The Fixer Upper (17 page)

“You should hire a babysitter for her.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Libby snapped. “She’s thirteen. Old enough to babysit herself.” She’d babysat for Eric Donovan on Friday, hadn’t she?

“How do you know she’s home?” Harry pressed. “She could be gallivanting around the city every afternoon while you’re still at your desk.”

“And while you’re at yours.”

“I’m not the custodial parent,” Harry said, his brow pleating with more creases as his frown intensified. “You are. I’m providing the home. You have to provide the controls.”

Anger flared inside her. “You’re not providing the home! All you’re doing is giving me a little financial assistance.
And we both have to provide the controls. You’re not going to turn me into the bad cop while you get to be the good cop.”

“I don’t have a problem controlling her,” Harry argued. “I’m not the one she disappeared on.”

Libby drew in another deep breath to keep from lashing out at Harry—or bursting into tears. The fact was, Reva had disappeared on
her.
She was the bad cop. The lousy mother.

When she’d sold her autonomy and self-sufficiency, she’d apparently also sold Harry the right to make her feel like shit. At least she’d gotten a high price.

“I’m going home,” she lied, knowing she had to detour back to her office to touch base with Tara and collect some more applicant files to read that evening. She might be a bad cop and lousy mother, but she was a semidecent liar, because Harry didn’t berate her further. With a quick nod, he stalked down the street and vanished into the subway kiosk at Broadway and 72nd, his impeccable suit fitting him better than Ken’s Mattel apparel ever fit the doll.

The phone rang just as Ned ran the last dinner plate under the spout to rinse off the suds. Eric was old enough to do the dishes, but Ned couldn’t yet bring himself to turn over that chore. Back in Vermont they’d had a dishwasher, and he felt guilty about moving Eric to a residence lacking that basic appliance, even if Eric had wanted the move as much as Ned had.

But asking Eric to do the dishes meant asking him to be just a bit older, a bit more responsible, a bit less Ned’s little boy. The kid was already growing up too fast. Surely Ned could handle the dishes for another year.

At least Eric had helped clear the table before bolting to the computer to do some stuff, as he’d put it. Just as well; Ned wanted to be alone. He’d had difficulty staying
cheerful while Eric had regaled him with news of his day at public school. Apparently, a classmate named Simon had unspooled an entire roll of cellophane tape in art class that day. Eric clearly considered both the mess and the ensuing hysteria on the part of the art teacher quite entertaining, and he’d described the entire incident in excruciating detail. “Then this girl Melissa got tape in her hair and she was screaming, and Ellen started to cry because she always cries, and Richard tried to wrap the tape around his neck and Ms. Engelhart threatened to call the police….”

Ned had had to pretend he cared. It wasn’t Eric’s fault that his father was tied in knots over Libby.

By the time he’d tamed his resentment enough to call her back that afternoon, she was out of the office, and her being unreachable had made his resentment return, more potent than before. If she’d wanted to talk to him, she should have stuck around to receive his call. Or she should have tried him again. In fact, she should have called him yesterday, or Saturday night.

He was a jerk for being angry that she’d stepped out of her office. He was a jerk for letting her get under his skin. He wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to sleep with her. He wanted to meet a dozen other smart, attractive women who could make him forget about her. He wanted not to care about her as much as he didn’t care about Simon’s excellent adventure with the roll of tape. He wanted Deborah to be alive so he wouldn’t have to go through all this courtship shit.

The phone rang a second time while he dried his hands on a towel. He grabbed the receiver before it rang a third time. “Hello?”

“Ned? It’s Libby.”

He felt a muscle tick in his jaw. Did this call qualify as courtship shit, or had she finally remembered her promise
to update him on her daughter’s situation? Until he knew, he wasn’t going to say anything.

“You can do my fireplace,” she said.

Hell. He wanted to do
her
. “Your fireplace,” he said.

“I applied for a mortgage today. If I get approved, the fireplace will officially belong to me. You can refinish it.”

He tried unsuccessfully to summon some excitement. “Gee,” he said. “That’s…” He sighed. “Great.”

“I tried calling you earlier today.” Her voice wavered. “I don’t know if you got my message…”

“I was working,” he said, avoiding the question she hadn’t quite asked.

“I’m just…” Her voice wavered again, and she paused. “I’m sorry, Ned. I’m feeling overwhelmed.”

That covered a lot of territory. “Is Reva okay?”

“She’s fine. I’m a wreck.”

“And you think my fixing your fireplace will help?”

“No, but I want you to fix it anyway. You said my fireplace would want it.”

“What do
you
want?” he asked.

Another, longer pause. “I want to have a perfect home and be a perfect mother with a perfect daughter, and I can’t have that. So I’m thinking maybe I should settle for a perfect fireplace.”

“I can’t give you that,” Ned said, realizing that Libby was serious. “I can give you an improved fireplace. But perfection is way beyond me.”

“It is?” She sounded almost pleased.

“What do you want, Libby?” he asked again. The bitter edge was gone from his voice.

She said nothing for a minute, then admitted, “I don’t know. I thought maybe I could start with a fireplace and see what happened.”

He suspected she was no longer talking about her apart
ment, but damned if he could cut through the crap. Women loved talking around a subject. Maybe it was part of the courtship shit, but he just wasn’t sure how to play that game.

Keep it simple,
he advised himself. “All right,” he said. “I’ll fix your fireplace.”

“Thank you,” Libby said.

He heard something beyond
Thank you
in her tone, but again he was at a loss as to what it might be. When he saw her, he’d figure it out. Maybe. Or else he’d just kiss her again, the way he did the last time, and she could take it from there. She could slap his face or she could kiss him back. Last time she’d kissed him back.

“You’re welcome,” he said, choosing to act as if he knew what the hell they were talking about. “When should I get started?”

“Whenever you’d like. Some evening this week?”

“Wednesday,” he said, to give himself a couple of days to think over what he was getting himself into.

“Wednesday would be good.” Another tremulous silence.

“I’ll be over around seven, seven-thirty,” he told her.

“Fine.”

One more silence and he’d have to throw socks. “So I’ll see you Wednesday,” he said.

She murmured a goodbye, freeing him to hang up the phone.

Christ. What was that all about?

Hopefully, it was about his winning a second chance to get close to her. Physically close, and emotionally close, too, if she wanted that. And if he wanted it, which he wasn’t so sure about. Perhaps by Wednesday he’d have a clearer idea where he and Libby were heading.

Two short steps carried him out of his minuscule kitchen—God, he lusted for her kitchen as much as he lusted for her, and he was a man, not a chef. Maybe once he
finished her fireplace she’d let him play with her kitchen. New cabinets, a tile floor, a polished oak sill for her window—she had a fucking window in her kitchen! Yeah, he could work some magic there. Then he could move on to her entry, refinish that parquet floor, hang some French doors in the entrance to the dining room….

If he couldn’t make love to her, he’d make love to her apartment. That wouldn’t be as satisfying, but it was better than nothing—and a hell of a lot better than Macie Colwyn’s loft.

Eric was at the computer in the den, studying what appeared to be a Web page. “What’s up?” Ned asked, relieved to be dealing with his son. No games necessary here, no courtship shit. Just two guys who more or less understood each other.

“It’s a Web site I created,” Eric told him. “Gilbert got me this software.”

“What software?” A bootleg copy? Were Eric and Gilbert breaking copyright laws?

Eric shrugged. “I don’t know. He just had this copy he gave to me. You can make your own Web sites. I was experimenting with it.”

Ned propped himself on the back of Eric’s chair and squinted at the screen. It showed a photo of a grouchy-looking white-haired woman in a green sweater, surrounded by soft-focus roses and pastel swirls that resembled diaphanous veils. Beneath the roses, in a florid golden script, ran the words
Eau de oatmeal—the scent that sticks to your ribs
. A bottle of perfume appeared at the bottom, with a pair of walking shoes next to it, the sort that older people wore when they power-walked around malls.

“What is this?” Ned asked, his head starting to thump with an incipient headache.

“It’s a make-believe ad. A Web site for Mrs. Karpinsky’s perfume.”

“She doesn’t wear perfume.”

“If she did,” Eric pointed out, “it would be this stuff. Check this out.” He clicked the mouse and more florid script spread across the bottom of the screen:
Fragrance for your grandmother. For your breakfast. For you.
“It loads real easily,” Eric said.

Okay. This was kid humor, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the comic strips he and his friends used to create about their teachers. Ned had designed a whole series about Mr. Nylund, the eighth-grade social studies teacher who’d always seemed intoxicated in class. In the comic strip, Ned had had Mr. Nylund tripping over his own feet and imagining strange winged beasts while garbled lectures on the Louisiana Purchase rose in cartoon bubbles from his mouth. Ned’s buddy Joey had specialized in strips about Mr. Blunt, the sadistic gym teacher. They’d both had stay-at-home mothers, so they hadn’t had the opportunity to write silly comic strips about babysitters.

“I hope you don’t plan to load the Web site anywhere,” Ned said. “I’m not paying for Web space for you.”

“We’ve got free Web space through our ISP,” Eric said.

“Yeah, well, Mrs. Karpinsky knows how to use a computer. If she stumbled upon this, she’d be insulted.”

“She probably wouldn’t even get it,” Eric argued, but he shrugged again. “I can trash it when I’m done. I’m just experimenting.”

“So you said.” Ned straightened up. “Did you finish your homework?”

“Hours ago.”

“I’m going to catch some TV and read the paper. I want that Web site gone before you shower.”

“Yeah,” Eric said, tuning Ned out with a click of the mouse.

Ned abandoned the den for the living room. He opened the cabinet doors that hid his TV, grabbed the remote and set
tled on the couch. He wasn’t really interested in any shows; the World Series would start next week, but no playoff games were on tonight. It didn’t matter. He wanted the noise, a babble of voices to serenade him while he read about turmoil in other parts of the world. They made his own turmoil seem petty.

He’d go to Libby’s apartment on Wednesday. He’d do her fireplace and see what happened. If nothing worked out…Well, he had a lot of socks and some sturdy walls.

L
ife sucked sometimes, Reva thought as she unwrapped her Muenster-and-sliced-tomato sandwich. In fact, life sucked a lot of the time. Here she was, grounded for the rest of her life—and her Sunday afternoon with her father convinced her he was in total agreement with her mother regarding the punishment, so she couldn’t even play her parents off against each other. Even worse, she had no idea where Darryl J was. And Luke Rodelle, who was an asshole anyway because he was obsessed with hubcaps and hadn’t paid for her pizza, was schmoozing at the diva table when she’d entered the cafeteria a few minutes ago. She saw him leaning over Larissa LeMoyne, talking intimately to her, tossing his head every now and then to get his hair out of his eyes. Larissa was wearing a sheer white fitted blouse with a black tank top under it. All her friends were wearing the same thing. Seeing Luke surrounded by so many sheer white
fitted blouses with black tank tops under them had curdled Reva’s already sour mood.

After he was done talking to Larissa, Luke wound up sitting with Micah Schlutt at the other end of the dining room from where Reva settled. She shouldn’t have told Katie Staver she’d serve on the dance committee, because now that she’d made the commitment she was stuck having to work with Luke. And Micah, the little turd.

Across the table from her, Kim pulled the cardboard lid off a disposable foil tub filled with tempura. Reva could see the big pieces were shrimp. The smaller pieces were probably vegetables, although who could tell with all that batter clinging to them? The shrimp held her attention, though. She’d kill for shrimp.

Not that she’d kill Kim, of course. Kim was her best friend, and now that Reva was majorly grounded, Kim could serve as her lifeline to the world. While Reva was imprisoned in her apartment, Kim could use her cell phone to call her and report in. “It’s sunny out,” she’d say. “I’m at a hot-pretzel stand, and I’m going to buy a pretzel and eat it in your honor, since you can’t be here to eat it yourself.”

God, if Kim did that, Reva might just have to kill her after all. Reva would rather have a hot pretzel than a Muenster-cheese sandwich. She’d rather have tempura than a hot pretzel. She’d rather have
anything
than the life she was living right now.

Well, she wouldn’t rather have whatever weird vegetarian thing Ashleigh had packed into her insulated bag. Ashleigh dropped into the chair next to Kim’s, her long gray skirt fluttering around her legs and her hair so black it looked as though she’d spilled ink on it. “Hey,” she said much too cheerfully. “I hear Luke Rodelle likes you.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Reva snapped.

“Mia Nussbaum told me. She was at my dad’s office
yesterday getting a new retainer. This is her third replacement. She threw the last one down the compactor chute by mistake. The one before that got run over by a bus. Anyway…” Ashleigh busied herself peeling the silver foil off a spinach wrap with weedy green stuff spilling out of it. “My dad’s office is on the first floor of our building, so I stopped in before going upstairs, and I saw Mia, and she told me Luke likes you.”

“I don’t think so,” Reva muttered.

“Reva’s in a bad mood,” Kim warned Ashleigh.

“I am not,” Reva argued, then sighed.

Ashleigh appeared genuinely sorry. “How come?”

“She’s grounded,” Kim said.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know,” Reva answered, softening. Having sympathetic friends eased her resentment. “Probably till I finish college, at least.”

“What did you get grounded for?” Ashleigh asked, gathering the sprouts her sandwich was shedding and stuffing them back into the wrap.

“It’s a long story,” Reva said, even though it wasn’t that long. She just didn’t want to have to go through it. “I didn’t check in with my mother every five minutes when I was searching for Darryl J this weekend.”

“He’s disappeared,” Kim added.

Ashleigh frowned. “No, he hasn’t. He’s playing in the subway.”

Reva could barely keep from leaping out of her chair. She was so excited to hear Darryl J was still in Manhattan that remaining seated seemed physically impossible. She jiggled both feet and bounced her knees to burn off the excess energy. “Where was he? Which station?”

“Seventy-second and Broadway,” Ashleigh said.

“How’d you find him?”

“It was really bizarre.” Ashleigh settled into her seat and grinned, obviously thrilled to have a really bizarre story to tell. “I was walking home through the park yesterday—” Ashleigh lived on the East Side “—and I detoured down to the Band Shell to see if he was there. He wasn’t, but that mime was.”

Oh, yuck. The mime. Reva scowled.

“So I figured, what the heck, and I asked him if he knew where Darryl J was.”

“You asked a
mime?
” Kim gaped at her.

“Well, he’s a human being. I figured, what the heck.”

“What did he say?” Reva asked.

“He didn’t say anything. He’s a mime.”

Reva decided Ashleigh was enjoying this story a little too much. Her impatience grew and she jiggled her feet harder.

“He was doing this whole routine, pretending to sew his fingers together,” Ashleigh continued. “But there was hardly anyone watching him, so I interrupted him and asked if he knew where Darryl J was. He’s, like, blinking. His face is so white. He has no skill when it comes to makeup.”

Neither did Ashleigh, but Reva was too polite to mention that.

“So he points to where Darryl J used to stand, and mimed strumming a guitar. And I’m nodding and telling him, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s the guy. Do you know where he is?’ And the mime starts doing this thing like he’s walking downstairs. He gets shorter and shorter, like he’s about to disappear into the ground. It was really cool. And I’m thinking, Darryl J has gone to hell.”

“Why would he go to hell?” Kim asked. “He seems like a nice guy. Plus he’s so cute.”

“Well,” Ashleigh said, drawing the story out, “I asked the mime, ‘What, you’re saying he’s underground?’ And the mime shakes his head and sticks one hand in the air and
starts trembling and rocking. He looked exactly like someone riding a subway train. He was really good. If I’d had any money on me, I would have given him some, just for that subway routine. Well, I did have some money, but I need it to buy my kid sister a new Minnie Mouse watch, because she ruined hers because I told her it was waterproof and she was dumb enough to believe me, so she wore it in the bathtub and this was somehow
my
fault.”

“So Darryl J’s in a subway?” Reva pressed. Damn. She and Luke and the Stavers had guessed right on Saturday—but they hadn’t found him.

Ashleigh nodded. “So I asked the mime which line, which station, and he falls to his knees and spreads his arms out…” She put down her icky green sandwich and dropped to her knees, arms extended like one of the Marx Brothers at the end of
Duck Soup.
When Reva and her mother had watched that movie on the VCR, her mother had explained that the Marx Brothers were spoofing minstrel singers. Reva wasn’t exactly sure what a minstrel singer was.

“I didn’t get what he was doing,” Ashleigh continued. “Not a clue.” She stood up, dusted off her skirt and flopped back into her chair. “So then he pretends he’s holding a microphone, and he’s mouthing some song—I don’t know what it was, but I tried to read his lips and I think he was singing that schmaltzy song from
Cats.
You know which one I mean?”

“‘Memory,’” Kim guessed.

“That’s it.” Ashleigh nodded energetically. “All I’m thinking is
Cats.
And then I got it. Broadway. So I said, ‘Is Darryl J on the Broadway IRT?’ and the mime hugged me.”

“Gross!” Reva and Kim shouted in unison.

“Yeah.” Ashleigh laughed. “It was gross, but at that point I was on a roll. So I asked if he was playing on the subway, and the mime did the shaking, swaying thing again, then
tapped on this imaginary subway door and then stepped through it and did the imaginary guitar-strumming thing. So I guessed Darryl J was playing in a subway station, and the mime hugged me again. That made me feel better about not giving him any money. I mean, he was getting paid in hugs.”

“Gross,” Kim muttered again, although she seemed full of admiration for Ashleigh.

Reva admired Ashleigh, too. She couldn’t believe she and Luke and the Stavers had wasted Saturday checking out the IND stations instead of the IRT. They’d been on the right track—but on the wrong tracks. Damn, damn, damn.

“So I asked which Broadway station,” Ashleigh continued, “and he starts pawing the ground with his foot like one of those circus horses that can supposedly do arithmetic? After a while, I just guessed 72nd Street, and he did this stupid little dance.”

“So Darryl J is playing in the subway station at Broadway and 72nd?” Damn! That was so close! Her own neighborhood! “Do you think he’d be there now?”

“Reva.” Kim sounded sterner than Reva’s own mother. “You’re already in trouble. You’re not going to cut school to find him.”

“But after school—”

“You’re grounded, remember?”

Leave it to Kim to be obedient. Reva didn’t want to get in worse trouble than she was already in…but if Darryl J was in the 72nd Street station, that was just a few blocks away. Chorus wasn’t rehearsing today, and the dance committee wasn’t meeting, thank God. Reva’s mother would be working late because she had all those applications to deal with. Reva could leave school, check out the station to see if Darryl J was there and be home before her mother ever found out.

“Okay, I’m grounded,” she said with a shrug. Like what
more could her mother do to her if she found out Reva had taken a minor detour to the subway kiosk at 72nd on her way home from school? Add another year to her life sentence?

Her mother wouldn’t have to find out. Kim wouldn’t have to find out, if she couldn’t stand the pressure of participating in Reva’s brief jailbreak. All Reva meant to do was check on Darryl J, find out where he was going to be when, and then go home. No big deal.

He might not be there today, anyway. And shit, she’d have to buy a fare card just to see him, unless he was playing in the entry, outside the gates. She hoped he was, because the odds of her earning any more babysitting money watching the fireplace guy’s kid play Sim games on the computer were pretty low, not only because she was grounded but because her mother hadn’t said a word about the fireplace guy for days.

Darryl J was worth the fare, of course. And if Reva wasn’t allowed to go out ever again, she wouldn’t have much opportunity to spend her money on anything else. So she’d pay to find Darryl J.

He’d just better be there.

Eleven o’clock. Libby stared at her fireplace, a farewell visit with the thing. Tomorrow Ned would do whatever he was going to do to it—chip it and strip it, work a miracle, fix it up. She wanted to be excited, but she felt like
drek.

Reva hadn’t gone straight home from school today. Libby knew because she’d phoned home at 4:00 p.m. and Reva hadn’t answered. Libby hadn’t bothered to leave a message on the answering machine. What would she say? “Reva, you’re breaking my heart!” But she’d asked about it over dinner—a meal she’d had to choke down, she was so upset—and Reva had said, with only the slightest hesitation, that she’d taken a nap when she’d gotten home from school. She must have slept right through the phone’s ringing.

Reva was a teenager. The sensory nerves in her body were wired to vibrate wildly at the sound of a ringing telephone. No way could an eighth-grade girl sleep through that sound.

“You should have left a message, Mom,” Reva had had the audacity to scold her. “I would have called you when I woke up.”

Her daughter was lying to her. Libby had realized it then, when Reva had issued her phony defense at dinner, and she understood it now, in the silence of her dimly lit apartment in the minutes before she went to bed. Reva was slipping right through her fingers. Libby recalled her own mother’s warnings when she’d been a teenager: “Someday you’ll experience what I’m feeling right now. May God give you a daughter who causes you pain the way you’re causing me pain.”

Of course, Libby hadn’t had to do much to cause her mother pain. She often achieved that tragic feat simply by dressing in what her mother considered unflattering clothing, or refusing to wear lipstick on a date. She hadn’t misbehaved the way Reva did, sneaking around and lying about it. Then again, her mother probably thought that going on a date without lipstick was more shameful than what Reva had been doing.

Damn. Libby didn’t even know what Reva was doing.

She was a terrible mother, that much was certain. Her own mother had been a stay-at-home mom—busy with her volunteer work when she wasn’t whining about how this or that organization was refusing to pay her for her efforts. Libby recalled a few conversations with her mother during which she tried to explain the concept of volunteerism, which was that a person wasn’t supposed to get paid, and those discussions had usually concluded with her mother moaning, “You should only have a teenage daughter someday who does to you what you’re doing to me!”

But Libby hadn’t sneaked around. And when she’d misrepresented her activities to her mother, her lies had been awfully benign: saying she’d been at Jenny’s house when she’d actually been at Laurie’s house, or saying she’d bought a piece of fruit to snack on when she and her friends had in fact gone to the Cone Zone for ice cream.

She’d been in the suburbs, for God’s sake. How much trouble could a suburban teenage girl get into? Bethesda wasn’t Manhattan.

She stared glumly at her fireplace and pondered the likelihood that her choices of late represented one huge mistake after another. The hugest of all had been signing all those papers at the bank in order to buy this apartment. Buying it meant that not only would she never be able to retire, but she’d have to be reincarnated so she could finish paying off the mortgage and Harry’s loan in her next lifetime. She would never be able to come home at three o’clock to keep an eye on Reva, and Reva would run wild through the city, looking for some scummy street musician who was probably strung out on drugs. If he was any sort of decent musician, he’d be taking classes at Juilliard during the day and practicing his scales at home at night.