The Fixer Upper

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, crossing my arms across my chest. “Besides defacing my property?”

  Jimmy gestured with his brush at his handiwork. “I was over at the hardware store this morning, and I got to thinking about Birdsong. I’ve driven back and forth past this house at least twice a day for the past twenty years, and every time I pass it, I think about what a beautiful place this could be if it was fixed up. You know I just live up the block, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  He pointed to his right. “The little brick Colonial Revival. Six houses down. First house I ever bought. I lost it in my first divorce, but then, when Shirlene hooked herself a rich doctor and moved out to the country club, I managed to buy it back. Two marriages and two divorces later, I’m still hanging on to the place.”

  “You’ve been married and divorced three times?” I asked incredulously.

  “Four, if you count good ol’ LaDonna.” He was opening another can of paint. This one was an acid green. “Oh hell,” he said, putting the lid back on. “That won’t work. Looks like baby puke.”

  “I thought you wanted me to paint the house white,” I said.

  “Change of plans. White’s boring. Dill pickle, this is called,” Jimmy said. “Stupid name for a paint, you ask me. I think I’d like it better if we cut it twenty-five percent with white.”

  “We?”

  “Just a figure of speech.”

  “Back to your marriage record,” I said, starting to enjoy myself despite my previous funk. “Why wouldn’t I count good ol’ LaDonna?”

  “That one was a shotgun wedding. Her daddy caught us in the backseat of my Camaro, out at the reservoir. I was seventeen, but ol’ LaDonna was eighteen.”

  “You got married at seventeen? Were you still in high school?”

  “Technically,” he said. “We moved into a double-wide out at my granny’s farm, and I went to summer school so I could graduate early. Her daddy got me a job at the bedspread mill. At the time it was durned good money. For a seventeen-year-old.”

  I leaned up against one of the porch columns. “Then what happened?”

  “I got laid off at the mill, and LaDonna got laid by some dude she met at a dance at the VFW. No hard feelings though. I even let her have the double-wide.”

  “You’re quite a guy, Jimmy Maynard,” I said.

  He put his hand on my arm, and I shivered involuntarily. “Oh, darlin’,” he drawled, with that slow, deadly smile that had obviously affected many a woman in Guthrie, Georgia. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  I gave him a long, searching look. He flashed the grin, full force. I think he thought I’d drop my panties right there.

  I shook my head. “You’re good. But it won’t work on me. You forget, I’m not from here. Anyway, it’s a waste of time expending all that charm on me. I’m going to get this old house fixed up, and sold, and then I’m outta here. Two months tops.”

  He looked hurt. “Why? You don’t like me? Let me guess. You think I’m too old for you? Just how old do you think I am, anyway?”

  “It’s not that,” I said quickly. I flashed back to what my roommate had said about my affinity for older men. She was wrong. Dead wrong. Wasn’t she?

  “What is it then?” he persisted. “Ah, hell. Don’t tell me. I bet you came down here to nurse a broken heart.”

  “That’s not it,” I said sharply. “I told you already, I’m down here on business, plain and simple. I’m really not in the market for complications.”

  “Complications?” he hooted. “Anybody who knows me can tell you, I am the least complicated man on this planet. I’ll tell you straight up who I am. I like my sippin’ whiskey old, my cars fast, and my women young. Oh yeah. Money. I like money. You see, Dempsey Killebrew? With me, what you see is what you get. Ain’t that refreshing? No bullshit. No complications. Now, what about it?”

  “What about what?”

  “You and me. Tonight. Some dinner. Some drinks. Some laughs. I promise, it’ll be strictly physical. And I’ll still respect you in the morning.” He gave me a broad, endearing wink.

  “Sorry,” I told him. “I already have plans for tonight.”

  His face fell. “With who? Don’t tell me you’re seeing little old Tee Berryhill again. What? You got a thing for lawyers?”

  My face flushed at the mention of Tee. We’d had one dinner—definitely not a date. His father did the cooking. Did everybody in town know my business already?

  “I’m staying in tonight,” I told Jimmy. “Just me and the heat gun. It’s going to be hot, and it’s going to be messy.”

  I left him standing on the porch, paintbrush in hand.

  22

  I hadn’t lied when I told Jimmy Maynard about my plans for the evening. Still smarting from Alex’s phone call, I decided the best way to work out my worries was with a project.

  I cleared all the furniture out of the kitchen, stacking the chairs on top of the table, which I’d dragged into the dining room.

  For a moment, I stood looking down at the ugly green floor, trying to figure out where to start. The room reminded me of an enormous, scummy pond. The only way to empty it, I decided, was bucket by bucket, or in this case, square by square.

  At my request, Bobby had left me a wooden fruit crate full of tools he’d gathered from Birdsong’s basement and toolshed. I dug out a measuring tape and measured the room. It was exactly fifteen by twenty. The tiles themselves were eight-inch squares. By my quick computations, there were 630 tiles begging to be demolished.

  The old linoleum tiles were worn and brittle and came up relatively easily with the aid of the knife-edged pry bar Bobby had lent me. Each time I whacked the head of the pry bar with the mallet, the sensation filled me with malicious delight. By eight o’clock that night, I’d filled two heavy-duty plastic trash bags with the discarded tiles. I was elated when I dumped the last tile into the last bag. Piece of cake, I decided. At this rate, I might have the entire kitchen rehabbed within a week. And if Bobby could match my pace, I would have Birdsong spiffed up and sold in half the time Mitch and I had allotted. Soon, I thought, I would be seeing Guthrie in my rearview mirror. By April, I would be seeing the cherry blossoms in bloom around the tidal basin.

  Cheered by this thought, I made quick work of dragging the bags of discarded tiles outside to the garbage cans. But when I came back inside, it was to find Ella Kate standing in the middle of the kitchen, a look of fury on her face.

  “What’s all this?” she demanded. “Look at the mess you’ve made here. What do you think you’re doing to my floor?”

  Something in me snapped.

  “It’s not your floor,” I said. “I’m sorry, Ella Kate, but that’s the truth. Norbert left the house to my father, and he has asked me to get it ready to be sold. That’s what I intend to do.”

  “You Killebrews!” She bit the words out. “Think you know everything. Think you run the world.” She stomped out of the room, slamming behind her the door to the hallway.

  I vowed once again to get to the bottom of Ella Kate’s feud with my father. Later. Right now, I had a floor to demolish.

  I plugged in the heat gun and started to work. If the tiles had come up with relative ease, the stubborn black adhesive was a whole different ball game. I had to aim the heat gun inches from the mastic with my left hand, use the heat to soften it, and after precisely two minutes, quickly scrape up the goo with my right hand before it had time to harden again into a seemingly impregnable lump.

  In an hour’s time, I had barely managed to scrape clean a two-foot square of floor. My wrists were aching, and I’d somehow burned a dimesize spot on my right thumb. Waves of depression and self-pity washed over me. I’d graduated from undergrad school second in my class, been editor of the law review in law school. I’d landed a prestigious job with the most influential lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. But now, from the looks of things, I might well spend the rest of my fleeting youth on my hands and knee
s on the floor of a decrepit old house in a one-horse town in Mudflap, Georgia.

  I flopped down on my back and stared up at the ceiling. The sight of water stains and peeling plaster did little to dispel the cloud of gloom hovering over me.

  Stop it! I told myself fiercely. It was just a kitchen floor. Just three hundred square feet. Before tonight, I’d never so much as hammered a nail in place. And now, in just a few short hours, I’d already pried up an entire roomful of linoleum.

  Groaning, I rolled myself to my feet. I brewed a strong pot of coffee and went back to work.

  After plugging in my iPod, I decided to attack the floor the same way I’d attacked a seemingly impossible workload in law school. I divided the task into manageable chunks. Found a way to do the job more efficiently.

  At midnight, when I’d worked my way exactly halfway through the floor, I stood up, did some yoga stretches, and decided to take a short break. I’d gotten hot and sweaty from proximity to the heat gun. I opened the kitchen door, and after a brief hesitation, stepped outside onto the back porch.

  Sinking down on the top step, I let the cool night air wash over me, breathing in deep lungsful of some sweet-smelling floral scent. Looking around I noticed for the first time that a thick green vine had wrapped its way around the porch posts, and the waxy, white, star-shaped flowers seemed to be the source of the perfume.

  I wondered idly what the name of the flower was. In fact, I wondered what the names of most of the plants in the overgrown yard were. I plucked one of the flowers, sniffed, and tucked it into the pocket of my bib overalls. Maybe, I thought, Tee Berryhill could name the flower for me.

  Or maybe it didn’t really matter. As I’d already made clear to Jimmy Maynard, my stay in Guthrie was business, not pleasure. And it was time I got back to business.

  “Drunk! Eight o’clock in the morning, and she’s passed out dead drunk on the floor.”

  Ella Kate’s voice dripped contempt. I lifted my head from my outstretched arms, rolled to my left, and looked up. She and Bobby Livesey stood looking down at me.

  “Eight o’ clock!” I tried to roll over, but my muscles screamed a protest. I looked around the room. Sunlight made warm butter yellow splashes on the wooden floor around me.

  Wood. My kitchen floor was now decidedly wood. I gingerly inched my way up to a sitting position. The better to survey my night’s work.

  “Dempsey!” Bobby said, giving me a hand and hauling me to my feet. “I don’t know how you did it, but you sure did hit this floor a lick last night.”

  I yawned. “Sure did,” I said sleepily.

  “Man!” he said admiringly. “I thought it was gonna look good, but I didn’t know it was gonna look this good.”

  “Not bad, huh?” I asked.

  The floor was far from perfect. In the light of day I could see numerous specks of mastic still clinging stubbornly to the wood. There were gouge marks in the wood, and singe marks too, where I’d gotten carried away with the chisel or the heat gun, but all in all, I was amazed by what I’d accomplished in one night.

  “I liked the linoleum better,” Ella Kate said with a sniff. “Olivia picked that tile out herself. Sent all the way to Atlanta to get it. Everybody knows linoleum is what you put on a kitchen floor.”

  Bobby and I exchanged knowing looks.

  “I wasn’t able to get everything up,” I told Bobby. I held out my mangled fingertips. “As it was, I couldn’t get into the tight corners with that pry bar. I must have ruined three or four kitchen knives.”

  “You done great,” Bobby said, walking all around the room.

  “What’s next?” I asked eagerly.

  “Drum sander,” Bobby said. “I can rent one over at the Home Depot tomorrow. I got a helper coming over this morning. We’re gonna pull up all that slate on the roof and try to get the new underlayment down before another hard rain. Maybe next week, when the roof’s done, I can get this floor knocked out.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head emphatically. “Not next week. I’m on a roll. I’ll drive over to Home Depot myself and rent the sander. You’ll have to show me how to use it, though.”

  “Oh no, no, no,” Bobby said, laughing. “I know you think you’re tough. In fact, you’re mighty tough. But you don’t want to be messing around with a drum sander. You got to keep working it over the floor, nice and even. And it ain’t as easy as it looks. That thing is heavy as a horse, and it’s got a kick like a mule. I see where you started stripping the wallpaper in the front room. That’d be a good thing for you to do. Get that wallpaper off. Or pick out the color you want the outside of the house painted. I like that shade of green Jimmy Maynard painted on the right side of the door. You just leave the drum sander to Bobby.”

  I looked at him. Raised one eyebrow. He shook his head and held up his hands in a gesture of defeat.

  “You’re a Dempsey, all right,” he said. “Hardheaded. All them Dempseys hardheaded. I don’t guess you’re any different. Come on, then. A drum sander won’t fit in the Catfish. We’ll take my truck.”

  In fact, we rented a drum sander and a corner sander at the Home Depot in Macon.

  We stopped at a hot-dog stand that Bobby knew about, the Nu-Way, which he said was famous for its dogs, split open, grilled, and served on griddled hamburger buns with a spicy chili sauce. The day had gotten warm, hot even, so we sat on the flipped-down tailgate of Bobby’s truck and had an impromptu picnic, washing the dogs down with icy Styrofoam cups of root beer. We ate in companionable silence, and when I’d eaten every bite of my hot dogs, I embarrassed myself with a tiny, unavoidable belch.

  “Whoa!” I said, covering my mouth with a crumpled napkin. “Excuse me.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Bobby said. “You ready to get back to work?”

  “In a minute,” I said, leaning back on my elbows and turning my face up to the sun. It felt so good to be warm, and comfortable, with a belly full of food. Spring came much earlier to this part of Georgia, I decided. The dogwoods that lined the streets of Guthrie were already fully budded out, and waves of pink, white, and coral azaleas made bright splashes of color in nearly every yard I’d seen. This time of year in Washington, I’d still be wearing a winter coat.

  I hopped off the tailgate, did a couple of deep yoga stretches, and gathered up the grease-spattered paper sacks from our food. “Now then,” I told Bobby. “Back to work.”

  The drum sander was, as Bobby had informed me, bulky and tricky to maneuver. He fitted me out with a pair of plastic goggles and a dust mask, and when I got a look at my reflection in the kitchen window, I looked like some kind of giant mutant science fiction insect.

  “Just keep it moving evenly over the floor,” Bobby told me, shouting to be heard above the racket the sander made. “Don’t stay too long in one place either, or you’ll dig a hole in the floor. Nice, even, sweeping motions. That’s what you want with a drum sander.”

  With Bobby’s help, I sealed off the kitchen from the rest of the house with thick plastic sheeting, and then went to work. I spent all day that day, and the next, working on the kitchen floor, becoming totally obsessed with achieving wood-floor perfection, working through three different grades of sandpaper.

  At one point Saturday morning, Tee Berryhill dropped by. He took a step backward when I answered the doorbell.

  “Lord have mercy, Dempsey,” he said. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

  I looked down at my Carrharts, which I’d finally broken in with three consecutive washings. My clothing, my shoes, my hair, in fact, every inch of exposed skin on me was covered with a thick film of sawdust. He reached out and gingerly flicked a spot of sawdust from my cheek.

  “I’m refinishing the kitchen floor,” I reported happily. “No more bile green linoleum.”

  His eyes strayed from me to the contrasting swatches of green on either side of the front door.

  “What’s with the paint?” he asked.

  “Oh. I’m, uh, trying out colors.”

&n
bsp; “I like this one, on the left,” he said promptly. “Hey, I’ve been trying to reach you for the past two days. I even dropped by, but you were out. Did Ella Kate tell you I stopped by?”

  “No,” I said. “But that doesn’t surprise me. We’ve had words, she and I.”

  “Anyway,” Tee went on, “I know it’ll seem like last minute, but there’s a Middle Georgia Bar Association dinner tonight at the country club. I was hoping you’d go with me. It’s not a formal or anything, but it would give you a chance to meet some local folks. I think you’d have a good time.”

  He smiled winningly, like a schoolboy presenting his teacher with an apple. “Oh,” I said. “That’s so sweet, Tee. I’d love to go.”

  “Good,” he said. “Dinner’s at eight. Cocktails at seven—”

  “But I can’t go,” I said. “My floor. I’m right in the middle of it.”

  “Take a break,” he urged. “The floor will be there when you get back.”

  “Sorry,” I told him. “Maybe next time.”

  Ella Kate came and went as I worked, stepping disdainfully over the piles of sawdust I’d swept up, sniffing and muttering dire warnings about how I was ruining what had been a perfectly good kitchen.

  I ignored her comments and attacked the sawdust with Bobby’s borrowed Shop-Vac. I had a schedule to keep.

  Once I’d achieved a satin-smooth floor (or nearly smooth—with the exception of the unavoidable gouged places), I was in a fever to see the project through to completion.

  “What’s next?” I’d asked as we loaded the sanders in the truck for the return trip to Home Depot late Saturday.

  “We put down good thick paper on that pretty floor of yours, and leave it down till we’re done with everything else,” Bobby said. “Last thing we do, we apply the finish. Guess you need to decide how you want it to look. Do you want a high-gloss finish? Or more of a matte, natural look?”

  “Matte,” I said promptly. “Why can’t I put the finish down now? I’m dying to see how it’ll look, now that I’m this close. I could start tonight. I bet it’d be dry by morning.”