The Fixer Upper (4 page)

I gave him a long look. He missed the point entirely.

“California’s out,” he said, as if that settled it.

I decided to seize the moment. “What I’d really like to do is stay in D.C. I went to school there, that’s where all my contacts are. Dad, if you could just help me out. It would only be three months. Six months tops. I’ve got a month’s severance pay coming. And I really think I could get by on three thousand a month. And it would be a loan. I’d pay interest and everything. I’ve been adding it all up. With rent, utilities, food—not that I spend that much on food, mostly I have business lunches with clients who pay, and most nights there’s a cocktail party, or a reception or dinner the girls and I can go to. There’s my Metro card, and of course, I’ve gotta keep up with my law school loans.”

Mitch drained his martini. “That’s another thing. Georgetown! You could have gone to any law school in the East. Not to mention Chicago and Denver. Goddamn Jesuits. They’ll be into you your whole life. If you’d listened to me and gone to Florida State, with in-state residency—”

“I wasn’t a resident of Florida,” I pointed out. “And I got my own scholarships and took out the loans, and I haven’t asked you for anything since I got out of undergrad school.”

Pilar had whipped a calculator out of the pocket of her sundress and was punching the keys and shaking her head. “Three thousand dollars? Tha’s, like, eighteen thousand.” Her eyes bulged from their kohl-lined sockets.

“
Ay Dios Mio!
Do you wanna know what I run this house on?”

I didn’t. And I certainly didn’t want her in on this discussion of my finances with my father. And I didn’t want to hear her usually normal accent deteriorate into a cartoon version of Ricky Ricardo either.

“We got two lil’ guys runnin’ around here. You know what a box of pull-ups costs? And I buy generic at Costco, so don’ start on that with me, Mitch. Groceries, gas, utilities, you should see the power bill—this dump got no insulation at all. Preschool? Our Lady of Angels is sixteen hundred a month. Multiply that times two.” She was standing now, her hands on her hips. “By the time my boys get to high school, Gulliver Prep is gonna be six thousand a month. Again, times two, pray to the baby Jesus we get Gavin potty trained by then. And what about the new house? You think that’s gettin’ built for free?”

“Pilar,” Mitch said. He nodded gently. “Nobody said the boys would have to go to public school. Or that we’d have to stay in this house.”

“Fine,” she said, sitting back down. “I’m jus’ sayin’.”

Mitch opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a manila file folder. He opened it, read the top sheet, nodded his head in approval.

“I’ve got another idea,” he said.

Pilar rolled her eyes. “I can’t wait.”

M
y father slid a yellowed black-and-white photograph across the desk in my direction. I picked it up and studied it. The picture was of a huge old house, antebellum, I guessed, with tall white columns marching across a wide front porch. It was set back behind a hedge of tall flowering shrubs, and a woman dressed in a hoopskirt and a 1950s-looking hairdo was posed prettily on the porch, waving, as if to a tour bus.

“What’s this?”

Pilar took the photo out of my hands and frowned. “Yeah. Wha’s this?”

“Birdsong,” Mitch said smugly. “My maternal grandmother’s family homeplace.”

“Your grandma lived on a plantation?” Pilar asked. “You never said anything about a plantation to me.”

“This is the house south of Atlanta?” I asked.

“Guthrie, Georgia,” he said. “Sixty-two miles south of Atlanta, if you want to be precise.” He smiled nostalgically. “I wasn’t born there, but my mother and father did take me there from the hospital. I guess I spent every Sunday of my life there until Dad and I moved when I was six.”

“When your parents split up?” I asked. I knew Mitch’s parents had divorced when he was young, and that he and his father had moved from Georgia to Nashville before he started first grade, but he’d never talked much about those early years of his life.

“That’s right,” Mitch said. “I guess I went back half a dozen times after we moved, to visit my mother and grandparents, but I don’t think I’ve seen the place since I was twelve. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten
it even existed until I got this letter from the lawyers.” He tapped the file folder.

“My great-uncle Norbert was the last of the Dempseys,” he said. “An old bachelor farmer. Never married, never had kids. He died several months ago at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. And it seems he’s left Birdsong to me.”

Pilar turned to me. “So, you’re named after them? I kinda wondered how you got such an unusual name.”

“It was Lynda’s idea,” Mitch said dryly. “She bought into all that romantic Southern crap about old family names. While she was pregnant, she got hold of an old family Bible and went through it looking for names for the baby. I told her I thought Dempsey was a terrible choice for a baby girl, but she was dead set on that name.”

Pilar turned to me and rolled her eyes again. “No offense, but your mama sounds like a nut.”

For some reason, I felt the need to defend Lynda, and her choice of baby names.

“I hated my name when I was in grade school. I always wanted to be named Katelyn or Tara or Brittany. But when I got to boarding school, it was kinda cool to be the only Dempsey.”

I turned to Mitch. “I always wished you’d had some family photos of your mother’s side of the family. So I could see the people I’d been named for.”

“My father wanted nothing to do with the Dempseys after the divorce,” Mitch said. “He never talked about them, so it wasn’t what you would call an amicable split.”

“But now they’ve left you a plantation house,” Pilar said excitedly. “How many acres? How many bedrooms?” She grabbed the photo again and stared down at it. “A place like this must be worth a lot of money.”

Mitch shook his head. “Not according to the lawyer.” He picked up a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses and took a letter from the folder.

“Carter Berryhill, he’s the attorney representing my great-uncle’s estate, says Birdsong conveys with point eight acres of land. At one time, I think, the property consisted of a couple hundred acres, but I imagine
the Dempseys sold off that land over the years, and the town kind of grew in around the house.”

“No plantation?” Pilar’s face fell.

“Sorry,” Mitch said. “By the time my grandparents lived there, there were maybe five or six acres. When I was a boy, it seemed like a huge place, with a barn where they’d once kept horses, and a small pasture where my granddaddy did keep a cow, along with a chicken coop and a big flower and vegetable garden, but of course, to a kid everything seems huge and magnificent.”

He ran his finger down the typed lines. “Berryhill says the property was recently appraised for ninety-eight thousand.”

“That’s all?” Pilar got up and went around behind the desk to read over Mitch’s shoulder, just to make sure he hadn’t gotten the number wrong.

“That’s next to nothing,” she complained.

“It does seem low to me,” Mitch said. “Birdsong was a showplace. When I was a kid, it was the biggest, fanciest house in town. Berryhill does say old Norbert was in poor health the last few years, and that the house is in pretty bad disrepair, so maybe that explains it.”

I’d picked up the picture and was examining it more closely. The Southern belle on the porch had a familiar look about her. I held it up for my father to see.

“Who’s this?”

He put the reading glasses on again and squinted down at the photo. “It’s such a grainy old print, it’s hard to tell. Could be my mother, I guess. Or maybe just some pretty girl who lived in town. Guthrie was the kind of place that always had aspirations to be like something out of
Gone With the Wind
. There was some kind of festival they had every spring, and all the women in town would get themselves up in hoop-skirts and other costumes like this. I think it was something the mill people and the business owners came up with to try to bring tourists in off of the interstate.”

Pilar looked at my father with astonishment. “You don’t even know if this is your own mama?”

“She died when I was nine,” Mitch said quietly. “Anyway,” he added,
pushing the file across the desk to me, “this is what I’ve got in mind for you.”

“What? Dress up in a hoopskirt and wave to tourists?”

“Birdsong,” he said briskly. “My first thought was to tell this Berryhill fella to go ahead and put it on the market, sell it and be done. That’s what I intended, until you called and said you’d been fired.”

I winced.

“Look,” Mitch said. “You’re out of work. Out of money, basically. No place to live—”

“The girls said I could stay—”

“Until your savings run out. After that you’re freeloading.”

“Not if you loan me the money—”

“Never loan money to family,” Mitch said quickly. “That’s my policy. Anyway, how do you plan to pay me back? There’s no guarantee you’ll get a job with this mess hanging over your head.”

“You’re saying you want me to move to Guthrie, Georgia? A place I’ve never been? Move into a house I’ve never seen?”

He tapped the photo with his glasses. “You’re seeing it right now.”

“I’ll bet it’s a dump,” I said flatly.

“Now, maybe. But not when we’re done with it.”

“We?” I said.

“I thought we could form a little partnership.”

“What kind of partnership?” I asked warily.

“I think we can flip the place,” Mitch said. “You and me. I don’t care what some country-bumpkin lawyer thinks, I know the old home place has to be worth more than ninety-eight thousand. A lot more. When I was a kid, Atlanta seemed a world away. But now, with all the urban sprawl, Guthrie’s got to be almost a suburb of Atlanta. I’ve done some research, and real estate in Jackson County has been skyrocketing in the past few years. Birdsong, fixed up, would be the perfect ‘estate home’ for some Yankeee corporate executive. Or a country retreat. Hell, the house alone has sixty-eight hundred square feet. A historic property like that, fully restored, ought to be worth around half a million.”

Pilar nodded vigorously. “At least. You can’t even get a chicken coop
in Miami for that much money.”

“I’m not asking you to stay down there indefinitely,” Mitch said.

“Yeah,” Pilar put in. “You can’t expect your dad and me to give you a free place to stay forever. We got bills too, you know.”

“Are you talking about flipping? Like all those reality television shows?”

“People do it all the time. Make a lot of money at it,” Mitch said.

“People who know what they’re doing. And I don’t,” I started.

“What are you talking about? I remember when you were just a little girl. We got you a Barbie dream house for your birthday. You threw out the plastic furniture that came with it and spent weeks painting and redecorating it with scraps of wallpaper and fabric from a sample book your mother had lying around the house.”

He turned to Pilar. “This was during Lynda’s ‘I want to be an interior designer’ phase. Which came after the fashion-model phase, but before the sculptress phase. If I had a nickel for all the art lessons and books and crap that woman bought—”

“Stop making Lynda out to be such a flake,” I said angrily, tired of his criticisms. “She’s actually a very talented artist. She’s been doing the jewelry for years now, and several of the hottest boutiques in Hollywood sell her stuff.”

“Hollywood!” Mitch said. “Where else could you sell a necklace made out of pieces of broken taillights and beer can pop-tops?”

“For a couple thousand dollars,” I added. “That’s what one of her pieces sells for, you know.”

“If you say so,” Mitch said, his expression telling me he found it unlikely. “Anyway, the point I’m making is, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to fix this place up and make a nice profit on it.”

“Maybe.” Now I was the one who wasn’t buying what he was selling.

“Tell you what,” Mitch said, turning his attention back to the golf tournament. “Hang on. I gotta check to see how Tiger’s doing now. That kid from Australia’s been breathing down his neck for the past three holes.”

“Dad?” I said.

“Oh yeah. You go on down to Georgia. Get yourself settled in the house, then get busy fixing it up. I’ll set you up with a credit card to buy supplies and food and whatnot. Shouldn’t take you more than a month or two to whip the place into shape, right? Then we’ll flip the place and split the profits. How’s that sound?”

“What?” Pilar screeched. “That sounds like some kind of fabulous sweetheart deal to me. How ’bout Dempsey stays here with the boys, and I’ll go up there and get the place ready to sell. It won’t take me any month, I’ll tell you that right now.”

“Damn!” Mitch cried, slapping the desktop. “He shanked it. Son of a bitch has been six under par all day, and he shanks it on the seventeeth hole.” He flicked the television off and stood up. He stood up and put his arm around Pilar.

“Now, baby, you know you don’t want to be messin’ around with some old house in some dinky little town in Georgia. What would the boys do without you? Hell, what would I do without you?”

“You’d get along,” Pilar said darkly.

“Dempsey?” Mitch said, looking over at me. I was staring down at the picture of Birdsong, at the mystery woman in the hoopskirt, waving to a carload of passing tourists.

“What do you say? Is it a deal?”

I sighed. “Deal.”

M
y mother was just as thrilled with Mitch’s project as my stepmother. “Guthrie, Georgia!” Lynda cried when I called to tell her of my impending change of address. “Precious, you can’t move there. Why, the place is a flyspeck. I bet they don’t even have a Starbucks.”

I was packing up the last of my belongings from the apartment in Alexandria. Not that there was much to pack besides my clothes and books. Lindsay had furnished the place before Stephanie and I moved in. And the girls quickly lined up a third friend to sublet my room on a month-to-month basis.

“Fix up the old Dempsey place?” Lynda went on. “What on earth can your father be thinking? You’re a lawyer, sweet pea. You don’t know the first thing about real estate.”

“Dad says I used to love to redecorate,” I said huffily. “Remember that Barbie dream house you guys gave me when I was little? And I made my own furniture and repainted the whole place? Dad said it was really something.”

“It was ghastly,” Lynda said. “You took Magic Markers and scribbled giant orange flowers on the outside of it, and then you glued scraps of hideous striped purple wallpaper over all the windows and the front door. But then, that’s how you dressed too, at that stage. I used to worry that you were color blind or something. Thank God you grew out of all that.”

The door to my bedroom opened and Stephanie plopped down on the bed. “My mom,” I mouthed, pointing to the phone. She nodded that she understood, but pointed at the watch on her wrist.

My plane was due to leave at noon, and it was getting close to ten.

“Look, Lynda,” I said, struggling with the zipper on my suitcase. “It’s not like I’m moving to Outer Mongolia or something. Guthrie is only an hour south of Atlanta. Remember Becky—my roommate from junior year at St. Catherine’s? She lives in Atlanta, well, Decatur, actually. She does something with computers. She’s going to pick me up at the airport and give me a ride down to Guthrie.”

“So does that mean you’ll be stuck down there without a car?” Lynda asked, even more horrified.

“Dad says I can pick up a used car cheap once I’m down in Guthrie,” I said. “Who knows? I may even get a pickup truck—wouldn’t that be cool?”

“Don’t even joke about something like that,” Lynda said. “It’s not funny. In fact, this whole bizarre undertaking has me worried sick. I still don’t see why you don’t just come out here and stay with us for a while. Leonard has so many friends in the film business. And you wouldn’t have to live in some backwoods hamlet and work like some field hand just to prove to your father that you’re not a failure.”

“Dad doesn’t think I’m a failure,” I lied. “And it’s sweet of you to want me to come out there, but I don’t know anything about the movie business. And I’m not licensed to practice law in California. It would take months and months before I could get to that point.”

“You could work with me,” Lynda said impulsively. “Learn to make jewelry. I’m about to hire an assistant. I could teach you instead.”

“I’ll be fine,” I told her for the tenth time. “It’s just for a couple of months. It’ll be an adventure! And in two months, after everybody in Washington has forgotten about this whole Hoddergate thing, I’ll come back, get another great job, and pick up the pieces of my life again. Which is what I really want to do, you know.”

“What about your boss?” Lynda asked. “Have you heard from him? What does he think about this whole crazy idea?”

“I haven’t heard from Alex,” I admitted. “According to Ruby, the office manager, he and his wife are in the Grenadines, on vacation. I sent him an e-mail, telling him where I was going and how he could reach me.”

“On vacation with his wife,” Lynda mused. “That can’t be good news for you.”

Stephanie stood up and tapped her watch again. “It’ll all be fine,” I repeated. “I’ll call you when I get down to Guthrie. And I’ll take pictures of the house, so you can see what it looks like.”

“Oh, I’ve
seen
Birdsong,” Lynda said. “Of course, it was a wreck twenty-five years ago, when your father’s family was living there, so I can only imagine how awful it must be now.”

“You’ve been to Guthrie? Seen the house? But when? Dad said he hadn’t been there since he was a kid.”

“He hasn’t, as far as I know,” Lynda said airily. “Your father had absolutely no interest in anything like that. But before I married Mitchell Killebrew, I made it my business to see the town he’d come from and meet the people in his family. On
both
sides of his family,” she emphasized. “Why do you think I was so determined to name you Dempsey? I’m not surprised his uncle Norbert left him the house. Such a sweet old man! And he always doted on Mitch, God knows why.”

“Demps?” Now Lindsay was at the door, jingling her car keys. “Let’s roll, girlfriend. Traffic on the beltway’s gonna be a bitch.”