The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  Libby must have once again guessed his thoughts, because she chuckled. “Ginger ale in champagne flutes,” she explained. “It’s the way we celebrate big events. Want to join us in a toast?” As soon as the invitation was out, she appeared startled. Her cheeks darkened slightly, although that could have just been an illusion caused by the awning’s shadow. “It was so nice of you to walk us home, sharing your umbrella and all,” she added, justifying her hospitality.

  If he was smart, he’d say no. He remembered all the reasons he wasn’t supposed to think about Libby Kimmelman as anyone other than a school administrator who could change his son’s life—and the likely existence of a husband was the most important reason. She wasn’t wearing a wedding band, he noticed as he glimpsed her left hand, but nowadays that didn’t mean much.

  Yet this building, this magnificent old prewar with its rococo facade…Damn, but he’d love to see what her apartment looked like. “Sure,” he said. “How about it, Eric? You want some ginger ale in a champagne flute?”

  “What’s a champagne flute?” Eric asked.

  “A fancy glass.”

  Eric considered for about a second. “I like ginger ale,” he informed Libby.

  She smiled tentatively, as if she wasn’t quite thrilled about the way things were turning out. If Ned changed his mind and declined the invitation, would Eric fare better in his application?

  The hell with it. He wanted to get inside this building. And she was right—it had been mighty nice of him to walk her home.

  They entered the building together, Ned carefully folding his umbrella shut to avoid offending her superstitions. A bored doorman in a navy blue topcoat and hat smiled and nodded mechanically at Libby, gave Ned a questioning stare and then went back to the magazine he was flipping through. “Let me just check my mail,” she asked, ducking into a room off the lobby. Ned watched her fumble with her key for a minute before she finally inserted it in the narrow door and pulled it open. Several envelopes spilled to the floor. He considered entering the mail room to help her gather the letters, but thought she might read too much into his chivalry. So he remained where he was and let her scoop them up. She stuffed them into a side pocket of her briefcase, straightened and shoved her hair back. It seemed to have doubled in volume during her walk home. The rain had made it thick with waves and curls, and droplets glistened as if someone had spread a net of diamonds over it.

  They moved as a group to the elevators, pressed the button and piled into the car. The lobby hadn’t been too unusual—a floor of black and white marble tiles in a checkerboard pattern, black marble accents on the walls, bronze sconces that produced a little less light than he deemed safe in an apartment lobby. But the elevator was something else. It was paneled, the wood polished to a high sheen and trimmed with bright brass fittings. The buttons on the control panel appeared fairly new—no numbers worn off—but they were dark tortoise shell, a classy touch.

  “The apartment’s probably a mess,” Libby apologized as they rode up. “Things are usually chaotic in the morning when we’re rushing around, and—”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure our place is worse.”

  “Mrs. Karpinsky makes me pick up all my stuff,” Eric complained.

  “Good woman. She’s worth every penny I pay her.” Even if she smelled like oatmeal, Ned added silently.

  The elevator bumped to a halt and they emerged. The air had a familiar, pleasant scent. Clean laundry, Ned identified it. A few years ago, he wouldn’t have recognized that dryer-sheet fragrance, but he’d learned a lot about laundry since Deborah had died.

  Libby didn’t fumble her keys this time. She opened an apartment door and stepped inside. Ned held Eric back to let Reva in first—he’d have to work with the boy on his manners. Reva waltzed through the entry, singing once more. “‘See me…fe-e-eel me…’”

  Ned paused in the entry. It was spectacular.

  Chaotic, maybe—if one had a low tolerance for chaos. A closet door hung open, revealing a jumble of coats, jackets, hangers and enough scarves to warm every neck in Alaska. A sloppy pile of fliers occupied a small mail table, and Libby hastily set her briefcase atop them, effectively hiding them. A single pink shower sandal lay on the floor of the hallway.

  But what a floor! Herringbone parquet in various oak stains, bordered with a dark oak trim. The finish was dull and scuffed, but the craftsmanship blew Ned away.

  So did the square footage. The foyer alone was as large as his kitchen, and the living room that opened off it had a fireplace.

  Without asking for permission, he strode into the living room. If the hearth, which held nothing but a thin layer of dust, was any indication, no one had burned a fire here in years. But the fireplace was a thing of beauty, flanked by ridged moldings and topped by an ornate mantel, which, like the moldings, was slathered in off-white enamel paint. He rapped his knuckles on the shelf and heard wood under the paint—and something else under the wood. Marble, he’d bet.

  “This is incredible,” he said.

  Eric laughed. “I told you my dad was a fixer upper,” he reminded Libby. “Wherever he goes, he has to check stuff out and figure out how to fix it up.”

  A drop of water hit the toe of Ned’s work boot, and he carried the dripping umbrella back into the foyer. Seeing no obvious storage place, he propped it in a corner as Libby shoved the closet door shut. Opposite the living-room door, another doorway opened onto the dining room, and through it he saw a long trestle table covered with papers and files. The furniture in the living room and dining room was old and shabby. The apartment was old and shabby, too, but God, what potential.

  “Is the fireplace operational?” he asked.

  Libby smiled awkwardly. “I have no idea.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve never used it. Eric, can I take your coat?” She extended her arm to Eric, who obediently unzipped his jacket and handed it to her. She hooked the hood over the cut-glass doorknob of the closet.

  “How can you have a fireplace and not use it?”

  “I’ve never built a fire,” she admitted. “The house I grew up in didn’t have a fireplace, and I never joined the Girl Scouts.”

  “The one time we tried to roast marshmallows, we had to do it over a burner on the stove,” Reva muttered, shaking her head.

  “That was a disaster,” Libby added with a laugh. “The marshmallows dripped all over the coils. What a mess!”

  Ned turned back to study the fireplace from a distance. “You ought to strip the paint off the mantel and moldings and find out what’s underneath. A fireplace like that is a treasure.”

  “Oh, sure.” She laughed again, but stopped when he didn’t join her. He hadn’t said anything funny, certainly not about her fireplace.

  “These floors are terrific, too,” he added. “If you polished them and slapped on a fresh layer of polyurethane, the place could pass for a ballroom.” He fell silent when he realized she was staring at him. What kind of asshole was he, to come into this woman’s home, go nuts over the construction and then advise her to renovate the place?

  “If I could afford a fixer upper, I’d refinish those floors and unbury the fireplace treasure,” she said, startling him even more. How could she live in an apartment this spacious, with its high ceilings and crown moldings, and not be able to afford a renovation? The place had to be worth a fortune. If she could afford to live here, surely she could afford whatever she wanted.

  Or maybe not. What did he know? He should just shut up, chug some ginger ale and take off before he put his foot in it again.

  “Reva…” she addressed her daughter. “Why don’t you give your father a call while I get the champagne.”

  Reva scowled. “If I call him, he’ll be out of his office and I’ll just wind up leaving a message that he’ll never get.”

  “Then call him at home and leave a message there. He’ll want to hear about the solo, and the date of the concert. It’s such exciting news.”

>   While Reva yanked her windbreaker over her head, Ned processed what Libby had just said. Call him at home. She wasn’t married to Reva’s father. “If I leave a message there,” Reva said, “Bony’ll get it and make a big deal out of it.”

  “It is a big deal.”

  “She’ll say I should lose weight so I don’t sound fat while I sing.”

  “If she does, I’ll punch her in the nose,” Libby promised. “I bet she’ll say you need a new outfit for the concert, and she’ll bring you to some fancy boutique and spend a lot of money on you.”

  Reva considered her mother’s words and grinned. “I’ll call,” she said, yanking off one wet sneaker and then the other, and padding down the hall, hopping over the stranded shower sandal rather than stopping to pick it up.

  Call him at home. Ned shouldn’t be thinking what he was thinking…but Libby had such gorgeous eyes and a vulnerable smile, and he’d liked the feel of her shoulder bumping his under the umbrella, the graceful curve of her arm as he’d helped her regain her balance…and he really shouldn’t be thinking what he was thinking. Totally inappropriate. She was the flipping Hudson School director of admissions.

  She sauntered through the dining room and, although she hadn’t invited him to accompany her, he followed, registering the dining-room’s chair rails and beveled windowsill, all of it coated in gloppy white paint. He unbuttoned his jacket, which wasn’t leaking water like Eric’s because he’d stayed relatively dry under the umbrella. Libby wasn’t too wet, either. In the kitchen, she kicked off her shoes and lost an inch and a half in height. Her skirt fell to her knees, but what he could see of her legs he liked. She shrugged out of the blazer of her suit and tossed it onto a chair, and he liked what he could see of her back, too, the slope of her shoulders under her white blouse, the wild waves of her hair.

  More than inappropriate, he scolded himself. Demented. For all he knew, Libby could have a husband making his way home right now. Just because she wasn’t married to Reva’s father didn’t mean she wasn’t married. And even if she wasn’t…damn it, she held Eric’s educational fate in her hands. Ned could find other women to admire, women with pretty eyes and crazy hair and great legs. Women who couldn’t wield any power over his son.

  There was always Macie Colwyn, after all. Her hair would qualify as crazy. Merely thinking about it made him wince.

  Hovering in the kitchen doorway, he watched Libby pull several inexpensive-looking champagne flutes from a cabinet shelf and arrange them on a metal tray. The kitchen was small, but it was larger than his—big enough to fit a tiny table into one corner—and it had a window. It also had more than its share of clutter: a box of Grape-Nuts cereal on the table, a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, an empty gallon-size milk jug on the Formica counter. With stone counters, the kitchen would look so much better. And with the paint removed from the cabinets. Someone who lived here must have really had a thing for ugly white enamel. The stuff was slathered over practically every surface.

  But whatever lurked under all that paint might be magnificent. “This apartment is really something,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She removed a bottle of ginger ale from a shelf in her refrigerator.

  He tried to focus on the kitchen, but his attention refused to shift from her. He shouldn’t have asked her about how Eric’s interview had gone, but he’d asked anyway. And he realized—because he wasn’t good at playing games or stifling his curiosity—that he was going to ask her something else he shouldn’t. “It’s none of my business, but…”

  She twisted off the cap, and the bottle of soda hissed. As she filled the glasses, she said, “For all I know, the fireplace does work. One of my neighbors told me a long time ago that the flues had been sealed off as a safety precaution. But maybe he was pulling my leg.”

  She was giving Ned an opportunity to back off, but he was too foolish to grab that opportunity. “I meant, about Reva’s father. It’s none of my business, but are you divorced?”

  She lowered the bottle and stared at him. He wished he were as skilled at guessing her thoughts as she was at guessing his, because for the life of him he had no idea what was going through her mind. She wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t seem angry or affronted. Nor did she seem entirely comfortable. Uneasy, possibly pissed. Maybe even panicked, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’m divorced.”

  “And there’s someone named Bony?”

  “Bonnie,” she corrected him. “Reva’s stepmother. Reva calls her Bony.”

  Okay. Libby hadn’t slapped him, hadn’t told him to take a hike, so he pushed a little more. “Does Reva have a stepfather?”

  Libby gave the question far more consideration than it deserved. Either she was married or she wasn’t. Was there some gray area he wasn’t aware of?

  “No,” she finally said. “No stepfather.” As if she wanted to cut him off before he could venture any further, she turned from him, lifted the tray and started toward the door, leaving him no choice but to move out of her way. “Where’s the superstar?” she shouted as she carried the ginger ale through the dining room. “It’s time for a toast! And then the Donovans have to leave.”

  Well, there was an answer for him. The Donovans have to leave. What he’d seen shimmering in her big brown eyes must have been panic after all.

  Maybe he ought to develop his mind-reading ability before he attempted to put the moves on a woman. Libby was clearly a mind-reading master. She’d read what was on his mind just now—and read, as well, that he was mind-illiterate, so she’d helpfully spelled out her sentiments: The Donovans have to leave.

  He might be dense, but he could take a hint. Gorgeous woman, gorgeous fireplace, and neither would get stripped by him. At one time, he’d known what he was doing around women, but his skills must have atrophied. Marriage could do that to a guy. He’d have to polish his moves—and practice on a woman who didn’t work at the Hudson School, for God’s sake.

  In the meantime, he’d choke down a little ginger ale, grab Eric and his umbrella and get the hell out of there.

  Ten

  Reva felt giddy and light-headed, as if she’d actually been drinking champagne instead of ginger ale. Too much singing, probably. She’d hyperventilated or something. Too much dancing, as well. Her hair was still damp from bopping around in the rain, and it was going to get all weird—not as awful as her mother’s, but she’d have to wash and straighten it tonight if she wanted to show her face in school tomorrow.

  And she definitely wanted to show her face. She was a soloist. She flopped onto her bed, let her wet head sink into the pillow, closed her eyes, whispered, “I am a soloist,” and smiled.

  She’d always believed she had a good voice—but not really. It was one thing to believe something, and another to have proof that other people believed it. You could tell yourself over and over that you had a great voice, but if Ms. Froiken never gave you a solo, you couldn’t help wondering whether you were deluding yourself. Like maybe you couldn’t truly hear how you sounded because your voice was entering your brain through your tonsils instead of your ears. Reva was always a little startled when she heard her own voice on a tape.

  But now, the world—or at least Ms. Froiken—had finally acknowledged what Reva had always believed: she had a great voice. A magnificent voice. A soloist’s voice.

  A voice as good as Darryl J’s.

  Well, not that good. Nobody sang as well as he did. Besides, she was a girl, so she couldn’t really compare her voice with his anyway.

  But if she was good enough to sing a solo, she might be good enough to sing backup for Darryl J. She’d been fantasizing about that ever since Kim had brought it up last week, and now the fantasy was a few steps closer to reality. How cool would it be to sing backup for him? She could dress in something slinky and black and semi-sheer, with lots of silver jewelry, and she could do a simple rhythmic step and rattle a tambourine—or she could learn some chords on a guitar. The guitar couldn’t be
that hard, and she was a lot smarter than some of the kids she knew who played the instrument. Talented enough for a solo meant talented enough to learn a few chords, right? Darryl J could teach her.

  The phone rang. She thought about ignoring it and letting her mother answer, except her mom was getting dinner ready and washing the champagne flutes—twice as many glasses as she would have had to wash if she hadn’t impulsively invited that kid and his father upstairs for ginger ale. Reva hadn’t minded including those people—at the moment, she didn’t mind anything. The boy had been okay, less creepy than most boys his age. He didn’t do anything gross or obnoxious, like pick his nose or go on and on about video games or other geek subjects. And his father seemed okay, too, although all his comments about the fireplace and the floors were kind of strange.

  One thing Reva was learning about guys was that they became obsessed with weird stuff. Her dad was fanatical about his Scotch, for instance. It had to be a certain brand, a certain age, a certain color—yet the whole point of drinking Scotch was to get drunk, and once you achieved that goal, who cared about the brand, the age and the color?

  So the umbrella man was fanatical about fireplaces. In the grand scheme of things, Reva considered that a better obsession than Scotch.

  The call was probably from her father. She’d left a message on his machine at home, and he always called her back when she left messages. Pushing herself up, she grabbed the phone from her night table, lifted the receiver and hoped her father had gotten to the answering machine before Bony did. She’d rather not talk to Bony.

  “Hello?”

  “Um…Reva?” A boy’s voice, deep but not man-deep yet. Familiar. She tried to place it, all the while wondering what boy would be calling her. Someone who needed help with homework, no doubt. She didn’t hang out with the dating kids, so boys generally didn’t phone her unless they wanted something, like the reading assignment or her answer on the third math problem.