Love's Little Instruction Book (10 page)

There was a long moment of silence. Then Kirk said, “She liked it?”

Dave shrugged. “And he did it because he had fallen in love with her.”

“That’s sick,” Ghoulie said.

“Do women really like that stuff?” Dave asked.

“No,” said Ghoulie, with authority in his voice. “They don’t. And it was on the bottom shelf, remember?”

“So, what do these books have in common?” Dave asked. “Something that might be of use,” he clarified.

They looked at each other blankly.

“Same as before,” Kirk said at last. “Beautiful girl, handsome hero, a story that takes place in another time and/or place.”

“And the guy rescues the girl,” Ghoulie added.

Dave stared at him. “Does the girl ever rescue the guy?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” Kirk answered. “The girl in mine distracted the bad guy when he had a gun trained on the hero. That was enough for the hero to catch the villain off guard and get the gun away from him.”

Dave frowned.

“What’s the matter, Dave?” Ghoulie asked.

“You’re right,” he said. “The hero does always rescue the girl. But how do you rescue a modern, successful career woman?”

• • •

“Dave could help you.”

Dave, who was taking a short cut across the lobby of WMTR, almost kept going. Any time Presley was volunteering him for anything, it was almost definitely a good idea to keep going. He actually did put his head down and managed to take three steps before his curiosity got the best of him and he glanced over toward the receptionist’s desk.

She was talking to Denise.

Dave altered his course and headed back to the desk.

“What do you need?”

“I don’t need anything,” Denise said, smiling at him apologetically. “That was just Presley’s idea. I told her that I was going to be spending the weekend painting my mother’s porch and she suggested that I ask you to help. But I don’t need help. Really.”

“But Dave would be a great help. He used to paint houses in college. He’s helped lots of people around the station. You know Sally in the music library? He painted her whole nursery in just one day. Laid a coat of white, put rainbows on it, even painted the ceiling blue and put clouds on it so that it looked like the sky.”

“Sally was pregnant at the time,” he explained, feeling a little sheepish under Presley’s glowing recommendation. “She’s a single mom, and, well, a pregnant woman has no business trying to paint a ceiling.”

“And he painted Howard Kartstein’s dining room,” Presley forged on.

“He asked me,” Dave explained.

“And he helped paint his friend’s house.”

“My buddy Ghoulie. He bought a real fixer upper. He needed help. I did it for the beer, actually.”

“Denise could get you beer.”

Denise looked nonplussed. “Yeah, but he hardly even knows me.”

“Well, he’ll know you after the two of you spend the weekend painting together,” Presley pointed out.

“Presley!” Denise protested weakly. “I couldn’t impose on him like that.”

No fool, Dave decided that it was time to speak up. “It’s not really an imposition. Fact is, I paint faster and better than probably anyone else you know. I work cheap, too.”

“Beer?”

He shrugged. “Beer and maybe a free meal.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s up to you. But I’m willing if you need me.”

She frowned. “It’s a pretty big job.”

“Maybe, but it will go twice as fast if we both work on it.”

She searched his face with her eyes. “You’re sure you won’t mind?”

“It would be my pleasure.”

• • •

Denise wasn’t doing any sort of styling, simply pulling her black mane back and throwing it into a ponytail. Still, she couldn’t help but look at herself in the mirror as she looped the ponytail holder around the thick column of hair. It was a far cry from the way she’d looked back in the day when her main function was to serve as hostess at Manhattan dinner parties. Jason would have had a cow if he could see how she looked now — no makeup, no hairdo, no designer clothes. She grinned as she looked at herself — what she was wearing now was even less than off the rack. The cut-off, slightly frayed denim shorts were her own, but the plain white T-shirt was raided from her brother’s drawer, left behind when he moved out five or six years ago.

She wiggled her toes against the bathroom floor — the only part of her that was adorned, mostly because she hadn’t gotten around yet to taking off the most recent layer of nail polish. Yup. Jason wouldn’t have let her out of the bathroom looking like this, let alone out on the porch where someone might actually
see
her.

The doorbell rang and she padded her way down the hall, calling out to her mother that she would get it, bouncing down the stairs so that every other step creaked in protest.

Dave DiSciullo stood on the far side of the wooden screen door, frowning as he looked at the cracking and peeling porch railing with its dozens of narrowly spaced spindles. She could guess what he was thinking — with the number and close proximity of spindles, it was going to be a bigger job than he’d been anticipating. She knew how he felt. This was going to be the mother of all paint jobs.

“Hi, Dave,” she greeted, pushing the screen door open and stepping back to allow him inside. “Did you have any trouble finding the place?”

He returned her smile. “No, the directions were good.” He glanced back. “So that’s the porch?”

Her smile faded. “Uh huh. Quite a job, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “You know that the whole railing should be scraped before you start, don’t you? If you put fresh paint on top of paint that’s already cracked and peeling, it’s not going to last.”

She looked past him at the porch in dismay. “It’s not?”

He shook his head, and something about his grim, serious demeanor reminded her of a mechanic or contractor who was about to tell the ignorant woman that the job she had thought would be quick and easy would instead be long and expensive. She tried not to scowl at him. “I thought that if we just peeled off the parts that were falling off, then painted over the whole thing, it would be okay.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “You could do it that way,” he agreed, “but the paint would go on all uneven. You’d have a double layer where you painted over and a single layer where you peeled it off. And paint that goes on over paint that’s coming off the wood anyway isn’t going to stay on as long as paint that just goes directly onto the wood in the first place.” He peered up at her. “Have you got any sandpaper?”

“A little.”

“A little will get us started,” he said. “I’ve got an electric sander and a scraper in my trunk. We can use those on the railing and the flat parts at the top and bottom of each spindle, but those round sections,” he shook his head again. “They’re going to have to be done by hand.”

She glanced beyond him at the porch and grimaced, the nodded. “Okay. You’re the expert. May as well do it right the first time. Can I get you a drink before we start?”

He smiled and nodded. “I’d like that.”

She gestured him toward the kitchen and he fell into step next to her, rubbernecking as they went. “You live here with your mother?”

She nodded.

“Presley said your mom is some kind of writer?”

She snorted. “You might say that.”

He seemed a bit abashed. “I guess she’s really popular?”

“
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestseller list kind of popular.” She tried not to sound too proud, but she was just about ready to bust her buttons every time she talked about it.

“Wow,” Then, “I’d never heard of her.”

He seemed embarrassed, so she decided to take pity on him. “Not many guys read romance books — that’s what she writes.”

A look that she couldn’t interpret passed over his face. “Is she here now?” he asked.

She nodded as she opened the refrigerator and peered inside. “She’ll come out eventually,” she told him, “but she’s writing what she calls ‘the good part’ and she really hates to stop when she’s into it. It’s kind of like when you’re reading a good book and don’t want to put it down, only she’s writing it, not reading it.”

He nodded thoughtfully, but said nothing.

“It’s a little early for beer, although we bought a six pack for you. We’ve got milk, iced tea, diet soda, orange juice, cranberry juice … ”

“Orange juice would be fine.”

She pulled out a half gallon of juice and a pitcher of iced tea. “Are you much of a reader?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said, “you’d be surprised … ”

“I have trouble finding the time to read,” she said. “Although I read all of Mom’s stuff, of course. Even before it’s published.”

“Do you read it as she write it?” he asked.

“Not usually. Unless she asks me to read something because she’s not entirely happy with it and wants an opinion.”

She filled the glasses and turned, catching him looking around the kitchen. She could guess what he was thinking. It didn’t look like the kind of place you’d imagine a bestselling author living in. “You expected more, didn’t you?” she asked, handing him his glass.

“What?” he asked, not following the transition.

“The house,” she explained. “You probably expected something a little more … upscale.”

He colored, just a little. “I … I didn’t know what to expect.”

“Disappointed?” She knew what he was seeing — an ordinary, slightly old, slightly worn house. From the old round metal doorbell with the hard rubber button that made an old fashioned
brrriinnnggg
when pushed, to the kitchen with the linoleum floors, Formica table, white porcelain sink, and dangling pull chain to turn on the kitchen light, the house was so old that parts of it were now retro and in style again. It was old, ordinary, and very, very comfortable. And she loved it.

His mouth fell open for a moment before he answered. “It’s smaller than I expected. And the porch has way more spindles.”

She smiled at that, then picked up the carton and the pitcher and put them back in the refrigerator.

“Did you grow up here?” he asked.

“Uh huh. Still have a twin bed upstairs.”

He blinked. “Now that surprises me.”

She wiped her hands on her shorts, then picked up her iced tea. “It’s home,” she said simply. “How about you, Dave? Where’s home?”

“Originally, Melrose. Lately, I have an apartment in Everett. I rent the upstairs of this nice little old Puerto Rican lady’s house, Mrs. Silva. It’s kind of like having another mother.”

She leaned against the counter and raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean that in a good way, or a pain in the ass way?”

He glanced down at his glass. “A good way,” he told her. “She watches out for me and brings me up these great soups, and I shovel the sidewalk and mow the lawn for her. It works out really well.”

She looked at him as she sipped her tea. She had been a little reluctant to ask him to come over and help. She didn’t know him well, and felt funny imposing on him, but Presley had insisted that he should do it. He was a
nice guy
, she’d insisted. Denise could have politely refused Presley if they’d been alone, but when Presley called Dave over and he’d agreed that he’d do it, there hadn’t been any graceful way to refuse his help. She’d checked him out a little after that — discreetly, of course. She’d asked Sally in the music library and the station manager Paul Lund about him. They both had nothing but praise for the chunky, curly haired guy who now stood drinking juice in her mother’s kitchen.

“Are your parents in the area?”

He nodded. “Mom, Dad, and sister, all alive and well and living in Melrose. Have a niece and a nephew, too. Mattie is five and Marie is two going on three. Cute kids.”

She smiled.

“Do you like kids?” he asked.

She shrugged. “How can you not like kids?”

“Any nieces or nephews?”

“No,” she shook her head. “A couple of my cousins have kids, but none of us, yet. It would make my mother’s millennium to be a grandma, but none of us have obliged her so far. I’m the only one who’s gotten married so far, but no kids.”

He tilted his head and looked at her. “Divorced?”

She nodded. “Happily.”

“Well, if you’re gonna be divorced, it might as well be happily divorced.”

“Beats the hell out of the alternative.”

• • •

Within a half an hour, Denise knew that Dave was as good at painting as he was at being nice. He borrowed the electric clippers from the garage and trimmed the back of the shrubbery so that there was space to stand between the porch and the bushes, spread out the tarp that she had bought under the railing, and shown her how to use the scraper on the flat planes of the railing before settling himself down a few feet away with the sandpaper to work on denuding the rounded portions of the spindles.

While Dave had trimmed the bushes, Denise had dragged out a portable boom box and set it up on the porch, playing the radio set to — what else? — WMTR.

It was a very long day. Denise wanted to complain. She wanted to bitch and moan and whine and say that she was perfectly willing to live with uneven layers of paint on the spindles. Hell, at this point she was willing to say that she could live quite happily with one third of the porch absolutely denuded of paint. But then she’d glance over at Dave, stropping the sandpaper in one of the narrow places on a spindle with the same motion that one of the shoe shiners used on shoes at the airport. It wasn’t his house. It wasn’t his porch. He was just as hot and cramped and sweaty as she was, and he wasn’t complaining. She knew,
knew
, that he had taken the less desirable part of the job, and that he would end up calloused with broken nails and cramped fingers, and so she couldn’t really complain.

As much as she wanted to.

Dave turned out to be a surprisingly easy coworker. She had felt really annoyed with him when he’d told her that they’d need to strip the porch before they could paint it, and had worried that he’d turn out to be the kind of condescending guy who thought that he knew it all and that she knew nothing, but she was pleased to discover that once he settled down to work, he worked more or less in silence. At first that had felt a little awkward to her — her instincts were to try to entertain him with polite conversation and amusing observations, but as time passed and she got more involved with the job at hand, she became increasingly comfortable with the silence. She didn’t need to entertain, she reminded herself. It was okay to just
be
.