The Fixer Upper (19 page)

Since the last time she was with Ned. Friday night. Before Reva turned off her cell phone and became a teenager.

“Reva’s home,” Ned pointed out. “She’s safe. She’s acting civilly toward a boy three years younger than her. I’d say her mother must have done a damn good job.”

“You’re trying to butter me up so I’ll accept Eric into the Hudson School,” she muttered.

“No. I’m doing the fireplace so you’ll accept Eric into the Hudson School. Just kidding,” he quickly added when she
stiffened against him. “Check out this marble. Is that beautiful or what?”

It really was beautiful. Undeniably wow-worthy. “Is the outside going to look like that?” she asked.

“I hope so. The outside has more paint on it. We’ll just have to see.”

His arm was still arched around her, his chest still cushioning her spine. One of his knees nudged the outer surface of her thigh. His chin brushed the crown of her head. “I really should get back to work,” she said faintly.

He tightened his hold on her. “I’ll let you go in a minute.” He turned off the flashlight, depriving her of her lovely patch of green marble. “When can I see you?”

“You’re seeing me now,” she reminded him.

“When can I see you outside a fireplace?”

“Ned…”

“Come on, Libby. We’ve got something here, something with potential. We should follow through on it.” He shifted slightly, his knee bumping her thigh again, his belt buckle pressing into her tush. “And I don’t think your being pissed at your daughter is a reason to avoid me. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

He was so wrong she couldn’t even imagine of where to begin. So she kept her mouth shut.

“When can we get together?” he asked again. “Like a date or something.”

“A date.” She felt dazed, as if someone had clubbed her with a two-by-four.

“Yeah. We go someplace together, talk, enjoy each other’s company, maybe fool around a little afterward…. Maybe fool around a lot, depending on how things go. Or maybe not fool around at all, if that’s what you want.”

She wanted to fool around a lot. She wanted to feel so carefree and guiltless that going someplace with Ned and
fooling around a lot would serve as her general life plan. “I don’t know,” was all she could manage.

“Check your calendar. I’m free Friday night and Saturday night.” With that, he released her, then gave her a little push to evict her from the fireplace. She felt a rush of cold from the open window and the absence of Ned at her back.

She didn’t have to check her calendar to know she was free both Friday night and Saturday night. She was free every night, much to Vivienne’s chagrin.

Ned didn’t seem to care that she was upset. He still wanted her.

“I’ll check my calendar,” she said to his rugged work boots. But he was whistling and doing things to her fireplace’s interior, so she doubted he heard her.

“T
hat is so cool!” Reva leaned toward the computer monitor while the kid clicked some keys. He was really fast, and obviously computer-savvy. But he wasn’t like the usual nerdy little boys who obsessed over computers. He didn’t wear eyeglasses, he didn’t dress like a geek and he didn’t get all excited and start spitting saliva when he talked about techno stuff. For a ten-year-old boy, Eric was okay.

The software he’d brought with him constructed Web pages. He showed her some of the pages he’d created. One featured his after-school babysitter, and it was hilarious. The sitter was obviously an old lady, and he had one page designed like an ad for a musty-smelling perfume and another page full of
Wise Sayings from Granny Carpet-Stinky.
“Her real name is Mrs. Karpinsky,” Eric explained.

The sayings were really dumb, like: “Roughage is Mother Nature’s Roto-Rooter” and “If God wanted us to
watch TV, He would have wired the Garden of Eden for cable,” and “Because I said so.” A third page was labeled
Fashion Tips from Granny Carpet-Stinky
, and it included things like, “Hats are more attractive than frostbitten ears” and “Big sleeves make the arthritis in your fingers less noticeable.” The way he wrote
arthritis
looked wrong—Reva was pretty sure there was no
u
in the word—but she thought the joke was pretty funny, and much more subtle than the jokes she heard from guys in school.

“You must really hate this babysitter,” she said.

“I don’t
hate
her. She smells kinda funny, but…” He shrugged. “I wish I didn’t have a sitter at all. I wish I went to a school with a good after-school program, so I could just hang out there until my dad came and got me. Like at the Hudson School. They’ve got good after-school programs.”

“I hope you get in,” Reva said, meaning it. “I’d tell my mom to make sure you got in, but she’s mad at me right now.”

“Why?”

Reva answered with a shrug of her own. If she told Eric the truth—that her mother insisted on treating her like a three-year-old—Eric might tell his dad, and then his dad would tell her mom at some point when they were on a date or whatever. And then her mom would come down hard on her for complaining.

Reva couldn’t ask Eric for a copy of his software, even though she desperately needed to build a Web site. If her mother found her in possession of bootlegged software, she’d shit a brick. Reva was in enough trouble without breaking copyright laws or whatever all the fuss about bootleg software was about.

“I’m wondering,” she said, instead, shifting her chair closer to Eric’s so she could view the monitor with less distortion, “if you could build a Web site for me.”

“Sure. It’s easy,” he said. “You could build one yourself. I can burn you a copy of the CD—”

“No.” She didn’t want to turn him off by talking about the legalities of sharing software, so she said, “I’m such a doofus about computer stuff. If it’s easy for you, then you can do it.”

“Well…” He flipped through the old-lady pages he’d created. “It’s pretty much wysiwyg—”

“Huh?” She really felt like a doofus now.

“Wysiwyg. What you see is what you get. Some Web site software, you’ve got to do things in code and then download them onto the page. This, you just block out what you want and type in the text, or click and drag the image.” He gazed at her. “What kind of Web site do you want?”

She lowered her voice slightly, just in case her mother was eavesdropping. “It’s for a musician,” she explained.

Reva had found Darryl J after school on Monday, right where Ashleigh had told her he’d be, performing on the platform of the subway station at 72nd Street and Broadway. Naturally, her mother had checked up on her while she’d been in the subway, and Reva was pretty sure her mother hadn’t bought her explanation about missing the call—that she’d slept through it. Yeah, right. Like anyone could sleep through all that ringing. But her mother hadn’t accused her of lying, not in words. She’d accused her with her eyes, though, and days later her eyes still looked accusing. Her mother didn’t trust her anymore.

So what? Who cared? She’d seen Darryl J. He’d seen her. Even better, he’d remembered her. She’d had to remind him of her name, but he knew who she was. “Right. Reva,” he’d said, giving her a smile so big it made the underground station seem as bright as Central Park at noon.

But it wasn’t Central Park. “What are you doing down here?” she’d asked. “Why aren’t you playing in the park?”

“It’s too cold out there. My fingers don’t work when they’re cold.” He’d run his left hand up and down the neck
of his guitar, tapping his fingertips against the strings so quickly they produced fluttery notes. “The acoustics are fine down here, as long as no train is rumbling through. Money’s good, too. I had to audition to get this spot, ’cause the money’s so good. Everyone wants to play in the subway.”

“Yeah, but…” But Reva had had to pay a fare just to go downstairs to see him. Not that he wasn’t worth every penny she’d spent on the fare card. “I didn’t know where you were. You have fans, and if you change locations, people can’t find you.”

“Fans?” He’d tossed back his head and laughed, and all his little braids had vibrated as if they were laughing, too.

“Yeah. Like me. And my friends. And lots of others, I bet.” She’d been sort of amazed that she could talk to him this way, as if they were buddies, so close she could give him advice and he’d take it. “What you need to do is find a way to alert your fans to where you are.”

“You think?” He’d strummed his guitar, and the entire station resounded, all the steel and concrete surfaces bouncing his chords through the air. “How do I do that?”

“Flyers? You could post them around the neighborhood.” She’d design them for him and attach them to every vertical surface in the city. She’d run rows of them on the construction walls lining sidewalks, and on bus shelters, and in store windows. She could be his assistant, and he’d fall in love with her because she did such a fabulous job of publicizing him.

“They’d get torn down. Or ruined in the rain.”

“Can you run an ad? Like, in
Gotham
magazine or the
New York Times
or something.”

He’d laughed again. His laughter was as musical as his singing. “Reva, Reva, Reva,” he’d crooned. Then he’d begun a song, which, she realized after a moment, he’d made up on
the spot. “Reva…I could never leave her…I could not deceive her….”

Reva had thought she’d die, right there, on the downtown IRT platform. No one had ever sung a song to her like that. No one had ever made up a song, just about her—unless you counted her mother’s silly lullabies when Reva had been a baby, when instead of singing “Hush, little baby,” she’d sung, “Hush, little Reva.”

But Darryl J wasn’t her mother. He was the man she loved, the man she would someday sing with, and marry. “I’ll figure something out,” she’d promised him. “I’ll make you famous.”

Now, thanks to Eric Donovan, she’d figured something out.

“So, who’s this singer?” Eric asked. “Does he do hip-hop? I like hip-hop.”

Reva curled her lip. “Hip-hop sucks. You need to listen to good music. Like Darryl J’s. That’s his name—Darryl J.”

Eric hit a few keys to clear the screen. Another few keys, and a grid appeared, different rectangles outlined in dotted lines. He typed
DARRYL JAY
in one of the boxes.

“No. It’s just the letter—
J.
Without a period,” Reva informed him. “I guess it’s an initial or something, but I don’t know what it stands for.”

Eric accepted that with a faint “Humph.” He deleted the
AY
and hit the enter key. “I can play with fonts and stuff, colors, whatever. You probably need some artwork, though, like a picture of this guy or something.”

“I’ll have to get that.” Just seeing Darryl J’s name on the monitor and imagining an entire Web site about him excited her.

“So, what else are you going to want on this?”

“His picture, of course—” because he was so cute and that would attract fans “—and a list of where and when he’s performing. Like a concert schedule.”

Nodding, Eric moved the cursor to another box and typed
Concert Schedule.
“You know, this isn’t going to show up on the net or anything.”

Reva’s excitement transformed into uneasiness. “Why not?”

“You have to pay for Web space and register a domain name.”

“I have Web space,” Reva told him. “We get some space free with our ISP.”

“Oh. That’s good. You still need a domain name, though. DarrylJ.com or something.”

“How do we get one of those?” Reva asked.

Eric glanced at her. Maybe he was reacting to her use of the word
we.
But she saw them as partners in her mission to make Darryl J successful. Eric was the tech and she was the creative. She was also the marketing and the management, and maybe someday she’d be the missus, too, although she couldn’t imagine ever using that title, even if she got married. She’d always be Ms. Reva Kimmelman. She hoped Darryl J wouldn’t mind.

“You have to go to a service, reserve the name and pay for it,” Eric explained.

“Pay for it?” Shit. How was she going to do that? She didn’t have a checking account or a credit card. She had some savings in her bank account, but she could only withdraw that in cash, and couldn’t very well mail cash to whoever was in charge of the domain names.

Eric doodled on the computer for a while, saying nothing, letting her stew. She watched as he opened a second window, scrolled through a list of items and clicked on
guitar.
The picture of a folk guitar appeared in the window, and he click-dragged it onto the Web page.

“That’s the wrong kind of guitar,” Reva muttered. She felt the way she had years ago, when her father and Bony had
taken her to the Hamptons and every time she’d built a sand castle it had collapsed. Her Darryl J Web site sand castle was collapsing now.

“Um,” Eric suddenly said. “I might be able to use my dad’s credit card, but you’d have to pay him back.”

“Your dad would let you do that?” Mr. Donovan had to be the coolest father in the world. Reva hoped he’d keep seeing her mother. Maybe some of his coolness would rub off on her.

“I don’t know if he’d let me. I did it before and he didn’t kill me. It’s just a possibility.”

“If we could do that…Omigod, it would be perfect. As long as my mom didn’t find out about it.”

“Why? She doesn’t want you to do this?”

“She doesn’t want me to do
anything,”
Reva complained.

“Is she…” Eric glanced at her again. His sweatshirt looked a little small on him, his wrists sticking out. She wondered if he would wind up as tall as his father once he was done growing. “Is your mom in love with my dad or something?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Reva said. “I’m not even sure if she and your father are dating. She used to tell me stuff, but she doesn’t anymore.”

“It’s not that I mind or anything,” Eric said solemnly. “I would just want to know.”

“So would I.” Reva sighed. “Are your parents divorced, too?”

“No. My mom died,” Eric told her. “That was back in Vermont. I think my dad wants a girlfriend.”

Reva felt a pang of sorrow for Eric, but she did her best not to reveal her emotions. As much as she hated her mother right now, and her father, too—and she’d never been crazy about Bony—she was so lucky both her parents were alive. Death was awful. Especially the death of someone young.
Great-grandparents you expected to die, but not a kid’s mother.

“Well,” Reva said, “if your dad wants a girlfriend, he shouldn’t have picked my mom. She never dates.”

“Never?”

“She’s had a few boyfriends,” Reva conceded. “But no one serious. I wouldn’t count on her falling in love with your father. She doesn’t do that kind of thing.”

“Okay.” Eric deleted the picture of the guitar from the Web page, went back to the list and clicked on another item. A curving musical staff appeared, with a graceful treble clef at the left end and little notes dancing along the ribbon of lines. Eric click-dragged it to the Web page. Reva liked the guitar better, but she didn’t want to criticize him. His mother was dead, after all.

“I’m going to get a photo of Darryl J,” she said. “Maybe a couple. We could have one on the home page and one on a link that lists his performance schedule, and maybe another on a third page that has his biography. Does that sound good?”

“I guess.” Eric didn’t seem totally convinced. But then, he liked hip-hop. Reva would be wise not to depend too much on his aesthetic judgment.

She’d have to get photos of Darryl J. Kim had a digital camera. They could use it to shoot pictures of him, if he didn’t already have some photos he wanted them to use. Reva also had to get his performance schedule. He’d have to update it regularly, which meant he’d have to stay in touch with her.

“So, you’ll buy this domain name we need?” she asked, just to make sure.

He glanced at her, then turned his attention back to the screen. He still had a baby nose, small and soft. Reva had noticed that most guys didn’t start getting their real noses
until middle school. “Yeah, I’ll take care of that—but you’ve got to pay me back.”

“Of course.” Reva hoped it wouldn’t cost, like, hundreds of dollars. In less than two months she’d be getting more money—Hanukkah gelt from both sets of grandparents and from her father, too. He gave her presents, but he also always gave her some money. Bony would lecture her about how she should spend it on something of quality, not trash, but once the money was Reva’s, she could do whatever she wanted with it. And this Web site wouldn’t be trashy. Darryl J was a quality musician, and his Web site would reflect that.

“I need your phone number,” Reva said, pulling a sheet of paper from the printer and a pen from the drawer in the computer desk. “My mom probably has it, but I don’t want to have to ask her for it.” Reva didn’t want to ask her for anything. These days, whatever she asked her mother, the answer was no.

Eric wrote down his phone number and his e-mail address. Reva folded the paper four times and stuffed the thick rectangle into her hip pocket. “Thanks,” she said. “This’ll be cool. We can work on it while your dad and my mom do whatever they’re doing.” Eric seemed on the verge of asking her what she meant, and he was too young, really, for her to go into all the implications, so she added, “The whole fireplace thing. God knows why they’re so excited about a stupid fireplace that we never use anyway.”