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10/18/2009 3:34 AM

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Here's a funny story about a girl who was a lawyer working for a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. The lobbyist gets arrested in a case of bribing a congressman and taking him on golf vacations, and so on.

So far, it sounds like another Jack Abramov exposé, but this one, "The Fixer Upper" by Mary Kay Andrews, is fiction. The heroine is innocent, but nobody wants to believe her. Her father exiles her to a small town in Georgia so that she will "do something useful," and do a little work for him. It seems his great uncle has died and left him the old family plantation house.

He thinks his daughter can just go down there and fix it up a little so he can sell it for a big price. After all, he says, it was "the biggest, fanciest house in town." He's been told it's become a little rundown, though, but he thinks his daughter can take care of that in about a month.

"You go down to Georgia. Get yourself settled in the house, then get busy fixing it up. I'll set you up with a credit card to buy supplies and food and whatever. Shouldn't take you more than a month or two to whip the place into shape, right? Then we'll flip the house and split the profits."

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Well, she has nowhere else to go, especially since the FBI is on her track. She goes to Georgia, but has trouble finding the house, which after all is one of those big ones with pillars on the front porch and all. She has to drive past it several times before she spots a cracked concrete driveway along the sidewalk because the front yard is so overgrown it covers the house, too.

Finally, she gets into the house. "The interior wasn't much of an improvement over the exterior. The large room before me was the foyer, although that seemed too grand a word for this dump. A single bare light bulb dangled from an extension cord that snaked its way up a wall with faded brocade-patterned wallpaper and into the center of an elaborate plaster ceiling medallion. The rest of the ceiling's plaster either hung in clumps or lay in chunks on the floor of what had once been an elegant center entrance hall."

After loading up on cleaning supplies, she scrubbed down the front porch and washed the eight tall front windows facing it. This took her about half a day, and this was when I started realizing that the story was getting more and more fictional. At least I know it would have taken me longer than that.

The next thing is that a contractor shows up at her door - the roof needs repairing, the wiring needs to be redone, the water lines need to be repaired, the kitchen is a mess, etc. "When can you start?" she asks. "Tomorrow," he says. THE NEXT DAY? I didn't believe that one for a minute.

So, anyway, the next day she and the contractor start examining the kitchen. The floor is covered with cracked, green, dirty linoleum tiles, but the contractor scrapes one up and says there is a beautiful heart pine floor under them. The heroine volunteers to remove them. And, indeed, prying them up takes only a few hours.

The next step, of course, is sanding. Her contractor rents a drum sander and gives her instructions: "Just keep it moving evenly over the floor. Don't stay too long in one place, or you'll dig a hole in the floor. Nice, even sweeping, motions."

I've heard that one before. In fact, I did a sanding job once in my own front hall, and received the same instructions. In the book it only took a short time, again. In my case, it took me three months. Huh.

But at least the FBI wasn't looking for me at the time.

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