The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  That was it: she’d tell him he could work on her fireplace. With her insecurities foaming all over the surface of her ego, she didn’t think she could discuss anything else with him. But he dreamed of giving her fireplace the chance to be all it could be, so she’d tell him he now had clearance to actualize her hearth.

  His work number was filed with Eric’s application. The woman who answered told her Ned was at a job site and would have to call her back, and she’d promised to inform him of Libby’s call. Libby stared at her phone for a few minutes, hoping he would call back immediately, but it didn’t ring. Sighing, she packed her briefcase, donned her blazer and headed for the apartment that she could once again think of as her home.

  She stored her papers regarding the apartment in a drawer of her dresser. Her apartment folder contained letters from the management company, the sales offer, the sheets of scrap paper on which she’d calculated what she could afford each month in mortgage, taxes and common fees, the amount she could use as a down payment…God, those numbers seemed paltry, she thought as she thumbed through the folder to make sure no documents were missing. If Harry truly wished to increase the stability in Reva’s life, maybe he could contribute more than a quarter of a million dollars toward the down payment. A third of a million dollars would make Reva more stable, wouldn’t it?

  The local bank where Libby had her savings and checking accounts offered competitive mortgage rates. She figured they would be more likely to approve her because she’d been banking there for fourteen years. Of course, in those fourteen years, the bank had undoubtedly familiarized itself with her finances, which might work against her.

  But Harry would be there. They couldn’t possibly say no to Harry. He was a corporate attorney with a very big income.

  She spotted him standing inside the glass-enclosed ATM lobby as she approached the bank’s Broadway entrance. If he’d been waiting a long time, he might be in a cranky mood. Well, screw it. He had left her on hold, after all. He could wait.

  Weren’t banks supposed to shout money? Libby’s local branch bank shouted airline terminal, and when she joined Harry inside the entry she half expected to hear a disembodied voice reminding her not to leave her bags unattended. The floor was linoleum, the walls pale and unadorned, the chairs molded plastic, the lighting bright and bluish. As Harry surveyed the bank, his expression grew pinched. He was probably used to banks with plush carpeting, paneled walls and Winslow Homer prints in gilt frames. The banks where he did his business likely resembled Libby’s office at Hudson. A venerable private school, a venerable financial institution—all that class required high-quality decor.

  “Thank you,” she said effusively as they left the ATM lobby for the main room. “I really appreciate this.”

  Harry nodded, and Libby noticed a slight softness underlining his chin. He was aging. In the not too distant future he’d have jowls, just like his father. The possibility made her smile.

  “We’ve got to keep a closer eye on Reva,” he said.

  Libby’s smile faded. By “we” she knew he meant she had to keep a closer eye on Reva. Fine. If he’d help her buy the apartment, she’d put Reva on a leash, or maybe get her one of those electronic ankle bracelets that could track her movements. Was there some sort of satellite-controlled global positioning system parents could hook their teenage children up to?

  If there was, Harry would have to pay for it. Once Libby was done signing all the papers the bank would require of her, she wouldn’t be able to afford a pen to write “Reva, call home” on a Post-it.

  The mortgage officer was a thin man named Sharma, with an Indian accent and tawny cheeks covered in peach fuzz. The Hudson lower school matriculated students who looked older than him. Libby didn’t like having to beg for money from someone at least ten years her junior, but she needed what he had.

  Sharma seemed perplexed that a divorced couple was buying a single unit. “You are not going to live there together?”

  “No,” Harry and Libby said in unison, perhaps a bit too emphatically.

  “You are going to buy this apartment together, but not live there together?”

  “She’s buying it,” Harry said. “I’m just helping.” Libby was both touched by his generosity in presenting her as the apartment’s future owner, and irked by his insinuation that she couldn’t buy it without his help. Which she couldn’t, but still.

  Now was not the time for pride. Stoically, she provided Sharma with all the numbers requested: her monthly gross income, her monthly net income, her savings, the current sum in her pension fund, photocopies of her last three income-tax returns, projections of future earnings, Harry’s child-support payments, any possible inheritances on the horizon—gee, maybe her parents would do her a favor and die soon—and on and on.

  She signed papers. Harry cosigned everything she signed. If she allowed herself, she would fret about what, besides her entire financial future, she was signing away. Her independence? Her autonomy? Her right to call herself a self-supporting single woman?

  “Face it, Libby—you need someone to cosign,” Harry muttered to her while Sharma was shuffling and sorting his countless multicolored forms. “If I don’t cosign, they’ll turn you down.”

  Once again, Libby was irritated by Harry’s ability to give with one hand while taking with another. He was probably right that the bank would reject her application without his signature on it, so she really ought to be grateful. But she hated having to depend on him. She’d never shared his ambition about earning big bucks in a Wall Street firm, and now he was making her feel like a hypocrite for tapping into those big bucks of his.

  Practicality trumped ego, however. She’d let him cosign, she’d accept his down payment—hell, she’d give him a key to the apartment if he’d enable her to purchase it.

  Ninety-four minutes after they’d entered Sharma’s office, Libby found herself standing outside in the fading sunlight with Harry. Sharma had said the application process would take roughly a month, and an appraiser would contact her for an appointment to visit the apartment, even though he acknowledged that the insider price was obviously below market value. “With Manhattan real estate,” he’d said in his crisp accent, “you can never be too careful.”

  Of course you could be too careful, Libby believed. If she’d been too careful, she would have moved out of the city long ago, found herself some middle-management job at an office park on Long Island and raised her daughter in a safe suburban house on a third-acre lot, just like the safe suburban house she’d grown up in outside Washington. Her daughter would never have attended Mostly Mozart concerts or visited the Frick Museum. She would have watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV instead of in person, standing on a windswept corner amid a crowd of thousands and shrieking with joy when the gigantic Cat in the Hat balloon drifted down Broadway above her head. She would never have discovered some grungy street-corner singer named Darryl Something in Central Park.

  Reva hadn’t been too careful. She took after her mother that way, unfortunately.

  “Where is Reva?” Harry asked, as if he’d tuned in to Libby’s thoughts.

  Libby checked her wristwatch again. “Home.”

  “By herself?” He scowled, his symmetrical brows dipping above his nose and his thin lips tightening. “She’s home all by herself?”

  Libby inhaled for strength. “I work,” she reminded him. “If she has an after-school activity, she stays at Hudson and we go home together. If she doesn’t, she goes home alone. I can’t end my workday at three-thirty just because she ends her school day then.”

  “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.�
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  “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 apartment, 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.

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p; “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.