The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  “And here I thought we expected all Hudson students to be verbally precocious. Reva could say mama in the womb. Don’t tell me you weren’t able to do that.”

  “If there wasn’t a cell phone in the womb, I wasn’t talking,” Tara said. “Your first interview is here. Melanie Agapakis and enough relatives to stage a touring production of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. One of them brought stuffed grape leaves.”

  “It’s a change from chocolate, at least. Bring Melanie to the interview room. I’ll meet her there. I’d just as soon avoid the extended family.”

  “Coward,” Tara teased.

  Libby hung up and closed her eyes one last time. A drink with Ned Donovan. She didn’t do things like that.

  But she was going to do it Friday. After he mutilated her fireplace, which wasn’t even hers—and might never be, if she couldn’t get the funds together.

  Somehow, thoughts of her teetering finances and her insecure housing situation were nowhere near as unsettling as the thought of spending an evening with Ned.

  Eleven

  “It’s marble,” Ned Donovan said.

  He was half in and half out of Libby’s fireplace, his long, denim-clad legs stretched across the hearth and into the room. Armed with a small chisel, a bottle of solvent, some rags and a penlight, he’d been fussing with the fireplace for a half hour. Libby would have thought it would take five minutes to gouge enough paint off to find out what was underneath, but Ned had promised to do the job carefully, indulging in his teeny tiny peek without spoiling the appearance of the mantel.

  While he’d been digging around in her fireplace, she’d wandered in and out of the living room, wishing she weren’t so conscious of his presence in her home. He had big feet—well, not big, but much bigger than any other feet in the apartment. She wasn’t used to such massive, thick-soled shoes leaving tread marks on her rugs.

  The second-biggest feet in the apartment right now were his son’s. Ned had phoned her fifteen minutes before arriving with the news that the teenage girl from down the hall who had promised to stay with Eric that evening had just been diagnosed with strep, and Libby had blurted out that she had a teenage girl who could stay with Eric and wasn’t suffering from any contagious diseases at the moment. After hanging up, she’d belatedly asked Reva if she would mind babysitting for Eric. Reva had acted exceedingly annoyed until Libby offered to pay her. Intense financial negotiations had ensued, but Libby had held firm at ten dollars. Eric, after all, was a self-sufficient kid. Reva wouldn’t have to feed him or change his diaper. And Libby and Ned weren’t going to be gone long. How long did it take to have a drink?

  As soon as the Donovans arrived, Libby had directed Eric to the den, which was furnished with a TV and a computer. Eric had ignored the TV and asked if he could play a computer game. Recalling his enthusiastic descriptions of various software programs during his interview at Hudson, Libby had figured he knew what he was doing when it came to computers, and told him to make himself at home with her machine.

  After getting Eric settled in, she’d prowled. Whenever she found herself watching Ned for more than a few minutes—not so much watching as ogling, even though she couldn’t see his face; his body was definitely ogle-worthy—she abandoned the living room for the den to check up on Eric, or the dining room, where the table groaned beneath multiple stacks of applications. Reva had shut herself up inside her bedroom, where she was either gloating or sulking over the ten bucks Libby had promised her. Libby wasn’t going to open that bedroom door until she had to.

  “So, it’s marble,” she said to Ned’s feet.

  He slithered out from under the hearth’s opening and gazed up at her from the floor. “Dark green, with lots of veins. Want to have a look?”

  Dark green? What would she do with a dark-green marble mantel?

  The same as she did with a painted white mantel—display on it the cut-crystal vase she’d got from her cousin Sarah for her wedding, a framed baby photo of Reva and a few other tchotchkes, and dust it every six months if she remembered. She’d dusted it earlier that evening, of course, so Ned wouldn’t think she was quite as lackadaisical a housekeeper as she actually was.

  Dark green would actually look lovely, she thought. Bold and vivid. As if she could afford to pay Ned what stripping and refinishing the entire mantel would cost.

  “Come here.” He beckoned her to the hearth, and she cautiously dropped to her knees next to him. “Gotta get in a little closer,” he said, casually arching his arm around her shoulders and guiding her head inside the fireplace. She tried not to lean back into him, even though she found maintaining her balance difficult without using his chest as a backrest. She admonished herself not to act as though lying this close to him was a sin. He probably flung his arm around the shoulders of all his marble-fireplace clients. She ought to be as nonchalant about it as he was.

  He turned on his penlight, and its small circle of white guided her gaze up toward the underside of the mantel. “There. See?”

  She saw dark green, with lots of veins. “Wow,” she said, because she felt some comment was called for.

  “Of course, this is what’s under the shelf.” He ran the light beam the length of the mantel. “The vertical trim appears darker—” he used the penlight to direct her attention to an area along the side edge of the fireplace, where a small patch of dark poked through the thick white paint “—but it might be more of the green marble. Hard to tell without stripping all the paint off and buffing it up. The top of the mantel feels like it’s got a veneer of wood attached to it.”

  “Why?” she asked, feeling the heat of his body surrounding her. Did they really have to have this conversation stuffed inside her fireplace? He was much too close. His chin was a millimeter from her ear, and given the proximity of his hips to her tush, he could easily discern how thirty-five years of gravity and a pregnancy had redistributed the fat in her body.

  “Beats me. Someone stupid enough to cover a marble mantel with paint is stupid enough to glue a slat of wood onto the marble, too. Maybe they thought it would hold the paint better.” He shimmied out of the fireplace and she scrambled out, as well, eager for light and space and the chance to put some distance between Ned and her. She wasn’t sure how old he was, but gravity hadn’t done a damn thing to his body. He was so solid. And warm. And male.

  She slid farther back on the floor and reminded herself that he was here as a carpenter, an expert, someone passionately devoted to fireplaces. He was Eric Donovan’s father. His hips had no interest whatsoever in her tush.

  He stood, leaned over and snagged her wrist to help her up. Even his hand was solid and warm and male, the palm smooth and hard with callus, the fingers thick and blunt. As soon as she was on her feet, she eased free and he smiled. “You want me to strip it?”

  Strip what? The mantel, she reminded herself. “I told you, Ned, I don’t own this apartment, and I can’t—”

  “Whoever owns this apartment would throw himself at your feet if you did him the favor of restoring the fireplace.”

  “I don’t think the management company would throw themselves at my feet,” she said, finding the image of those heartless, anonymous suits prostrating themselves before her rather amusing. “But it’s more than that. I can’t really—”

  “I’d do it free,” he said.

  She gazed into his eyes. They glittered like jewels, and staring at them made her feel like a gold digger pressed up against the window of Harry Winston’s, dazzled by a spectacular gem. But she couldn’t afford the gem, or Ned Donovan, any more than she could afford to make changes in an apartment she couldn’t afford without her ex-husband’s financial assistance.

  So Ned would renovate her fireplace free. And in exchange, she would…what? Let Eric enroll in the Hudson School? A renovated fireplace sure beat chocolate and flowers, to say nothing of loofahs.

  “I can’t let you do that,” she said quietly, turning away so she wouldn’t have to admire his eyes anymore, or the se
xy dimple creasing his right cheek. “I can’t accept gifts from the parents of Hudson applicants.”

  Ned laughed. “That wasn’t why I was offering. Libby, your fireplace…” He paused, then changed course. “You know what? Let’s go out, get a drink and talk. Okay? And just to make sure we’re both clear about this, I’m paying for the drinks and it’s not a bribe. It’s a guy thing. The guy pays for the drinks.”

  Grinning, she turned back to him. “What century are you living in?”

  “Early twentieth, just like that fireplace. Will you let me buy you a drink, or are we going to have an embarrassing argument in front of a bunch of witnesses at a café?”

  “I’ll let you buy me a drink,” she relented.

  “Good. Where’s Eric? I want to tell him we’re leaving.”

  Eric was still in the den, either building or blowing up virtual civilizations. Libby could never tell with computer simulation games, all of which seemed to feature numerous explosions no matter what their premise. He barely nodded when Ned said he and Libby would be gone for about an hour.

  Libby tapped on Reva’s bedroom door before inching it open. “Mr. Donovan and I are going out for a little while,” she said. “Eric is playing on the computer.”

  Reva sat cross-legged on her bed, her math textbook open beside one knee and a spiral notebook open beside the other. “Yeah, okay.”

  “I’ve got the cell phone if you need us.”

  “Uh-huh. Mom, I’ve got to do my homework, okay?”

  “Fine. Do your homework.” Libby closed the door and shook her head. The minute she and Ned left the house, she suspected, Reva would slam her books shut, phone Kim and whine about how she couldn’t IM her because some twerp she was babysitting for had taken over the computer. But she’d get ten dollars for her inconvenience, so Libby felt no sympathy for her.

  She donned a wool blazer and Ned put on his denim jacket. Neither she nor Ned spoke as she locked the door and strolled with him down the hall to the elevator. The silence continued as they waited for it to arrive, and as they got in and rode downstairs. Whenever she sneaked a glimpse of him, she found him watching her, a tentative smile curving his mouth. Why did this feel as awkward as a first date?

  Well, it was. Sort of.

  Not really. No.

  She didn’t date the fathers of Hudson applicants. She didn’t date gorgeous guys she barely knew. She didn’t date, period.

  Sure she did. Vivienne had set her up with a few guys over the years, all of them nice Jewish professionals, not the least bit like Ned Donovan. She’d dated one fellow for nearly a year. Marty Weinberg hadn’t been one of Vivienne’s finds. He’d been a sweet, slightly bald arts administrator whom Libby had met while rummaging in the cheese case at Bloom’s. He’d been on a desperate quest for feta and one thing had led to another. Marty had never turned her world inside out or upside down, which had been fine with her. They’d been compatible, they’d enjoyed each other’s company and the whole relationship had been…sweet and slightly bald. When Marty was offered a position at the Smithsonian, he’d asked her if she wanted to move to Washington with him and she’d said no, and that had been that.

  But Marty had left her life three years ago, and she’d discovered, shortly after his departure, that she didn’t really miss him that much. Reva had confessed she’d always considered him a weenie, and really, if her mother was going to go out with guys, couldn’t she at least go out with cool ones?

  Ned Donovan would qualify as a cool one, but Reva hadn’t even commented on him. Which proved to Libby that this wasn’t an actual date. If it was, Reva would have grilled Libby at length and then offered an unexpurgated critique of him.

  They left the elevator and headed through the lobby and outside. The evening air was bracing, and it helped to clear Libby’s mind. “The thing about the fireplace is—”

  “Libby.” He cut her off. “It’s a magnificent fireplace.” He motioned with his head toward the corner, and they started walking. “I don’t get to work on that kind of restoration very often. Up in Vermont, I did lots of restoration work. I loved it. I miss it. It would be fun for me.”

  “Fun? To scrape paint off a marble mantel?”

  “Yeah.” At the corner, they turned down the side street in the direction of Broadway. West End Avenue was primarily residential, offering no bistros or cafés for two people to enjoy a drink. They’d have better luck finding a place on Broadway. “If you want to get permission from the building’s owner first, fine. You don’t have to clear it with them if you want to hang a picture, do you?”

  “Hammering a nail into the wall is a little different from removing the paint from the fireplace.” She sighed and shoved her hands into the pockets of her blazer. “Anyway, the situation is complicated. I’m trying to put together the funding to buy the apartment. If I start messing with it, who knows what the current owners will do? Jack up the price, maybe?”

  “If you pay for the improvement—which you wouldn’t actually have to do, since I said I’d work free—I don’t see how the current owners would enter into it. Sure, the renovated fireplace would increase the unit’s value, but they wouldn’t assume the cost of that increase. So it’s no skin off their noses.”

  “Well…” Having the fireplace restored to its original beauty would be nice. Having Ned Donovan working in her apartment over a stretch of days would be…dangerous. Probably quite nice, too. “I’ll think about it.”

  They’d reached Broadway. A few shops remained open despite the late hour, but most of the activity buzzed around several eateries that occupied the block. One was a pizza place, one a Cuban-Chinese restaurant. One was a grungy neighborhood bar, one a chic place with enough twentysomethings gathered around the open front door to make Libby feel like someone’s grandma.

  “Which place would you recommend?” he asked.

  “I’ve never been to any of them,” she admitted.

  “Never? Hmm.” He gestured toward the grungy bar. “Let’s try that one. If it looks worse inside than outside, we’ll leave.”

  It looked better inside, dark and cozy, with aged paneling and wooden booths along one wall. The television above the bar was tuned so low it was inaudible once Libby and Ned settled into a booth. A waitress came over while they were removing their jackets. Ned ordered a Pete’s Wicked Ale, Libby a glass of merlot.

  As soon as the waitress left, Ned leaned back in the booth and regarded Libby. “So, where do you go on dates?”

  Thank God she didn’t already have her wine. If he’d asked his question while she was taking a drink, she probably would have choked—or spit the wine all over him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “When you go on dates,” he asked, “where do you go? What are some of the better places in this neighborhood?”

  “I have no idea,” she said, hating herself for allowing him to fluster her. First the awkward silence in the elevator and now this. Reva probably had more poise around guys than Libby did.

  The waitress arrived with Ned’s ale, Libby’s wine and a bowl of shelled peanuts dusty with salt. She left everything and disappeared.

  “You don’t date much?” Ned asked.

  Why was he posing such personal questions? Did stripping the underside of her mantel give him the right?

  The way he asked, though, gently and with a lilt of amusement underlining the words, calmed her down. This was his idea of getting-to-know-you, nothing more. “No,” she said, deciding to go along with him for now. “I don’t date much. How about you?”

  He poured some ale from the bottle into the frosted mug the waitress had provided. “I’ve only been in New York City for a few months,” he reminded her. “I haven’t had time to meet anyone down here.”

  “But in Vermont—”

  He let out a snort.

  “Not much of a social scene in Vermont?” she asked. She liked being the one pitching the questions rather than getting beaned by them.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it a scene,�
�� he said, “but yes, folks date in Vermont. I sure as hell tried.”

  She couldn’t believe a man with his charisma would have any trouble dating, if that was what he wanted to do. “What happened?”

  He took a drink of beer. “Eric and I were living in Woodstock, Vermont—the same town as my in-laws. My wife had grown up there, and she and I moved there after we finished college and got married. It’s a great town. I started a business renovating old houses and barns. We had Eric. Then one day, Deborah suffered a brain aneurysm and died.”

  “It must have been horrible.”

  “It wasn’t a barrel of laughs.” He sipped a little more beer, and Libby drank some wine. “After about a year, Eric and I decided it was time to start living again. So I invited a woman out to dinner. And call me crazy, but I asked my in-laws to babysit for Eric.”

  “What’s crazy about that?” Libby asked.

  “What was crazy about it was that my in-laws didn’t think it was time for Eric and me to start living yet.” Ned scooped up a handful of peanuts and tossed them one at a time into his mouth. “They were furious that I’d dare to go out with a woman who wasn’t Deborah. They found out from Eric what restaurant I’d gone to, and the next thing I knew, my mother-in-law was standing at our table, telling my date all about what a wonderful wife Deborah was, how much we all missed her.” He laughed, although Libby noticed a flicker of pain in his eyes. “Needless to say, my date and I lost our appetites. Afterward, I had a huge fight with my in-laws. They thought I was some kind of heartless bastard for wanting to meet women. They thought I should spend the rest of my life mourning Deborah. Don’t get me wrong—I loved her very much. But she was dead.”

  Libby nodded to show she understood and sympathized with what he was saying. “It sounds as if your wife’s parents weren’t ready to start living yet.”

  “Not even close to ready,” Ned confirmed. “I went out a few more times, and every time, one of them showed up—at the movie theater, at the restaurant, wherever. I took a lady up to Middlebury College to watch a hockey game, and my in-laws showed up at the arena. I went out a few times with one woman, a music teacher in town, and my mother-in-law intercepted her in the school parking lot to tell her I was still in mourning for my wife, that I was terribly wounded and didn’t really know what I was doing. The next time I phoned her, she suggested it would be better if we didn’t see each other for a while.” He shook his head. “I realized that if I hoped for my life back, I’d have to leave Vermont.”