The Fixer Upper (10 page)

Or maybe not. What did he know? He should just shut up, chug some ginger ale and take off before he put his foot in it again.

“Reva…” she addressed her daughter. “Why don’t you give your father a call while I get the champagne.”

Reva scowled. “If I call him, he’ll be out of his office and I’ll just wind up leaving a message that he’ll never get.”

“Then call him at home and leave a message there. He’ll want to hear about the solo, and the date of the concert. It’s such exciting news.”

While Reva yanked her windbreaker over her head, Ned processed what Libby had just said.
Call him at home.
She wasn’t married to Reva’s father. “If I leave a message there,” Reva said, “Bony’ll get it and make a big deal out of it.”

“It
is
a big deal.”

“She’ll say I should lose weight so I don’t sound fat while I sing.”

“If she does, I’ll punch her in the nose,” Libby promised. “I bet she’ll say you need a new outfit for the concert, and she’ll bring you to some fancy boutique and spend a lot of money on you.”

Reva considered her mother’s words and grinned. “I’ll call,” she said, yanking off one wet sneaker and then the other, and padding down the hall, hopping over the stranded shower sandal rather than stopping to pick it up.

Call him at home
. Ned shouldn’t be thinking what he was thinking…but Libby had such gorgeous eyes and a vulnerable smile, and he’d liked the feel of her shoulder bumping his under the umbrella, the graceful curve of her arm as he’d helped her regain her balance…and he
really
shouldn’t be thinking what he was thinking. Totally inappropriate. She was the flipping Hudson School director of admissions.

She sauntered through the dining room and, although she hadn’t invited him to accompany her, he followed, registering the dining-room’s chair rails and beveled windowsill, all of it coated in gloppy white paint. He unbuttoned his jacket, which wasn’t leaking water like Eric’s because he’d stayed relatively dry under the umbrella. Libby wasn’t too wet, either. In the kitchen, she kicked off her shoes and lost an inch and a half in height. Her skirt fell to her knees, but what he could see of her legs he liked. She shrugged out of the blazer of her suit and tossed it onto a chair, and he liked what he could see of her back, too, the slope of her shoulders under her white blouse, the wild waves of her hair.

More than inappropriate, he scolded himself. Demented. For all he knew, Libby could have a husband making his way home right now. Just because she wasn’t married to Reva’s father didn’t mean she wasn’t married. And even if she wasn’t…damn it, she held Eric’s educational fate in her hands. Ned could find other women to admire, women with pretty eyes and crazy hair and great legs. Women who couldn’t wield any power over his son.

There was always Macie Colwyn, after all. Her hair would qualify as crazy. Merely thinking about it made him wince.

Hovering in the kitchen doorway, he watched Libby pull several inexpensive-looking champagne flutes from a cabinet shelf and arrange them on a metal tray. The kitchen was small, but it was larger than his—big enough to fit a tiny table into one corner—and it had a window. It also had more than its share of clutter: a box of Grape-Nuts cereal on the table, a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, an empty gallon-size milk jug on the Formica counter. With stone counters, the kitchen would look so much better. And with the paint removed from the cabinets. Someone who lived here must have really had a thing for ugly white enamel. The stuff was slathered over practically every surface.

But whatever lurked under all that paint might be magnificent. “This apartment is really something,” he said.

“Thanks.” She removed a bottle of ginger ale from a shelf in her refrigerator.

He tried to focus on the kitchen, but his attention refused to shift from her. He shouldn’t have asked her about how Eric’s interview had gone, but he’d asked anyway. And he realized—because he wasn’t good at playing games or stifling his curiosity—that he was going to ask her something else he shouldn’t. “It’s none of my business, but…”

She twisted off the cap, and the bottle of soda hissed. As
she filled the glasses, she said, “For all I know, the fireplace
does
work. One of my neighbors told me a long time ago that the flues had been sealed off as a safety precaution. But maybe he was pulling my leg.”

She was giving Ned an opportunity to back off, but he was too foolish to grab that opportunity. “I meant, about Reva’s father. It’s none of my business, but are you divorced?”

She lowered the bottle and stared at him. He wished he were as skilled at guessing her thoughts as she was at guessing his, because for the life of him he had no idea what was going through her mind. She wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t seem angry or affronted. Nor did she seem entirely comfortable. Uneasy, possibly pissed. Maybe even panicked, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

“Yes,” she answered. “I’m divorced.”

“And there’s someone named Bony?”

“Bonnie,” she corrected him. “Reva’s stepmother. Reva calls her Bony.”

Okay. Libby hadn’t slapped him, hadn’t told him to take a hike, so he pushed a little more. “Does Reva have a stepfather?”

Libby gave the question far more consideration than it deserved. Either she was married or she wasn’t. Was there some gray area he wasn’t aware of?

“No,” she finally said. “No stepfather.” As if she wanted to cut him off before he could venture any further, she turned from him, lifted the tray and started toward the door, leaving him no choice but to move out of her way. “Where’s the superstar?” she shouted as she carried the ginger ale through the dining room. “It’s time for a toast! And then the Donovans have to leave.”

Well, there was an answer for him.
The Donovans have to leave.
What he’d seen shimmering in her big brown eyes must have been panic after all.

Maybe he ought to develop his mind-reading ability before he attempted to put the moves on a woman. Libby was clearly a mind-reading master. She’d read what was on his mind just now—and read, as well, that he was mind-illiterate, so she’d helpfully spelled out her sentiments:
The Donovans have to leave.

He might be dense, but he could take a hint. Gorgeous woman, gorgeous fireplace, and neither would get stripped by him. At one time, he’d known what he was doing around women, but his skills must have atrophied. Marriage could do that to a guy. He’d have to polish his moves—and practice on a woman who didn’t work at the Hudson School, for God’s sake.

In the meantime, he’d choke down a little ginger ale, grab Eric and his umbrella and get the hell out of there.

R
eva felt giddy and light-headed, as if she’d actually been drinking champagne instead of ginger ale. Too much singing, probably. She’d hyperventilated or something. Too much dancing, as well. Her hair was still damp from bopping around in the rain, and it was going to get all weird—not as awful as her mother’s, but she’d have to wash and straighten it tonight if she wanted to show her face in school tomorrow.

And she definitely wanted to show her face. She was a
soloist.
She flopped onto her bed, let her wet head sink into the pillow, closed her eyes, whispered, “I am a
soloist,”
and smiled.

She’d always believed she had a good voice—but not really. It was one thing to believe something, and another to have proof that other people believed it. You could tell yourself over and over that you had a great voice, but if Ms.
Froiken never gave you a solo, you couldn’t help wondering whether you were deluding yourself. Like maybe you couldn’t truly hear how you sounded because your voice was entering your brain through your tonsils instead of your ears. Reva was always a little startled when she heard her own voice on a tape.

But now, the world—or at least Ms. Froiken—had finally acknowledged what Reva had always believed: she had a great voice. A magnificent voice. A soloist’s voice.

A voice as good as Darryl J’s.

Well, not that good. Nobody sang as well as he did. Besides, she was a girl, so she couldn’t really compare her voice with his anyway.

But if she was good enough to sing a solo, she might be good enough to sing backup for Darryl J. She’d been fantasizing about that ever since Kim had brought it up last week, and now the fantasy was a few steps closer to reality. How cool would it be to sing backup for him? She could dress in something slinky and black and semi-sheer, with lots of silver jewelry, and she could do a simple rhythmic step and rattle a tambourine—or she could learn some chords on a guitar. The guitar couldn’t be that hard, and she was a lot smarter than some of the kids she knew who played the instrument. Talented enough for a solo meant talented enough to learn a few chords, right? Darryl J could teach her.

The phone rang. She thought about ignoring it and letting her mother answer, except her mom was getting dinner ready and washing the champagne flutes—twice as many glasses as she would have had to wash if she hadn’t impulsively invited that kid and his father upstairs for ginger ale. Reva hadn’t minded including those people—at the moment, she didn’t mind
anything
. The boy had been okay, less creepy than most boys his age. He didn’t do anything gross or obnoxious, like pick his nose or go on and on about video
games or other geek subjects. And his father seemed okay, too, although all his comments about the fireplace and the floors were kind of strange.

One thing Reva was learning about guys was that they became obsessed with weird stuff. Her dad was fanatical about his Scotch, for instance. It had to be a certain brand, a certain age, a certain color—yet the whole point of drinking Scotch was to get drunk, and once you achieved that goal, who cared about the brand, the age and the color?

So the umbrella man was fanatical about fireplaces. In the grand scheme of things, Reva considered that a better obsession than Scotch.

The call was probably from her father. She’d left a message on his machine at home, and he always called her back when she left messages. Pushing herself up, she grabbed the phone from her night table, lifted the receiver and hoped her father had gotten to the answering machine before Bony did. She’d rather not talk to Bony.

“Hello?”

“Um…Reva?” A boy’s voice, deep but not man-deep yet. Familiar. She tried to place it, all the while wondering what boy would be calling her. Someone who needed help with homework, no doubt. She didn’t hang out with the dating kids, so boys generally didn’t phone her unless they wanted something, like the reading assignment or her answer on the third math problem.

“Yeah, who’s this?” she asked, doing her best to sound bored.

“Luke Rodelle?”

“Oh.” Luke Rodelle was pretty cute, and he’d score only a two or three on the creep scale, which went all the way to ten, except for Danny Vandrick, who was easily a twenty. Luke’s hair was thick and kind of long, and he dressed mostly in baggy khakis and untucked polo shirts, and his
upper lip had a smudged appearance, as if he’d been sucking on pencils. He ought to start shaving. “Hi.”

“Yeah, so I was wondering—would you shut up?” he said, not to Reva but to someone on his end of the line. At least, Reva hoped he wasn’t telling her to shut up. She’d hardly even said anything.

She heard some laughter in the background and sighed. So help her, if Luke had phoned her on a dare and was going to ask her whether she smoked after sex or something, she would hang up so fast he’d feel the slam of the phone like a slap right through the wire. And then she’d tell everyone in school tomorrow that he was a jerk, and they’d take her seriously because she was a
soloist.

“Sorry,” he said, sounding sincere. “I was wondering, Ashleigh Goldstein mentioned this musician you know? Darryl something?”

Reva could hardly claim she
knew
him. But he’d asked her name the last time she’d seen him at the park, and then he’d sung a song just for her. The next time she saw him, he probably wouldn’t even recognize her, but for now, she saw no reason to correct Luke. “Yeah. Darryl J,” she told him.

“See, I’m kind of searching for something new. Music-wise, I mean. Hey, I heard Froiken gave you a solo.”

Reva puffed up a little. She remembered what her mother had said—that Ms. Froiken didn’t
give
Reva the solo; Reva had
earned
it. She wouldn’t say that to Luke, though. It would come across as bragging.

Through the phone she heard a high-pitched howl, some guy in falsetto pretending to sing something operatic. That unpuffed her pretty fast.

“Would you just—jeez,” Luke said to the screecher, and then, to Reva, “That’s just Micah Schlutt. He’s such an asshole.”

Reva didn’t know whether she was supposed to agree.
Luke hung out with Micah, after all. If they were friends, it wouldn’t be very nice for her to say he was an asshole, even if she happened to think he was.

“Anyway, I’m on the committee for the holiday dance—I’m not sure how that happened, except Matt Staver put me up to it—but anyway, I think the whole deejay thing is getting old, you know? So I was wondering, where does this Darryl dude play? I’d like to check him out.”

Reva bit her lip to keep from blurting, “At the Band Shell in Central Park.” For one thing, as autumn grew colder, he might not be playing outdoors that much longer. For another, he was way too cool to perform at a school dance, for God’s sake. For yet another, he was
hers.
She wanted him to have the biggest possible audience, but she also wasn’t ready to hand him over to the rest of the world in the form of Luke Rodelle and his committee. “He plays in the park,” she said vaguely, because she had to say something.

“Central Park? ’Cause, you know, there’s sometimes some music action down in Washington Square Park.”

Was Luke up on street musicians? Did he actually travel all the way to Greenwich Village in search of decent singers? Reva could just imagine asking her mother if she could spend the day in Greenwich Village. If her mom ever allowed it, which was highly unlikely, she’d make Reva go with friends and bring the cell phone, and call home every half hour just to say she was safe, even though her dad lived only a few blocks south of there. Her mother treated her like such a baby sometimes.

Luke rose considerably in her esteem because he was knowledgeable about Greenwich Village musicians. “Maybe Darryl J plays in the Village, too,” she said. “I’ve only seen him in Central Park.”

“So, he’s good, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s good.”

“Okay.” Luke had apparently run out of things to say, which made the gross-sounding background belch noises from Micah hard to miss. “Yeah, well, so anyway, I thought maybe you could show me where this guy plays.”

“Sure,” Reva said. Her voice was steady, but her heart started thumping like an out-of-control metronome. Was Luke asking her out? Or did he just want her to lead him and his committee to Darryl J’s spot by the Band Shell, and then her job was done and she should disappear? Since she wasn’t one of the dating kids, she wasn’t real skilled at reading the nuances. How could a girl tell whether a guy was asking her out or just asking her a question?

“So, like, when would be a good time for you?” Luke asked.

If she said after school one day this week, it wouldn’t be like a real date. It would just be an after-school activity, sort of. If she said Saturday, the whole thing would become more serious. What did she even think of Luke Rodelle? He seemed nice enough, but her only real contact with him was in math and history, where he didn’t really say much although at least he didn’t make stupid comments, and more generally from the fact that they’d both been attending Hudson forever and it wasn’t such a big school that you didn’t get to know all your classmates to a certain degree.

Did she like Luke enough to suggest Saturday? Or would she be better off playing it safe and saying Thursday? If this was only about finding a musician for the holiday dance and all he wanted was for her to point out Darryl J to him and then go away, she’d just about die if she’d devoted a Saturday to that. But if he actually intended to share Darryl J with her and they went on Thursday, then they could only spend like an hour together before she’d have to go home, because her mother would shit a brick if she stayed in the park past four-thirty.

She was keenly aware of the silence between them. She had to decide. “Saturday?” she suggested.

“Okay.”

Omigod. He’d said okay. “What time?” she asked.

“One o’clock?”

“Okay.” So they wouldn’t have to eat anything while they were together, which was probably good.

“We could meet somewhere. The Band Shell’s gonna be too crowded.”

“How about the mosaic at Strawberry Fields?’

“Okay.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well. Bye.”

“Bye,” he repeated, then hung up.

After setting down her phone, she sprawled out on her bed and reran the conversation in her head. This wasn’t a date, she told herself. He just planned to observe Darryl J for some stupid school dance.

Well, so what? She didn’t want to be dating Luke—or anyone else, for that matter. Her heart belonged to Darryl J. And she’d be helping him by generating some new fans for him, which was a very loving thing to do. Let Luke hang out with a turd like Micah, who thought making belching noises was funny. Reva didn’t like him that much.

She was a
soloist
, after all. That was way cooler than Luke Rodelle could ever hope to be.

Libby scrutinized the video box in her hand. Its computer-printed label gave the title of the video as
Scenes of a Childhood
. It purported to present a visual narration of the life of one Jeremy Tartaglia from his birth to his fifth birthday party.

“Tara, could you watch this video for me?” she asked her assistant.

“Is it X-rated?” Tara inquired.

Libby considered the scene of Jeremy Tartaglia’s birth. “There might be some nudity in it,” she said.

Laughing, Tara accepted the box from Libby and handed her three pink message slips. “Louise Streitmeister phoned three times. She said she wants to talk to you about the donation she intends to make to the Hudson School.”

“She should discuss it with someone in the business department, or the fund-raising chairpeople,” Libby said, accepting the pink squares of paper and frowning. “Why does she want to talk to me?”

“I assume her donation is contingent on the status of Aidan Streitmeister’s application,” Tara explained.

“Wonderful.” Libby tossed down the message slips as if they were radioactive. “If the woman’s handing out bribes, she might as well make a donation to me, not the school.”

“Oh, yeah, like that would really work. You’re so corrupt.” Tara started toward the door. “Your interviews begin at ten-thirty today. I’m gonna go scare up a VCR to check out this flick.” She glanced at the label. “It isn’t Swedish, is it? There was some Swedish flick with a title like that.
Scenes of a Marriage,
I think. I had to watch it in my film class in college. It went on forever. Very long and boring.”

“If that’s long and boring, we won’t accept the kid,” Libby promised, then waved Tara out the door.

Alone, Libby stared at the pink message slips. The audacity of applicants—or, more accurately, their parents—astonished her. Did this Streitmeister woman really believe she could buy her son a place in next year’s kindergarten class by making a huge donation to the school?

Maybe the idea wasn’t all that far-fetched. Only a couple of generations ago, that was exactly how things worked at elite private schools like Hudson. Families offered endowments and their offspring attended the school. Applications were just a formality. A top-flight education could be bought and sold like a loaf of rye. A very, very expensive loaf of rye.

If only she
were
corrupt. If only parents like Louise Streitmeister made donations to her instead of the school…

No, she didn’t need Streitmeister money. Harry would come through for her.

She hadn’t heard from him since Sunday, but that was an auspicious sign. If he’d decided to deny her any assistance, he would have phoned to let her know. He loved to say no.

Still, it would be nice of him to phone and say yes.

As if on cue, her phone rang. She glanced at her watch—ten-fifteen. Harry wouldn’t call her this early unless he had an emergency, and he never had emergencies. They were too messy.

Maybe it was Louise Streitmeister, calling to ask whom she should make the check out to. Libby chuckled and reached for the phone, knowing Tara was off searching for a VCR so she’d have to take her calls herself. “Libby Kimmelman,” she said.

“Hi, this is Ned Donovan.”