humor. Must come with being a doctor, she supposed. She wondered what kind of dad jokes she had to look forward in the hopefully long future they had together.