The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  Adding to her panic was her suspicion that it would take several hours and a forklift to clear all the application papers off the dining-room table. She didn’t have several hours. It was quarter to five, and Ned and Eric were due at six.

  And now, halfway home from the Hudson School, Reva had announced that some musician would be dropping by. “I told you,” she asserted. “I told you Darryl J was going to come over and record a sound clip for the Web site.”

  “When did you tell me this?” Libby demanded. She sped up a little, practically jogging the last block before their building.

  Reva jogged along beside her. “Last night.”

  She must have mentioned it while Libby had been measuring the barbecue sauce, or browning the breasts, or draining the liquid from the canned pineapple chunks. Libby had undoubtedly nodded and said, “Fine, fine,” without realizing what she’d agreed to.

  Apparently, she’d agreed to let her daughter invite a stranger—a street musician, no less—into their home to make a recording. “Why tonight?” she asked. “Mr. Donovan and his son are joining us for dinner.”

  “Eric’ll want to hear him. He helped design the Web site. Although he’s got sucky taste in music. He likes hip-hop.”

  Libby ignored Reva’s critique of Eric’s musical preferences. “What Web site?” she asked as they entered the building. Reva kept pace with her as she detoured to the mail room to pick up the day’s bills, gift catalogs and credit-card solicitations.

  “I told you. I made a Web site for Darryl J. Actually, Eric made it with my guidance. We have to put a sound clip on it so people will realize how talented he is.”

  Darryl J. Wasn’t that the singer Reva had been searching for when she’d turned off the cell phone and journeyed down to Greenwich Village a week and a half ago? Libby hadn’t completely lost her mind—she definitely remembered Reva telling her about the street musician.

  But she didn’t remember anything about a Web site, let alone giving permission for this Darryl person to come to her apartment.

  Maybe she should be glad Ned would be there. Not that she needed a big, strong man to protect her and Reva from the stranger Reva planned to welcome into their home, but…

  “When is Darryl going to arrive?” Libby asked as they rode the elevator upstairs. She’d never been impressed with the elevator until she’d started viewing it through Ned’s eyes. His passion for old architecture hadn’t quite rubbed off on her, but thanks to him, she’d developed an appreciation for it. The building’s maintenance fund—which she would be paying into as soon as Sharma approved her mortgage application—must include a budget for polishing the elevator’s honey-hued paneling and brass trim. The lustrous walls made her feel as if she were standing in a very, very small gentlemen’s club, one of those elite retreats where men smoked cigars and sipped brandy and closed billion-dollar deals.

  Libby wouldn’t mind a billion-dollar deal. A brandy would be nice, too. The cigar she could do without.

  “I’m not sure exactly what time he’ll arrive,” Reva answered.

  “You couldn’t do this another night?”

  “No, because for one thing, Katie Staver loaned me her digital recorder today, and I can’t just hang on to it forever. And besides, Darryl J works some nights, but he was free tonight.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “I don’t know. He serves drinks somewhere.”

  “He works at a bar? How old is he?” Oy vey, Libby thought. Her daughter had been traipsing through the city in search of some guy who worked in a bar.

  “Well, he’s only eighteen or nineteen. ’Cause he just got into college, which means he’s smart, right? But he’s taking a year off to try to make it as a musician. I think you can serve drinks if you’re eighteen. You just can’t drink them.”

  Why her daughter would be up on the intricacies of labor law was beyond Libby, unless it was because she wanted to keep abreast of Darryl J’s employment situation. “What are you going to do if he arrives just when we’re sitting down to dinner?” she asked.

  “I guess I’ll ask him if he’s hungry.”

  Libby suppressed a curse and tried to recall how many chicken breasts she’d marinated. She probably had enough for one extra mouth. “What’s he like?” she asked.

  “He’s very nice,” Reva said, her eyes glowing like hundred-watt bulbs. Wonderful, Libby thought. Reva’s in love. She was in love with an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old boy who worked in a bar. Not good.

  Libby would have liked to collapse on the living-room couch and experience a complete meltdown, but she had no time. As soon as she and Reva swept into the apartment, she mentally enumerated everything she had to do. “I could use your help clearing off the dining-room table,” she announced, “but first I’ve got to get the chicken into the oven and start the rice.”

  Reva gave her an alarmed look. “You’re making rice?”

  “You like rice.”

  “But it always boils over, and then you get all upset.”

  “I won’t get upset if it boils over tonight,” Libby promised, a vow she was likely to break. At least that wasn’t as great a sin as not having enough food for guests.

  Mollified, Reva shed her jacket and carried her backpack to her bedroom. Within a minute, she was in the dining room, scrutinizing the mess on the table. “What do you want me to do with all this?” she asked.

  Toss it down the compactor chute, Libby silently replied. She peeled the foil off the Pyrex dish with the chicken in it and slid it into the oven. “It’s in piles,” she called from the kitchen. “Keep it in the same piles and move it to my bed.” Ned wouldn’t be seeing her bed tonight.

  “What about the multimedia stuff?”

  Libby straightened, closed the oven door and turned. Reva stood in the kitchen doorway, holding up Samantha McNally’s greatest-hits CD and Jeremy Tartaglia’s videotape. Compactor chute, she thought, but said, “Leave them on my dresser.”

  She measured the rice and water into a pot and set it on the stove. Then she assembled the salad fixings. Did she have bread? She should have bought a loaf. Guys ate bread at meals. But what kind of bread went with Hawaiian chicken? Luau loaf? Poi sourdough?

  The doorbell rang. They couldn’t be here already, could they? And why hadn’t the doorman announced their arrival?

  Libby dropped the cucumber she was rinsing, shook the water off her hands and hurried from the kitchen in time to see Reva racing for the door. What a pair they were, both of them eager for the arrival of their sweethearts. Only Reva’s sweetheart was a much-too-old street singer who served drinks in a bar.

  Reva swung open the door. “What are you guys doing here?”

  “It was my idea.” Reva’s friend Ashleigh, pasty faced and draped in a long, swirling black velvet skirt, barreled into the entry, followed by the more modestly attired Kim. “We want to hear Darryl J make his sound clip. I talked Kim into coming because she’s so musical. You should have someone musical to judge if the recording is good.”

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Kim said. “Ashleigh called me at home and said you desperately needed me here. Hi, Ms. Kimmelman,” she added, acknowledging Libby, who stood in the dining room, dripping water from her hands onto the floor.

  “No problem,” Reva said rather presumptuously. What did she mean, no problem? Libby was hosting a goddamn dinner party. She was the one with problems.

  She heard a hiss coming from the kitchen. Shit. The rice had boiled over.

  Abandoning the girls, she dashed back to the kitchen to rescue the rice. Were Ashleigh and Kim expecting to stay for dinner? She’d prepared eight chicken breasts; if no one wanted seconds, she’d be okay. Libby wasn’t planning to eat seconds, anyway. Thanks to the revival of her sex life, she had a vested interest in keeping her tush from getting any bigger than it already was.

  Wiping the sizzling, milky rice water from the stove, she practiced breathing deeply. Why should she be rattled about having Ned and Eric over for di
nner? Ned clearly approved of her tush, and every other part of her. He’d had sex with her on the floor of the living room. Surely she didn’t have to impress him with her elegant hostess skills, of which she had none. And Eric was just a kid, and a male kid at that. Boys didn’t care if the stove was a little messy or the cucumbers sliced unevenly. She only hoped he wouldn’t mind the lack of bread.

  She was cautiously placing the pot back on the burner when the doorbell rang. She moved the pot to a cold burner before leaving the kitchen.

  Once again, Reva beat her to the door, this time with her giggling posse in tow. She swung open the door and smiled. “Hi,” she said, although it sounded more like a sigh.

  Darryl J was here. Libby braced herself to meet the man. She already hated him because he had the power to break her daughter’s heart. Reva had no business getting a crush on a man so much older than she was, at such a different point in his life from the one she was in hers, but crushes were irrational and often uncontrollable. Libby saw this situation ending in disaster.

  Kim and Ashleigh had fallen back a step, as if to give the visitor more room. He entered the apartment, a compact fellow—Ned had him in both height and weight, thank God—with skin the color of mocha and braided black hair and a huge guitar case. He wore jeans, but they weren’t torn or stained. In fact, he was dressed more neatly than Ned had been on Monday, when he’d raced from his work site to her apartment for their lunch-break tryst.

  “Hey, Reva,” Darryl J said, then nodded at Ashleigh and Kim and then turned to meet Libby. “Hey.”

  Hey? This was how the man who would break her daughter’s heart greeted her? “How do you do?” she said stiffly.

  “Mom, this is Darryl J. Darryl J, this is my mom, Libby Kimmelman.”

  If he called her Libby, she’d throw his guitar down the compactor chute.

  He won a few points by extending his hand and saying, “Thanks for letting us borrow your place to do this recording, Mrs. Kimmelman.”

  She shook his hand and decided not to tell him it was “Ms.” rather than “Mrs.” She was already feeling marginally better about the situation. He might even make his recording and leave before Ned and Eric arrived. And when he left, he could take Kim and Ashleigh with him. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” she said.

  “Try not to make any noise, okay, Mom?” Reva called over her shoulder as she led Kim, Ashleigh, Darryl J and his guitar into the den.

  Right. Libby would keep the rice from boiling over and not make any noise. At least Reva had gotten most of the clutter off the dining-room table. Things could be worse.

  She wiped off the outer surface of the rice pot, which was streaked with white from the water that had boiled over, and set it back on a burner adjusted to Low. Trusting the pot—undoubtedly a foolish thing to do, but she couldn’t spend the next half hour hovering over the stove, awaiting another eruption—she returned to the dining room to clear the last few folders from the table.

  As she carried them to her bedroom, she passed the den. Darryl J was tuning his guitar while the three girls crowded around him like guardian angels, or maybe Muses. If he objected to their nearness, he didn’t say so.

  Libby objected to their nearness. She’d prefer that her daughter put a few more inches between herself and the eighteen-year-old bar waiter.

  She was in the bedroom, adding her folders to the piles neatly arrayed across her bed, when Darryl began to strum. Not bad, she thought, remaining where she was so she could listen. The girls chattered for a minute—“We’ll just record it to see if you’re close enough,” Reva said. “I think it’s called a sound check”—and then he started to sing along with his strumming.

  Not bad at all.

  The doorbell chimed, interrupting his song. The girls keened at this dreadful interruption. It was only a sound check, Libby wanted to remind them as she strode down the hall, passing the den on her way to the front door.

  Ned and Eric stood on the threshold, Ned carrying a bottle of white wine and Eric a large bouquet of flowers. Libby’s eyes filled with tears, even though she knew the flowers were from Ned and not his son. “Thank you!” she gushed as she waved them inside. “Come on in. This bouquet is gorgeous! I’ve got to find a vase.”

  They stepped inside, Ned sending her a private smile, which, she supposed, would be the limit of their intimacy tonight. To her relief, he didn’t try to kiss her in front of Eric. She wasn’t ready for the kids to see her and Ned in PG mode, let alone NR-17.

  At the sound of a guitar chord, Eric tilted his head in the direction of the den. “Is that Darryl J?” he asked.

  “Yes. He’s recording a sound clip,” she reported, as if she actually understood what this whole enterprise was about.

  “Wow. Can I go watch?” He thrust the flowers into Libby’s hands and raced to the den, yanking off his jacket as he went.

  Alone at last. Ned stole a quick kiss that made Libby sigh. “A sound clip, huh.”

  “It’s for a Web site your son and my daughter are making. When did they do all this?”

  “When we were otherwise distracted,” Ned said, grinning slyly and stealing another, slightly less rushed kiss. Libby sank into it for a moment, then nudged him away. The kids were so wrapped up in their Darryl J project she and Ned probably could have torn off their clothes and gone at it in the entry without their noticing, but she still felt funny kissing him when Eric and Reva were just a few rooms from them.

  He set the wine bottle on the mail table and removed his jacket. “Who exactly is Darryl J?” he asked.

  “Some stray my daughter picked up.”

  “Hey, could you guys keep it down?” Reva scolded. “We’re recording in here!”

  Libby rolled her eyes. “We’re not allowed to make any noise,” she warned.

  “Well, that lets out some activities,” he muttered, wiggling his eyebrows lecherously.

  Libby didn’t think they were that noisy—but then, in the heat of passion, she was hardly aware of whether she was breathing, let alone moaning or screaming or…She felt her cheeks grow warm and busied herself hanging up Ned’s jacket. “I’m figuring we’ll wait with dinner until they’re finished,” she whispered. “Is that all right with you?”

  He shrugged. “I can work on the fireplace while they’re doing their thing.”

  In khakis, a dark plaid shirt and loafers instead of his clumpy work boots, he wasn’t dressed for fireplace work. But he’d gotten most of the messy part done already. The paint was completely off and he’d removed the wooden board someone had glued to the mantel shelf. A residue of glue remained. Perhaps that was what he intended to work on. Libby had told him to leave his tools, solvents and drop cloth at her place instead of schlepping them back and forth, so everything he needed was already here.

  “You can’t make any noise, though,” she reminded him. “The impresarios will throw a fit if you do.”

  “Well, I sure wouldn’t want them to throw a fit. I can work quietly.”

  “I’ll be in the kitchen,” she said, giving his arm a pat and carrying the flowers and wine with her. She hoped the rice hadn’t boiled over again. She also hoped she could remember where she might have a vase. The last time she’d had flowers on display in the apartment might have been after her wedding, when she had insisted on bringing home one of the centerpieces. She’d held the artfully arranged bouquet on her lap during the cab ride home after the dinner, and the floral fragrance had made her queasy. But then, everything had made her queasy during her pregnancy.

  She hadn’t needed a vase for those flowers, because they’d been wedged into green packing foam in a plastic bowl. What she’d needed then was a table to put the flowers on. The dining-room table hadn’t become a part of her life until she was eight months along, her belly so huge she could barely push in her chair.

  Entering the kitchen, she heard the lid of the rice pot rattling, but the water wasn’t boiling over. She checked the chicken again—nothing burning there—and rummaged through
her cabinets for a vase. Unable to find one, she grabbed a jar of pickles from the refrigerator door, discarded the pickles, rinsed out the vinegar and spices and stuck the flowers in. Not exactly elegant, but it would do.

  Darryl J’s music reached her faintly. Words spilled out of his mouth so fast she couldn’t decipher them, although they had an infectious rhythm and she found her feet moving to the syncopated beat. God help her if those lyrics were some sort of catchy rhyme about shooting up or shooting guns or enjoying unprotected sex with whores. Libby hoped she’d raised her daughter to have good taste when it came to music. But Reva was thirteen, so all bets were off.

  Libby carried the pickle jar into the dining room, then decided the table’s surface was too scratched to go naked. She pulled a tablecloth from the sideboard and shook it out, trying to remember when she’d last used it. It had a pale pink stain on one end. Wine? Cranberry sauce? For the life of her, she couldn’t remember the occasion. She vaguely recalled that the tablecloth had been a wedding gift from some distant relative. She wouldn’t be surprised if the last time she’d used it had been when she was still married to Harry.

  The stain wasn’t too bad. She’d cover it with the salad bowl—if she ever finished making the salad.

  She was once again attempting to slice a cucumber when the intercom buzzed. Three groups of visitors had arrived at her doorstep without being announced; apparently, the doorman had suddenly decided to do his job. She would have to yell at him for his failure to stop Darryl J, Reva’s friends and the Donovans. Once she owned her apartment, maybe she’d get a seat on the co-op board and yell at the doormen on a regular basis.

  She dried her hands on a sheet of paper towel before lifting the intercom receiver. “Yes?”

  “A woman named Vivienne is here to see you,” the doorman reported lethargically.