The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

Riding upstairs, Ned gave himself a final pep talk. If Libby turned out to be last week’s bitchy incarnation, he’d get through the meal and call it quits. If she turned out to be the smart, funny incarnation he’d seen when he’d first met her, and the past few nights when he’d worked on her fireplace, he’d be a very happy man.

  At her door he paused. He felt unarmed. No tools, no solvent, no drop cloth. Just himself. Tonight he wouldn’t be the guy who restored Libby’s fireplace, or the dad with the kid who wanted to go to Hudson. He would just be…

  Chill, he ordered himself, then rang the bell.

  Libby swung open the door, and he was glad to just be himself, a man taking a woman to dinner. She looked incredible.

  Actually, she looked like Libby, only more so. Her hair was wild with waves but soft and lustrous, and she’d done something to make her eyes appear darker, emphasizing just how large they were. She wore black slacks that gave her legs a long, slender shape, and a matching black jacket over a white shirt that was more lace than fabric. Not to tear her jacket off and see what she looked like covered in nothing but tantalizing lace took all his willpower.

  “Hey,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound as horny as he suddenly felt.

  She smiled shyly. “Is this okay?” she asked, gesturing toward her outfit. “I didn’t know where we were going, so…”

  “It’s fine,” he said, his voice catching slightly. God, did she have any idea how seductive he found her? Wasn’t there some sort of law that said mothers in their thirties weren’t supposed to be this sexy?

  “Good.” She seemed a little nervous, her smile too bright. “Will I need a coat? How cold is it?”

  “Kind of warm,” he told her, not bothering to add that he’d gotten a lot warmer in the past thirty seconds.

  “Okay.” She stepped out into the hall, locked the door and slipped her key into a small black purse.

  They waited for the elevator in silence. Still not a word as they got into the car, with its tasteful paneling and brass. If he didn’t speak soon, the heat and tension would overcome him and he’d do something stupid. “It’s not like we don’t know each other,” he said.

  She shot him a quizzical look.

  “I mean, we’ve gone out before, we’ve spent time together, we’ve kissed each other. This is just, well, dinner.”

  Her smile lost its artificial brilliance. “Of course,” she said, sounding relieved that he’d given them both permission to stop being nervous.

  “How’s Reva?” he asked, realizing he hadn’t seen her lurking behind her mother. Maybe she’d been hunched over the computer, working on her Web site. Last Wednesday, Ned had asked Eric about what had him and Reva so occupied when Ned was stripping the paint off the fireplace, and Eric in turn had asked if he could pay for a domain name with Ned’s credit card. “I think it’s a surprise for her mother,” Eric had explained, “so she can’t get the money from her. She’ll pay us back, but she doesn’t have a credit card. You do. I’ll set everything up. You just have to let me use your account.”

  Ned couldn’t stand in the way of a surprise for Libby, so he’d let Eric charge the domain name on his card. Yesterday, when he and Eric had been back at the Kimmelmans’ apartment, Reva had given Eric the money and he’d reimbursed Ned. Ned hoped the Web site would be spectacular, perhaps a grand apology to Libby for having gone to Greenwich Village without permission last weekend.

  “She isn’t home,” Libby said.

  “Oh? She’s been sprung?”

  “She’s spending the night at her friend Kim’s house. I gave her permission.”

  Then no one was home at Libby’s apartment. Ned could have gone inside. He could have torn off her jacket. They could have had wild sex in every room. They could have made love with their heads inside the fireplace.

  His internal thermostat rose another ten degrees.

  And then dropped back into the polar zone when he acknowledged that Libby hadn’t invited him in. A few brief words and she’d been out in the hall with him, locking the door. She hadn’t wanted to be alone with him in her apartment.

  So she didn’t want to have wild sex in every room with him tonight. Okay. He wasn’t a maniac; he could accept that. They’d be civilized, have dinner, maybe kiss a little, and spend the night alone and bummed out.

  He’d made a reservation at a romantic bistro in the neighborhood, a place with soft music and candles on the tables and no crowd of twenty-two-year-olds in spandex lined up outside the door. Libby seemed pleased by his choice. “I’ve always wanted to try this place,” she said as they took their seats.

  They ordered—some sort of chicken thing for her, a slab of steak for him, a glass of chardonnay for her and an ale for him. He thought of the white wine chilling back at his apartment, and then thought of her apartment with its lack of children, and then he thought of her rushing him away from her door rather than inviting him in, and he stopped thinking about what would happen once they were done eating.

  “So,” Libby said, her eyes the color of dark chocolate. “Tell me the story of your life.”

  “In twenty-five words or less?” She smiled. He swallowed a bracing sip of his ale and tried not to let her eyes and her rippling hair and her smile distract him. “I grew up in Altoona, in central Pennsylvania,” he told her. “My dad’s a cop, my mother runs the house and one of my brothers teaches math and coaches lacrosse at a high school a few towns away. My other brother is an optician. He lives in San Francisco. Have I used up my twenty-five words yet?”

  “No,” she told him. “I’m counting. Keep going.”

  He laughed. His childhood had been stable and loving. He’d been a Boy Scout for a few years but quit when Little League took over his life. He’d devoured superhero comic books, collected stones that resembled arrowheads but probably weren’t, and walked the family dog when he got home from school. He’d helped his father with household repairs and developed some excellent carpentry skills. He’d lost his virginity at seventeen—a birthday present from Jenny O’Neill, his steady girlfriend through high school. It had been without question the best birthday present he’d ever received.

  He decided not to share that last detail with Libby. “I decided to become an architect,” he told her, “and I got a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania.”

  “You’re an Ivy Leaguer?” She seemed surprised.

  He supposed most Ivy Leaguers didn’t hammer nails for a living. He wondered whether his Ivy League degree would improve Eric’s changes of getting into Hudson, but decided not to bring up the subject. He didn’t want Libby’s job or his son to be a part of this evening. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a genius,” he said with a smile.

  “Penn has one of the top architecture programs in the country, doesn’t it?”

  “The undergraduate program was pretty comprehensive. I contemplated going on for a graduate degree, but…”

  “But?” she prodded.

  He couldn’t avoid every subject—and he shouldn’t. This was getting-to-know-you stuff. “I met Deborah, and we decided to get married, and we moved to Vermont.”

  “Because her family was there?”

  “She loved the place, and once I saw it I loved it, too. It’s beautiful up there. So…” He shrugged. What more could he say? That he’d been so crazy about Deborah he would have moved to Neptune if that was where she’d wished to live? That even as an undergrad, he’d always felt a little out of place in Penn’s architecture program, a working-class kid who enjoyed the physical aspects of design and construction more than the intellectual aspects?

  Their salads arrived, but Libby clearly had more important things than food on her mind. “Tell me about your wife,” she requested.

  Shit. If she was going to put him on the couch, she’d damn well better lie down on that couch with him—and remove her jacket before she went horizontal. “What would you like to know?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound testy. He supposed this fell into the getting-to-know-you
category, too, and he didn’t want her to think he resented her inquisitiveness or felt threatened by it. “She was an English major. She loved Emily Dickinson. She was a mediocre cook, she was tone deaf and she was incredibly sweet and generous. She was blond like Eric.” Certainly that ought to be enough. But he preempted Libby before she could tell him it wasn’t, and said, “Now tell me about your husband.”

  “Oy.” She rolled her eyes, then dug into her salad. “Harry is not incredibly sweet and generous. Well, he has his generous moments,” she amended. “But sweet he’s not.”

  Ned listened while she told him, without hesitation or hedging, about meeting Harry at Columbia—“just like you and your wife, except that in your case it was obviously a good match”—and found herself pregnant in the spring of her senior year. She told him they got married and, thanks to Harry’s law-school connections, they moved into the apartment she was now in the process of buying. Libby got a job as an assistant in the admissions department at Hudson, Reva was born, Harry finished law school and announced that he wanted a divorce. “I really can’t blame him,” she said, then shook her head and laughed. “Sure I can. He’s a schmuck. He wanted a high-power job that paid tons of money. Dirty diapers didn’t figure into his plans.”

  “His loss,” Ned said simply. He’d done his share of diaper duty when Eric was a baby, and he hadn’t minded. He would have gladly changed diapers for more kids, but Deborah had had a miscarriage, and that had sent her into a depression for a while, and she refused to attempt pregnancy. Ned had accepted her decision.

  He was only thirty-seven, though. Still young enough for another kid. So was Libby.

  Whoa. Where had that thought come from?

  “So, what do you think of the president?” he asked, deciding it was time to change the subject.

  Libby caught his eye and smiled. She must have agreed with him that enough had been said about their marriages, because she said, “I think most politicians are putzes. What do you think?”

  He wasn’t sure what a putz was, but he cheerfully concurred. “Definitely,” he said. “Putzes, one and all.”

  Nineteen

  Libby agreed to go back to his apartment, just for a few minutes. He wanted to show it to her, and she figured Eric’s presence would keep them out of trouble.

  Not that she feared trouble was imminent. She could just as easily bring Ned to her apartment and stay out of trouble. They didn’t need their children to chaperone them. If she told Ned she didn’t want to sleep with him, he would respect that decision.

  The problem was, she did want to sleep with him. She’d considered him a hunk from the first moment he’d stepped into her office—the star of the Hunks of Hudson calendar she and Tara had fantasized about—and the more she got to know him, the more aware of his irresistible hunkiness she became. But sex was a big deal. It meant a lot to her. If it meant a lot to him, making love would imply a commitment she wasn’t sure they were ready for. And if it didn’t mean a lot to him, then he was an asshole and she shouldn’t be sleeping with him.

  It was only ten-thirty, though, and her options weren’t limited to sleeping with him or saying good-night. So she walked with him back to his building on West 71st Street. He unlocked the glass front door and led her through the vestibule to the stairs, and they climbed. She was a little out of breath by the time she reached his floor. She ought to join a gym to get in shape. Maybe after she’d paid off her mortgage and her debt to Harry—she should only live so long—she’d be able to afford that.

  Ned led her to one of the four doors in the hall and opened it. The quiet babble of a television reached their ears as they entered, and then the sound ended and a wiry girl with a pierced eyebrow entered the neat, square living room. “Hi, Mr. Donovan,” she said, although her gaze fixed on Libby with blatant curiosity.

  “Any problems?” he asked as he dug his wallet out of his hip pocket.

  “Nope. Eric went to bed about ten. I hope you don’t mind that I let him stay up that late.”

  “That’s okay,” Ned said. “It’s a weekend.” He handed her a few bills. “Did he watch any TV?”

  “He mostly just did computer stuff,” she said, cramming the money into a fabric purse and sliding its strap over her shoulder. “I can get home myself.”

  “No, I’ll walk you.” He turned to Libby. “It’s just down the hall. I’ll be right back.”

  She waited for them to leave, then surveyed the living room. The furniture seemed lived-in, the surfaces clean of dust. A faded Persian rug covered the hardwood floor, and a pile of magazines—Newsweek, Computer World and Gotham—stood in a neat stack on one side table. On a shelf a framed school photo of a stiff, freshly barbered Eric was displayed, and also a photo of a younger Eric, maybe five or six, with his parents. Ned also looked younger in the photo, the laugh lines framing his eyes a little less defined, his hair marginally shorter. The woman in the photo was blond and delicate, with a tiny nose, blue eyes and cheekbones to die for. She was the exact opposite of Libby, at least in appearance. Probably in personality, too. Libby had a lot going for her, but she’d never really thought of herself as sweet. And her cheekbones left something to be desired.

  She wondered if Ned still mourned for his wife. He had clearly loved the woman, but he didn’t act like someone in the agonizing grip of grief. He seemed so blessedly normal, grounded, content. Why the hell was he wasting his time on a divorced single mother about to hurl herself into a bottomless pit of debt?

  He lusted after her fireplace, she recalled with a wry smile. And then there was his son’s dream of attending Hudson.

  She firmly shoved that thought from her mind. She was having too much fun on this date, enjoying Ned’s company too much, to spoil the evening by worrying about what he might hope to get out of her.

  He returned, whistling the way he’d whistled the other night while working on her fireplace. “Shh,” she cautioned him. “You’ll wake Eric.”

  “Eric could sleep through a nuclear explosion,” Ned assured her. “Would you like a glass of wine? I’ve got white and red.”

  She’d already had wine with dinner, as well as decaffeinated coffee and a flourless chocolate cake that Ned had forced her to order and she’d forced him to eat half of. She supposed another glass of wine wouldn’t kill her. “Okay. Thanks.”

  He led her to a kitchen so tiny she understood why he found her kitchen impressive. While she hovered in the doorway, since there really wasn’t space for both of them in the minuscule room, he removed a bottle from the refrigerator, uncorked it and filled two goblets. “I didn’t know you liked wine,” she said as he handed her one of the glasses.

  “It’s not beer, but it’ll do in a pinch.” He tapped his glass to hers. “To Libby with the beautiful brown eyes.”

  For some reason, his toast struck her as remarkably romantic. She must have regressed to her giddy I’m-on-a-date mentality.

  “So, this is the kitchen,” he said, waving with a gesture far too grand for the room’s puny dimensions. “And this—” he backed her out of the doorway “—is the living room. I added that wall.” He escorted her to a wall of bookshelves. “I decided we needed a separate den.”

  The renovation was so natural and well proportioned she would have assumed it was part of the original design. The den was nearly as small as his kitchen, barely big enough to contain the computer desk and the love seat he’d somehow squeezed into it.

  “My masterpiece is Eric’s room,” he continued, leading her back through the living room to a small back hall.

  “I don’t want you to wake him up.”

  “He can sleep through a nuclear explosion,” Ned repeated as he nudged the door open. She peered into the gloomy room. Once her eyes adjusted, she saw an elevated bed that nearly doubled the available space. Tucked beneath the bed was a dresser, a desk and a bookcase, creating a clubhouse-like nook. A ladder at one end rose to the mattress, and she was able to make out a lumpy silhouette beneath the rumpled blank
et. Heavy breathing just shy of a snore rose from the lump.

  “It’s wonderful,” she whispered. “He must love it.”

  “Yeah. He thinks he can hide things from me under the bed.” Ned touched her arm, guiding her out of the room. He closed Eric’s door. “Bathroom,” he said, pointing to another door. “Linen closet.” And then the final door. “My room.”

  Those two last words seemed to fill the snug space. His room. Was she supposed to say she wanted to see it? Had he built a loft bed for himself, too? If he had, Libby could dismiss any possibility of the evening ending on an X-rated note. No way was she going to climb a ladder for sex.

  So why else would he want her to see his bedroom? Did he have a wall of bookcases he wished to show her? An interesting window treatment? A restored fireplace?

  Damn it, she knew why he wanted her to see his bedroom. She just didn’t know what to do about it.

  In the sudden silence, he bowed his head and touched his lips to hers. Oh, God, she thought, I’m on a date with a hunk, and his bedroom is on the other side of that door.

  And his son’s bedroom was on the other side of a door, too. “Ned, I don’t think…I mean, Eric—”

  “Can sleep through a nuclear explosion,” he reminded her, sliding his free hand along the edge of her chin and into her hair. He kissed her again, a light, teasing kiss. Sweet, she thought. Ned was sweet. His kisses were sweet. The promise in them was so sweet they ought to be banned from weight-loss diets.

  She already assumed Ned was destined to be a weight-gaining experience for her. He’d bullied her into ordering that slice of sinfully rich cake, hadn’t he? She’d been relieved that he’d eaten part of it—but now she tasted traces of chocolate on his lips, along with coffee and wine.

  If only Reva weren’t at Kim’s, Libby would feel obliged to say good-night and go home so her daughter wouldn’t worry about where she was. Not that it was so late, and not that Reva would spend a full second worrying about Libby. Libby was the family worrier, Reva the worried-about. Yet Libby hadn’t remembered to call Reva all evening. She’d been having too good a time with Ned.