The Fixer Upper (11 page)

I
awoke Wednesday to the slow, excruciating drip of rain, and the sensation that I’d been beaten with a stick. Apparently my twice-a-week gym regimen in D.C. had failed to properly tone my housework muscles. A glance at my travel alarm clock told me I’d overslept. It was closing in on eight
A.M.
“Damn,” I said, with a yawn. So much for my plans to spend the day working in the newly cleared yard. It wasn’t until I finally managed to drag my aching bones out of bed that I made the depressing discovery that it was raining inside Birdsong, as well as outside. The dripping sound that had awakened me was actually coming from a spot on the ceiling only a foot or two from the window that overlooked the street. Water was already pooling on the floor, and an ugly brown mark stained the cracked plaster ceiling. And now that I was looking for it, I could see other, similar damp brown stains on the ceiling, close to the window. And yes, once I pulled up the edge of the braided bedroom rug, I could see that the worn pine floorboards also showed signs of water damage.

“Damn.” I stumbled around the room, searching for something to catch the drips, finally coming up with a wide-mouthed china bowl, decorated with a delicate tracery of blue vines, that had been stashed on the top shelf of the closet.

While the rain fell softly outside, I hastily pulled on the work clothes I’d left folded on a wooden chair the night before, and ran around the house to perform a thorough rain check. The news was not good. I found a leak near the back door, in the kitchen, and another in the trunk room. I placed a couple of battered tin saucepans under each leak, and went back to the kitchen.

I was pouring water into the coffeepot when I heard a bedroom door
open, and then the tip-tapping of a dog’s paws coming down the hallway. Shorty pranced into the kitchen, and without giving me so much as a sideways glance began pawing at the back door. I looked around for the dog’s mistress, but when Shorty’s pawing turned to urgent whines, I unlatched the door and let him out. “Don’t run away, okay?” I said nervously, poking my head out the door to watch him relieve himself on a tree trunk a few feet away.

“Shorty ain’t goin’ nowhere.” The voice startled me so, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I whirled around to find Ella Kate standing in the doorway with her customary peeved expression. She was dressed in another of her odd ensembles. Over her flowered, pink, calf-length housedress she wore a moth-eaten black cardigan sweater that sported a large gold
G
on its right breast. She wore thick, white-cotton tube socks, and over those, a pair of worn, brown-leather house shoes. Her fine, white hair had been scraped into a topknot that looked for all the world like a whale’s waterspout.

Ella Kate shuffled over to the kitchen counter. She filled a teakettle and set it on the stove’s front burner, which she ignited with a wooden kitchen match. From the cupboard by the sink she took a sturdy white porcelain coffee mug into which she spooned some of the Piggly Wiggly instant coffee.

“I’m brewing fresh coffee,” I said, in what was supposed to be a friendly gesture. “You’re welcome to some, if you’d like.”

“Hmmph,” she enthused.

“The ceiling leaks,” I offered. “In my bedroom, and the trunk room, and even in here, right by the back door.”

“Hmmph,” Ella Kate chirped.

“I guess I’ll have to get a roofer over here, right away, for an estimate.”

She shuffled over to the back door and held it open. “C’mon, Shorty,” she called. “Get your bidness done and be quick about it. I don’t need you tracking mud into my clean kitchen.”

I cocked an eyebrow.
Her
kitchen? And a
clean
one, at that?

Shorty ran into the kitchen and sat expectantly at her feet. “Good boy,” she said, pouring dog food into a cereal bowl she took from the
cupboard—the same cupboard that held the dishes I’d been eating from.

I poured myself a cup of the French roast coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table. Ella Kate stood and watched the dog eat. When the teakettle whistled, she poured boiling water over her own cup, stirred it with a spoon, then disappeared back down the hallway, cup in hand, the dog in her wake again. Seconds later, I heard her bedroom door open, and then close.

So much for our cozy little coffee klatch.

While my own coffee cooled, I dug the Guthrie telephone directory out of a kitchen drawer. It was only slightly bigger than a pamphlet. I found the number for Bobby Livesey, the handyman Carter had recommended, and dialed it, but got only a recording, promising that if I’d leave a number, Bobby would call back, “just as soon as I possibly can.”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered, chin in hand, listening to the hollow chink of raindrops meeting saucepan.

After I’d finished my bowl of cereal, and placed the rinsed-out bowl on the highest shelf of the kitchen cupboard, where Ella Kate presumably couldn’t reach it, I decided to mount a frontal assault on the inside of Birdsong.

I plugged in my iPod, and thumbed it to a selection of songs I’d listened to back in D.C., during my infrequent stints of jogging. When Sheryl Crow started singing “All I Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun,” I knew I’d found a tempo to work with.

By noon, and with the help of some serious dance tunes from Fergie, Gwen Stefani, and Madonna, I’d mopped, dusted, and scrubbed my way through the kitchen and the rest of the rooms downstairs, discovering, along the way, two more threatening dark patches in the ceiling.

When I got to the foyer though, I suffered a serious loss of momentum. The bare light bulb cast a gray gloom over the assortment of junk arrayed around the room. Sweeping up the plaster chunks and thin layer of dog hair did little to improve the room’s look. What this room needed, I decided, was a total and complete clean sweep.

I knocked purposefully on Ella Kate’s door.

“Who’s that?” Her voice was muffled.

I rolled my eyes. Who else would it be?

“It’s Dempsey. I need to speak to you, please.”

“Me and Shorty are busy.” I could hear canned laughter from a television set in the background.

“It’s important, Ella Kate.”

Footsteps. She opened the door a crack and poked her head out. Her pale blue eyes narrowed and her thin lips pursed. “What’s so important it can’t wait until
Golden Girls
is over?”

I took a deep breath. “I wanted to let you know that I’m getting the house cleaned up and cleared out. What would you like me to do with all the stuff in the foyer?”

“What stuff?”

“All that junk,” I sputtered. “A barrel of rakes and brooms? Buckets of fake flowers, all those old paperback books? And that dressmaker’s form? I need to know what you’d like me to do with all of it?”

Her nostrils flared. “Junk? That happens to be my property, missy. You just keep your mitts off of that stuff and leave it be.” She slammed the door to announce the finality of her decision.

I took another deep breath. Was I going to let an octogenarian squatter get the better of me?

“Ella Kate!” I rapped on the door. “I’m sorry, but this is my father’s house, and he’s asked me to get it cleaned up and ready to sell. You can’t leave that junk in the foyer. If you don’t get rid of it, I will.”

The door swung open. She stalked down the hallway with Shorty at her heels. A moment later, she was dragging the fifty-pound sack of dog food back toward her room. It was nearly as big as she was.

“Here,” I said, coming to her aid. “Let me help you with that.”

“Leave me alone!” she said, slapping my hand away. “You’ve done enough already. Those tools are perfectly good gardening tools. I was gonna put ’em in the shed myself, once the weather cleared and my bursitis quit acting up.”

“I’ll be happy to move them to the shed,” I said. “Now, what about the books? And the flowers? And the dummy?”

She continued to drag the dog food sack toward her room. “I save the flowers to put on graves in the family plot over at Greenlawn. Put ’em
out in the shed too, if you wanna be like that. That dressmaker’s form is a real antique. Norbert’s mama used it, and her mama before that.”

“Could it go up in the attic?” I asked gently. “Or would you like me to move it to your room?”

“Do what you want,” she muttered. “It ain’t my house, so I guess it ain’t for me to say.”

I sighed. “I’ll take it up to the attic and try to find a nice dry spot for it. Now, what about the books?”

“The books are for the ladies over at the nursing home. I can’t lift ’em, and since the sheriff took my license away, I can’t tote ’em over there myself.”

“I’ll load them into Uncle Norbert’s car and drop them off if you’ll give me the address of the nursing home,” I promised.

“I guess that would be all right,” she said reluctantly. A moment later, she slammed the door in my face again.

I smiled despite the rebuff. Score one for Dempsey in this round.

I borrowed a plastic rain scarf from the dressmaker dummy, picked up the barrel of rakes, and made a dash for the driveway. It took three trips, but soon the boxes of books had been safely stowed in the enormous trunk of the Catfish.

Now, I thought, grimacing, it was time for a trip to the attic. I couldn’t help but remember what Tee had told me about bats emerging from Birdsong’s eaves. I decided to leave the rain scarf in place—just in case.

The dressmaker form wasn’t heavy, but it was bulky. It bumped along behind me as I dragged it up the stairs to the second floor. I’d found the door to the attic on an earlier exploration of the house. It was narrow, and the steep stairs up to the attic were narrower still. The dummy barely fit through the door.

As I climbed the crude wooden stairs, the attic’s smell wafted down to me—a mixture of decay, mothballs, and dust. I was out of breath when I reached the top step. In the half-light filtering through the room’s grime-covered windows, the attic reminded me of an elephants’ graveyard, with the hulking, dust-covered carcasses of cast-off trunks and furniture and wooden crates arrayed about the space.

I found a frayed cord, and a yellow lightbulb bathed the old wooden roof timbers with a weird amber glow. I scanned the room nervously, on the lookout for marauding bats. Thankfully, I saw none. What I did see were the sources of several leaks, with rain drops steadily dripping through the ceiling and down through the floorboards. I trundled the dressmaker’s form to a corner of the attic that showed no signs of water damage, and then scurried around placing every container I could find under the leaks.

When she was high and dry, I looked around the room. Another time, I might have spent the whole afternoon exploring the attic. I’d been a bookish little kid, and as a preteen, had gone through a serious Louisa May Alcott period, when I longed to be like Jo, of
Little Women
, scribbling away in some cozy rooftop garret. In an earlier time, I’d gobbled up stories of pirates and treasure chests. The kid in me longed to start rummaging through all those mysterious crates and trunks.

Today, though, I had work I needed to get to. And a roofer to track down. Just as I was turning to go back down the stairs, I caught a glint of light from the far corner of the room. As I got closer, I saw that the source of the glint was an elaborate, triple-tiered crystal chandelier, which seemed to be hanging from the roof rafters by some sort of pulley.

I gazed up at it in admiration. Three tiers of crystal arms protruded elegantly from its center shaft, and ropes of dusty crystal beading festooned each of the arms. This, I thought, had to be the missing light fixture, either from the foyer or the dining room. It would come downstairs soon, I vowed. But not today. Not until I had a handyman with a strong back and a knack for old wiring.

With the foyer cleared of Ella Kate’s junk, I could finally get a good look at the room’s graceful lines. For the first time, I noticed the wedding-cake ceiling moldings, and the detailed wooden wainscoting. On either side of the door I discovered a pair of crystal-drop wall sconces that I hadn’t noticed before. There was even a deep coat closet, which had been hidden behind the stacks of book boxes. Its door was solid mahogany, and the handle, like all the other door handles in the house, was crystal, with a finely etched brass back plate.

Under all those layers of junk and grime, I was discovering that Birdsong truly was a gracious old lady of a house.

After I removed each of the crystals, soaked them in a sinkful of ammonia water, and replaced them on the sconces, I screwed new forty-watt bulbs into the fixtures and held my breath as I flipped the light switch near the front door.

Magic! It was still rainy and gray outside, but now, with the front door’s glass inset and sidelights cleaned, the floor mopped and the sconces functioning, the foyer looked positively elegant. I stood there, turning slowly, grinning like an idiot, soaking up the immensity of my accomplishment.

“Hmmph.”

I hadn’t even heard Ella Kate leave her bedroom. She stood in the doorway to the foyer, holding a squirming Shorty in her arms, a cracked patent leather pocketbook tucked in the crook of her right elbow.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” I asked.

She shrugged, setting Shorty down on my newly mopped floor. “Better than a poke in the eye with a short stick, I reckon,” she said.

I decided to take it as a compliment.

She stood there, her hands on her hips now, waiting.

“You coming, or what?” she said finally.

“Coming?”

“The nursing home,” she said. “You said you’d tote the books over there. I’ll show you where it’s at. Then, I need to get some things at the Piggly Wiggly. Need to get my heart medicine pills refilled at the drugstore. And I need to go to the bank too.”

“Oh,” I said weakly. I
had
promised to take the books for her. I went in search of my purse and the keys to the Catfish. Score one for Ella Kate.

T
hursday dawned so bright and sunny it almost made me forget the wet gloom of the previous day. I walked around the downstairs rooms, coffee cup in hand, trying to decide where to start the day’s work.

I’d had a serious money talk with Mitch the night before. “The roof is probably shot,” I told him. “And the kitchen is positively prehistoric. If there’s heat in the house, I can’t tell. We need to come up with a budget before I get in too deep down here.”

“Damn,” Mitch said. “Hang on.” Over the phone I could hear the tapping of keys. A calculator. “Damn,” he said again. “What about the plumbing?”

“The toilets flush,” I reported. “But there’s barely enough water pressure to rinse out a glass.”

“Old pipes,” he said. More tapping. “Damn.”

“Eighty thousand,” he said finally. “That’s it. As it is, I’ll have to move some money around, make up some story for Pilar about why we can’t buy a new car this spring. Eighty thousand, Dempsey. I mean it. Not a penny more.”

I had no idea how far eighty thousand dollars would go. But I had a strong idea that it wouldn’t go nearly far enough, and that I’d need to invest plenty of my own sweat equity in the project at hand. Right now, the parlor’s peeling wallpaper seemed to be calling my name. I cleared some porcelain doodads off the mantel and set my cup down. One firm tug brought a whole sheet of the paper gratifyingly—and cleanly—off the wall. Fine flakes of plaster rained down on Norbert’s borrowed sneakers.

With a fingernail, I pried up the edge of another strip of the paper,
but no more. “Come on,” I muttered, moving on to the next strip, whose edge seemed to be glued securely.

Somewhere, in all those magazine articles that made home renovation seem as charming and effortless as a summer picnic, I remembered reading a how-to article about wallpaper. Something about soaking the old paper off with some kind of chemical solvent.

I went to the kitchen to survey my arsenal of cleaning products. Window cleaner in a spray bottle. Pine-Sol. Furniture polish. A squirt bottle of concentrated tile cleaner. Bleach. Green-apple-scented dish detergent. Scouring powder. Surely, one of these would do the trick. I dumped half a cup of the Pine-Sol in a plastic bucket and filled it halfway up with hot water. Then I carried everything back to the parlor. I spritzed the window cleaner on the edge of the wallpaper and waited a moment, to give the ammonia time to work its magic.

I blinked back tears from the fumes, then attacked the paper with my fingernail. The top layer dissolved into a gooey mess, leaving behind a stubborn layer of yellow backing, clinging tenaciously to the plaster.

Okay, no window cleaner. I dipped a sponge into the bucket of water, sprinkled it with scouring powder, and scrubbed hard on the backing. I managed to rub my fingertips raw, but the backing stayed intact.

Pine-Sol? I dunked the sponge in the soapy, pine-scented water, and dabbed it on the same patch of wallpaper.

A shrill ring echoed from the hallway, startling me so much that I dropped the soapy sponge on the floor.
Brrinnnnggg.
It sounded like an old-fashioned bicycle bell. For a moment I thought it might be a telephone. But the ring was coming from the hallway.

Brrinnnggg.
I trotted out to the hall, and could see, through the now squeaky-clean glass in the door, that the ringing was coming from the doorbell, which was being rung by a man.

I opened the door. My visitor was an older black gentleman, medium height, trim build. His hair was hidden under a red ball cap, but his thin mustache was graying, and he wore thick-lensed eyeglasses. He was dressed in work clothes, but not like any work clothes I’d ever seen before. His pale blue denim shirt was pressed, and livesey contracting
was embroidered in red over the shirt pocket. His blue jeans were spotless, knife creased, and his work boots had a dull polish.

“Hello?” I said cautiously.

“Hello. I’m looking for Miss Dempsey?” he said, glancing down at the clipboard he held in his right hand.

“Yes,” I said, wiping my own hand on the seat of Norbert’s overalls. “That’s me.”

He eyed me quizzically. In baggy overalls worn over a faded Redskins jersey, my hair held off my face with Norbert’s oversize handkerchief, I probably didn’t look like Miss anything. “You’re the Miss Dempsey called lookin’ to have some work done on your house? Roofing, like that?”

“Yes,” I repeated. “I’m Dempsey Killebrew. I’m the one who called you.”

“Ohhh,” he said slowly. “Killebrew?”

“Dempsey Killebrew. I live here.”

“That so?” He tugged at the bill of his cap, and looked around the porch, then back at me. “I was thinking Mr. Norbert’s family still owned the house. You the new owner?”

“It’s confusing,” I said, with a laugh. “My father is the new owner. Mitch Killebrew. Norbert Dempsey was his great-uncle. My father’s mother was Olivia Dempsey Killebrew. I’m named Dempsey for her.”

“Ohh,” he said again. “So, your daddy’s people were Dempseys?”

“On his mother’s side.”

A slow smile spread over his face. “All right then. Now I gotcha.” He stuck his hand out. “Bobby Livesey. Livesey Contracting. You called about needing some work done? How can I help you?”

It took most of an hour to show Bobby Livesey everything that was wrong with Birdsong. We started with the attic, and worked our way all the way down to the cellar. Along the way, Bobby poked and prodded. He tapped the old walls with his knuckles, like a surgeon sizing up the patient’s chest. He dug a penknife into the ceiling beams, shone a flashlight into the crawl space. He clucked and made notes with a small silver mechanical pencil in tiny block letters on his clipboard.

Along the way, I gave him an abbreviated explanation of how Mitch
had inherited Birdsong from his great-uncle Norbert. I explained that we wanted to fix the house up and flip it.

“Flip?” He frowned.

“You know. Fix it up. Make the repairs so it can be sold for way more than the ninety-eight thousand the county says it’s worth. Invest a little money, sell it, and make a nice profit.”

He nodded gravely, made a note on his clipboard, and we moved along with the tour.

“Well?” I said when we’d arrived back in the hallway. “What do you think? Can the patient be saved? Or should we just pull the plug and start all over again?”

“What? This old house? This here is a fine old building.”

“You’re going to tell me they don’t make ’em like this anymore?” I kidded.

“No, ma’am,” he said soberly, not taking the bait. “They sure don’t. This house is a rock. Solid, through and through. Your roof needs work. And yeah, the wiring’s about sixty years out of code. But that ain’t nothing. You should see some of these sorry new houses I work on around town. Brand-new houses, I’m talking about three hundred, four hundred thousand, they’re sellin’ for. Ain’t a single plumb wall in the place, skinny old wallboard no thicker than a sheet of paper, all of it held together with a caulk gun and a promise.”

He thumped the thick molding of the doorway with his knuckles, smiling, as though he’d picked out a perfectly ripe melon. “This house here is a beauty. One of a kind. You just need to shine her up a little, show her some love.”

“You can do all that?” I asked. “A new roof, wiring, fix the plaster?”

“Oh yeah,” he drawled. “We can do it. That ain’t no problem.”

“But how much? I’m on a tight budget,” I explained. “And I don’t need it all to be perfect. It just has to look good enough to sell.”

He looked down at his clipboard, and then back up at me. Bobby Livesey was a taciturn man, courtly as only a Southern man of a certain age can be. But his large brown eyes gave him away.

“Just good enough? If that’s all you want, you might oughtta get
somebody else,” he said finally. “I ain’t ever studied doing something halfway. Ain’t going to now.”

I felt a swift pang of regret at disappointing him. “Halfway, no, I don’t want you to do it halfway. I just meant, well, money’s tight. We’ll have to make every dollar count. And I’m willing to do some of the labor. I want to, in fact.”

He looked me up and down, took one of my hands and turned it palm side down. The skin was reddened from the cleaners I’d been using, but my French manicure was a dead giveaway.

“What did you say you did, before moving down here?”

“I’m a lawyer by training,” I said. “But I worked as a lobbyist. In Washington.”

He blinked. “A lawyer, huh? You studying on doing lawyering here in Guthrie?”

I laughed. “No. I’m studying on fixing up this old wreck. And I’m thinking you’re the man who can show me how to do that.”

The doorbell rang again.
Brrinnnggg. Briinnggg. Briinggg.
Whoever was at the door wasn’t nearly as patient as Bobby Livesey had been.

“I better get that,” I said. “There’s a pot of coffee made out in the kitchen. Maybe you could fix yourself a cup and come up with some kind of ballpark estimate on what the roof will cost? And the wiring?”

“Sure,” he said. “That ain’t no problem.”