The Fixer Upper (14 page)

She checked her watch and quickened her pace. She didn’t want to arrive at the Imagine mosaic ahead of Luke, but she didn’t want him to wait too long, either. She always thought girls who deliberately made guys wait for them were bitchy.

She hit Central Park West at exactly one o’clock. Perfect timing, she thought, slowing her stride down a little. She didn’t want him to think she’d raced to reach his side, either.

The crowd in Strawberry Fields was small, nothing like
the mobs that filled the plaza by the Band Shell to listen to Darryl J, but that made sense because there was nothing to do except stare at the Imagine mosaic and feel sad and maybe leave a candle or a dead flower or something. Reva had no difficulty spotting Luke, because he was tall and had long floppy black hair. She was glad she hadn’t arrived too early.

Drawing nearer, she realized he wasn’t alone. Katie and Matt Staver were with him, and—oh, shit—Micah Schlutt.

The Staver twins were okay. Reva had never heard them make belching noises or anything. But Micah? Yuck. And how had this turned from Reva taking Luke to hear Darryl J into a fricking group activity?

Disappointment settled like a cold, wet towel on her shoulders. She ducked behind a tree for a minute and took a deep breath. She’d
known
this wasn’t a date. She’d known it all along. But maybe she’d hoped, just a little bit, that it would be a sort of date because she would be graduating from the lower school in a matter of months and she’d never gone with a boy and Luke was tall and quiet and kind of nice.

And he hung out with Micah Schlutt, she reminded herself.

Her eyes got a little misty, and she batted them quickly. Tears would not do, especially when she was wearing mascara. She didn’t want to wind up with black
schmutz
all over her eyes.

Okay. She was going to be okay. This had never been about Luke, anyhow. It was about Darryl J, the guy she really loved. Today was about expanding Darryl J’s audience, getting him on more people’s radar, maybe scoring him a gig at the Hudson School, although he seemed way too cool to perform there. The moment Luke saw her and Darryl J together, he probably would figure out that he was way
down on her list. Her heart belonged to Darryl J. And she’d get to see him today, and maybe he’d remember her name, even if she didn’t put a dollar in his case. Which she couldn’t, because she didn’t have any singles. Just the ten-dollar bill her mother had given her last night.

Squaring her shoulders, she tossed her head to get her hair to lie smoothly, and stepped back onto the path that led to the mosaic. Luke spotted her first and waved. Then Katie jogged over to her. Reva liked Katie, even though she was too rich. She couldn’t help it that her ancestors came over on the
Mayflower
or something. She and Matt spent summers on Nantucket, which seemed like such a cool thing, except it meant they never could hang out with their school friends during vacation. Katie once confessed to Reva that she wished she could stay home in the summer and just do New York things.

Matt Staver greeted her with a cheerful, “Hey, Reva.” Micah didn’t make any belching or farting noises. And Luke had an awfully nice smile, even though Reva hated him for having brought so many people with him.

“I can’t wait to check out this musician,” Katie babbled just as Luke said hi, so Reva almost didn’t hear him. “Ashleigh Goldstein said he was really good.”

“He is,” Reva said, feeling superior because she was the only one in the group who knew just how good Darryl J was.

“We’re all on the dance committee,” Katie continued. “So we all have to hear him before we can even talk about hiring him. I’m not sure if the school will let us hire a singer. But they’ve got a budget for a deejay, so I don’t see why we can’t use that budget for a singer, instead. How much did they budget for the deejay?” she called to Matt as the group started down the asphalt sidewalk toward the Band Shell.

“A couple hundred bucks or something,” Matt said. He and Micah flanked Luke, with Reva and Katie a few steps
behind them. That wasn’t right. Reva should be in front, since she was the one who knew Darryl J.

But she couldn’t just elbow her way through the guys. Sooner or later they’d figure out that she should take the lead. In the meantime, she was just going to stay cool.

What a joke, the boys all together and the girls all together. And to think Reva had wasted a minute of brain time on the idea of going down on a boy. She would never do that. Never. Boys were so dumb, why would you let them put that part of them in your mouth?

“We just want to do something different,” Katie continued. “Nine years we’ve all been in that school, most of us anyway. We started in kindergarten, and this is our last winter dance, and you know? It’s like, let’s do something different for once in our lives.”

“Darryl J would be different,” Reva confirmed.

“You ought to join the committee, Reva. You’re such an expert about music. I hear Froiken finally gave you a solo.” Katie wasn’t in the chorus. “Like, hello? What was she waiting for? The next millennium?”

“There are lots of good singers in the chorus,” Reva said modestly. “She gave other people solos.”

“Everybody knows you’ve got a fabulous voice. It’s about time, that’s all I can say. Hey, guys, do you have any idea where we’re going?” Katie called to the boys, who had stretched their lead.

They stopped and turned around. “The Band Shell, right?” Luke asked.

Reva wished she didn’t have to answer. She was still pissed at him, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. But she had to remain mature and above it all. “That’s right,” she said.

He smiled again. She decided she hated his smile.

The usual assortment of kite-flying dweebs and Frisbee
throwers covered the Sheep Meadow. In another week or two, it would be too cold to hang out at the park. People would bundle up and use the paths only to get from one place to another. Reva wished Kim could be with her, enjoying what might turn out to be the last really nice park day of the year.

As they approached the mall leading to the Band Shell, she caught an aromatic whiff from a vendor’s cart, hot pretzels and roasting chestnuts. She was too irked to have an appetite, and no one else was stopping to buy food. She wondered if Luke had intended to treat her to something, then stifled a sarcastic laugh. Of course he hadn’t. He’d brought the whole damn dance committee today. You didn’t buy a girl a snack while a committee was watching you.

Beyond the vendor, Reva spotted the guy who juggled teddy bears. A few feet south of him was a guy in an Uncle Sam outfit doing an acrobatic dance on in-line skates. South of him was that dumb-ass mime, still trapped in his invisible box. Maybe it was sealed with invisible duct tape, Reva thought with a smile. Maybe it was actually an invisible prison cell. Maybe the mime was sentenced to invisible life.

Music drifted toward them from farther down the path, but Reva didn’t recognize it. She heard two women singing in close harmony, accompanied by a guitar and a country fiddle. They sounded good, but they weren’t Darryl J.

Behind them loomed the Band Shell, the huge, arched concrete stage. People stood around the singing women, gnawing on hot salted pretzels and nodding in time to the song. Reva edged past the crowd, then sprinted ahead of Luke and the other guys, searching the plaza.

He wasn’t there. Not in his usual spot. Not in any spot. Darryl J wasn’t there.

Shit. Luke was going to think she was a real loser now. Maybe he’d think she had totally invented Darryl J—al
though he’d heard about Darryl J from Ashleigh, so inventing Darryl J would have involved some ridiculous scheming and planning. And Reva had far more important things to do with her life than to pretend a nonexistent singer existed.

“Where is he?” Luke asked.

She surveyed the audience pit in front of the Band Shell, the grass and trees beyond, the path winding farther south. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice wavering. Shit, shit, shit. She couldn’t cry. She wouldn’t. Not here. She could fall apart when she got home, but right now she had to tough it out.

Luke patted her shoulder, making her flinch. “Maybe he’s somewhere else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, maybe he’s playing down in Washington Square, or in a subway station or something. Does he only play in Central Park?”

“I don’t know,” she said, hearing that quiver in her voice again and hating it. “I’ve seen him here a bunch of times.”

“Well, if he’s not here, he’s not,” Katie said sensibly.

“Why don’t we go look for him?” Luke suggested.

“Now?” Reva peered up at him. He’d stopped patting her shoulder, thank God—she wasn’t a baby who needed to be comforted—but he was still close to her. Close enough to see her eyelashes. Close enough to see her tears if she let herself cry—which she absolutely wouldn’t.

“Why not?” he said. “We could go down to the Village. Maybe he’s there.”

Her mother would shit a brick if Reva went to the Village. But if she didn’t go, she’d be the biggest loser at Hudson, if not in the entire city. She was already under a cloud of suspicion for having dragged all these people to the Band Shell—not that she’d chosen to include the Staver twins and
Micah—and Darryl wasn’t there. She could just imagine the scene at Hudson on Monday, when Luke and the others related to everyone in school how they’d schlepped all the way to Central Park to see this fabulous singer Reva was so high on and he wasn’t even there, and then she refused to go to Greenwich Village with them because she was afraid her mommy would shit a brick. Or if she phoned her mother on the cell phone to ask permission—they could make a big deal about that. “Reva Kimmelman can’t even take a subway downtown without asking her mother’s permission.”

She was nearly fourteen, for God’s sake, and she was with a bunch of friends, including three boys, including one boy who was as tall as a man, and it was the middle of a sunny afternoon. She’d been to Greenwich Village with her father and it was no big deal. Lots of college kids, some stoners, musicians…regular New Yorkers, just like in Central Park. Traveling downtown was no big deal. And Reva was
not
going to be a loser.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

E
ric wanted to spend Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Natural History. “Okay,” Ned said, “but you’ve got to bring along a friend.” It was already mid-October. The kid should have connected with a few classmates by now. If he didn’t get into the Hudson School, he would have to survive in the public school system, and he wouldn’t survive if he didn’t have friends. Ned had made a new friend last night, and while Eric was way too young to be developing friendships like the one Ned was embarking on with Libby, he needed some pals he could call on a Saturday and say, “Hey, wanna go to the Museum of Natural History with me?”

Eric accepted his father’s edict without protest. After five minutes on the phone, he announced that Gilbert would be joining them.

“Gilbert? Isn’t he the boy who pushes everyone?”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t push me,” Eric said.

Gilbert arrived at their apartment twenty minutes later. A scrawny boy with short hair, coloring that implied that an assortment of races had swum in his gene pool and trousers featuring more pockets than any human being could ever possibly require, he didn’t appear hefty enough to push anyone. He had a friendly smile, and when he called Eric “Monty,” he did so good-naturedly. And he called Ned “Mr. Donovan,” which Ned took to mean that someone had taught him manners.

Before they left for the museum, Eric showed Gilbert his bedroom. “Wow, look at that!” Gilbert’s voice drifted out to where Ned waited in the living room. “You sleep up there?”

“Yeah. It’s a loft bed.”

“And you can hang out underneath it? That’s so cool.”

“My dad built it,” Eric boasted, making Ned’s chest puff up a little. “He’s a fixer upper. He fixes things up.”

“That is so cool,” Gilbert repeated. “You could hide stuff under there that you didn’t want your dad to know about.”

Ned’s grin waned, and he made a mental note to peek behind Eric’s desk and bookcase, which were wedged under the loft bed, to see what he might be hiding. Eric was probably too young to be interested in hiding anything really dangerous, but Ned could imagine uneaten food, broken toys and important notes from his teacher vanishing into the darker recesses of his bedroom.

“Let’s go, guys,” he hollered toward the door, deciding to get their outing under way before Gilbert gave Eric any more good ideas.

The museum was crowded, as it always was on Saturdays. Ned didn’t mind, even though the throngs meant he had to remain extra vigilant not to lose track of the boys. He maintained a particularly close watch on Gilbert to make
sure the boy didn’t shove any of the other gazillion kids shrieking and giggling and racing around the exhibits, but Gilbert kept his hands to himself, usually tucking them into various trouser pockets. He and Eric insisted on visiting the Hall of Fossils, which was jam-packed and echoing with strident voices yakking about the dinosaurs, and then moved on to the Hall of Ocean Life, which was much less crowded. Gilbert darted from showcase to showcase, shouting, “Hey, Monty, check this out!” and, “Hey, Monty, you ever see a shell this big? Man, you hold that shell up to your ear, you don’t just hear the ocean. You hear the New York Philharmonic!”

“And it’s playing that thing they always play on the Fourth of July, with the cannons and the church bells,” Eric elaborated.

“Yeah, and all the fireworks, too. You could get fireworks out of a shell like that.”

All right. Eric had a friend.

In the relative quiet of the Hall of Ocean Life, Ned felt safe resetting his attention on the boys at seventy-five percent, which left him twenty-five percent to devote to his own interests.
Interest,
singular.

Libby Kimmelman.

You could get fireworks out of a woman like that,
he thought with a private smile. They’d lit a few sparklers last night. He wouldn’t mind igniting a Roman candle or two with her.

A school administrator. Well-groomed, mature, not terribly self-involved. Nothing flashy about her, although she’d look damn good in those boots she’d contemplated buying for her daughter.

The hell with her daughter. Ned wanted to see Libby wearing those boots—and nothing else.

All right, so her life wasn’t exactly simple. Any woman
past the age of thirty whose life was simple wasn’t fully engaged in the world. You reach a certain age, and of course there’ll be a little wear and tear, a couple of scars, a few chapters of history. That was what made a person interesting.

Libby interested him, even more than her fireplace did.

“Dad, we’re starving,” Eric announced, planting himself in front of the bench where Ned sat, right across from a display charting the evolution of algae. Gilbert nodded in vigorous agreement.

“How about some seafood?” Ned joked, waving at the display.

The boys wrinkled their noses. “We were thinking of ice cream,” Eric explained.

Ned stashed his thoughts of Libby in a safe nook of his mind and led the boys to the Big Dipper Café in the food court, where he treated them both to Stellar Sundaes and bought himself a lemonade. While they shoveled sticky spoonfuls of ice cream and toppings into their mouths, they evaluated their classmates, their ratings accompanied by assorted snickers and guffaws. This one always sounded as if she had the hiccups when she talked. That one was always trying to borrow stuff. A certain young fellow named Peter had a habit of eating his own boogers, which, Eric pointed out, was better than if he ate someone else’s boogers. This observation prompted so much laughter that the boys had to put down their spoons, rock in their chairs and bump knuckles a few times.

Ned sipped his lemonade, grateful that he hadn’t bought any food for himself. If he’d been hungry, the conversation would have made him lose his appetite.

Libby had raised a daughter. Did little girls discuss boogers?

He wondered about Libby’s divorce. What idiot would
leave a woman like her—and their daughter? Ned had had his share of arguments with Deborah, but even when he’d been angry enough to want to throw things—he usually resorted to throwing his socks against a wall, which allowed him to let off steam without damaging anything—he couldn’t imagine ever leaving her. Not if leaving her would have meant leaving Eric.

Booger jokes notwithstanding, the boys polished off their sundaes without any difficulty. They announced they wanted to do the lizard hall—reptiles and amphibians—and Ned downed the last of his lemonade and chased them out of the food court.

Museums were tiring, he realized an hour and a half later, after he and the boys had stormed through the lizard exhibit, the primates exhibit and the North American Birds Hall. Ten-year-old boys fueled on ice cream and enthusiasm were tiring, too.

“How about it, guys?” he said. His watch informed him it was a quarter to five. The museum would remain open for another hour, but he was too weary to stick around and help the janitors lock up. “I think we got our money’s worth.”

The boys insisted on visiting the gift shop, where they oohed and aahed over a variety of toys and Ned repeatedly said no. By five they were willing to let him tear them away from the shop. Outside, twilight lay golden over the Upper West Side. In another couple of weeks, with the end of daylight savings time, the city would be dark by this hour.

Ned and Eric walked Gilbert home, the boys frequently nudging each other and pointing out objects worthy of ridicule—“Get a load of that stupid baby stroller!” “That dog is
ugly!
” “This is the grossest garbage pail I’ve ever seen!”—and laughing uproariously. Ned felt a light pain tapping at his forehead from inside his head, but he knew it was noth
ing a couple of aspirin couldn’t handle. A couple of aspirin and a phone call to Libby.

He just wanted to say hi to her, maybe tell her about the afternoon, maybe discuss a time he could get started on her fireplace. He wanted to hear her voice, hear her laugh, water the seeds of their friendship so it would grow. He didn’t want to rush into anything with her.

Like hell. He’d be real happy to rush into sex with her.

But he was a responsible adult, and waiting would only make the sex better when it happened, if it happened. Last night’s kiss gave him hope that sex with Libby was a matter of when, not if.

Gilbert lived in a boxy modern building near Lincoln Center. He and Eric said goodbye by bumping knuckles again, and then he vanished into the building. “Did you have fun?” Ned asked as he and Eric headed west toward their own building.

“Yeah. Those stuffed eagles were cool. The ice cream was good, too,” Eric said.

“He seems like a nice kid,” Ned commented, angling his head back toward the building where they’d left Gilbert.

“He’s okay.” Eric shrugged. “I think I’d make more friends at the Hudson School.”

So much for that plan
, Ned thought wistfully. The kid still had his heart set on Hudson.

Which meant the woman Ned had kissed last night, the woman he would be phoning in just a few minutes, the woman who had occupied every bit of brain power he didn’t have to devote to Eric and Gilbert today, the woman he wanted to see naked except for a pair of colorful boots, held his son’s happiness in her hands.

He led Eric into their brownstone, and they climbed the two flights to their floor. Eric bounded up the stairs ahead of Ned, manifesting far more energy than anyone should
possess after a long afternoon at a museum. He reached their door while Ned was still trudging up the last few steps, and Ned tossed him the keys. Eric caught them and unlocked the door. “What’s for dinner?” he asked.

Ned groaned. Takeout was for dinner, he decided. One of the wonders of New York City was that so many restaurants delivered. Chinese, Italian, Indian, Thai, Greek, deli, sushi, pizza, kosher pizza—a simple phone call could bring to his door more cuisines than existed in the entire state of Vermont. “We’ll figure out dinner in a few minutes,” he said, following Eric inside and locking up behind them. “I want to make a phone call first.”

“Okay.” Eric charged down the hall to his bedroom. Ned paused for a minute, contemplating what treasures the kid might have stashed under his loft bed, then shook off the thought and strode to the kitchen. He picked up the phone and punched in Libby’s number.

She answered on the first ring, her voice sharp. “Hello?”

“Hey,” he said. “It’s Ned.”

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.

He cleared his throat to buy a minute. Why would a call from him disappoint her? She’d been there last night, just like him. She’d kissed him every damn bit as much as he’d kissed her.

“I really can’t talk,” she added. “This is a bad time.”

It was fast becoming a bad time for him, too. Dreaming about this call had sustained him throughout the long, exhausting afternoon. Had he been crazy to think she might be pleased to hear from him? He’d sure thought talking to her would make him happy, but happy was the last thing he was feeling right now.

He sank against the counter and rubbed the back of his neck, where the pain from his forehead had migrated. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Reva. She’s in a bathroom in Greenwich Village. At least, that’s where she was when she phoned. Now she’s turned the cell phone off and I have no idea where she is.”

“A bathroom?” Did the girl phone her mother when she had to pee? Or was she kidnapped? He’d seen more than one movie in which a kidnap victim had insisted on using the bathroom, and then she’d left a message—lipstick on the mirror, a scribble on a square of toilet paper—alerting the world to her plight. In the age of cell phones, he supposed a phone call would work even better. “Is she okay?”

“Who the hell knows? She’s with friends. She didn’t have permission to go downtown, and I don’t know where they are now, and I swear she’ll be grounded for life the minute she walks through the door.” Libby issued a mumble that might have contained a few curses, then said, “She hasn’t walked through the door yet.”

“If a lifetime grounding is waiting for her, she may be putting that off as long as she can,” Ned pointed out.

Libby clearly didn’t appreciate his wry humor. “I’ve got to leave the line open. Maybe I should call her father. He lives downtown.”

“What’s he going to do? Search bathrooms for her?”

“What is wrong with you?” Libby roared. “My daughter is in the Village somewhere with her damn cell phone turned off! Don’t you get it?”

Actually, Ned didn’t. He and Eric had gone to Greenwich Village a couple of times and it didn’t strike him as a particularly hazardous place. “I’m sure she’s fine,” he said helpfully.

“You have no way of guaranteeing that. I’ve got to go.”

“Call me when she gets home,” he requested, partly because he’d like proof that his claim about her being fine was true, and partly because once Reva was home Libby’s mood would improve and he’d be able to have a more rewarding conversation with her.

“Goodbye,” Libby said abruptly. Hearing the phone click dead, he lowered the receiver and cut loose with a few pungent words.

What the hell was her problem? Reva was fine. She was an eighth-grader and she was with a group of friends in Greenwich Village. She would come home, Libby would chew her out, they’d scream at each other, and eventually the smoke would clear, the dust would settle and all those other postbattle clichés would kick in.

So why was Libby taking out her rage on him? Because he was a convenient target for her anger? Because he’d dared to call in the middle of her crisis? Or because maybe she didn’t want his friendship after all?

I am a bitch
, Libby thought, staring out the living-room window as if she could will Reva to materialize on the sidewalk below. Ned Donovan was the most exciting thing to happen to her since Reva learned how to say
Mama
, and Libby had just blown him off.

Screw it
. He deserved to be blown off. Making jokes about Reva’s disappearance? Teasing that she should ask Harry to search the bathrooms of Greenwich Village for her daughter? The asshole!

Just wait until his golden boy hit adolescence. Just wait until earnest Eric got whomped by a barrage of hormones and went on a tear. Ned wouldn’t be making light of the situation then. He’d know just how devastating it felt to realize that your child was out there in the world, doing foolish things, and you couldn’t protect her.