“You’re still here, Miss Fix-It?” There was a glimmer in his eyes I liked, and I had to smile at the nickname.
“Yeah, looks like I’m sticking around for a little while after all.”
“I guess that makes two of us,” he said.
A playful mood struck me. “By the way, there are plenty of things I can fix, you know.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are,” he said, his tone matching mine. “Just not sculptures by famous artists.” That twinkle again.
“True. But I have to draw the line somewhere. I mean, I can’t be an expert at everything. I’ve already got a lot of areas covered, and there are only so many hours in the day.”
“Hmm.” He tilted his head back, assessing me. “But I was under the impression, given what you said yesterday about your experience with papier-mâché, that you were well schooled in art restoration.”
Why did he have to remember that? “Ah. Well, sadly, I realized my skills in that particular area are more suited to pieces created on a kindergarten table during the month of December.”
He peered at me in a suspicious way. “Are you saying your experience with papier-mâché was making Christmas ornaments as a five-year-old?”
He’d nailed it. I gave a sheepish nod. “Yep.”
He smiled. “You should have seen my papier-mâché ornaments. They were awful. I remember one year we were supposed to make a snowman and mine ended up looking like something out of a horror movie. It had this misshapen nose, and the eyes were dark and evil-looking. My mom was afraid of it. She wouldn’t put it up.”
I stifled a laugh.
“I bet yours were great compared to that.”
“Oh, I don’t know…”
He was being so nice. It was making me feel a little nervous, a little fidgety, like I might jump off the cliff. That was the term my father gave to my habit of rambling when I was anxious. It was as if the reasonable part of my brain shut down and let the other part go wild.
“So you didn’t go back to Manhattan,” I said.
“I was going to, but I got a lead on some properties out here and decided to stay and take a look at them.”
Why did I feel a little surge of excitement when he said that? I picked up a box of note cards from one of the shelves and tried to shake off the feeling. “Do you think anyone still uses these?” I held up the box. “It seems like a lost art. Although I do. Use them, I mean. My mother taught us when we were little that we had to write thank-you cards. She was a real stickler about it. She said she’d give the gift back if we didn’t send a card within a week. She was like a drill sergeant that way. I remember one time when…” I glanced at David. He was staring at me. I was doing it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“I use them sometimes,” he said. “Note cards.”
“You do?” I wondered if he really did or if he was just being nice. Either way, I felt better.
“Yeah. My mom was tough about that too.”
I liked the idea that our mothers shared that trait. I put the box back. “What’s going on with the hand? I’ve been wondering.”
“Not much,” he said, sounding a little frustrated. “Ana and I haven’t been able to get a hold of each other. And I’m not taking it anywhere until I find out exactly what Alex wants to do.”
Ana. So much was riding on her. It bothered me that she hadn’t returned his call. “You mean you haven’t spoken to her?”
“She called me back last night, but it was really late, and I was asleep. I tried her again this morning, but the call went right to her voice mail. I can’t leave the story about what happened on her voice mail.” His brows angled inward and a little ridge appeared between them. “I know she’s been in meetings with Alex and his clients, and there’s that time difference, but I really need to talk to her.”
“Time difference?” I glanced at a woman trying on an ivory-colored shawl.
“She’s in Aspen.”
Oh, right. Aspen. I’d forgotten. “I was in Aspen once, when Mariel and I were young. Dad was meeting some people about a play. It was summer and we went on the gondola up Aspen Mountain. Eleven thousand feet. Wow, that thing is…” I began to feel dizzy just remembering it. “It goes up and up and up. And you keep thinking you’re near the top, but you’re not. I had kind of a problem with it, fainted about halfway up.”
David winced. “You fainted?”
“Oh, I wasn’t out for long. Mom had a spritzer of Poison in her handbag. Do you know it? The Dior perfume? I guess she thought it might work like smelling salts. She sprayed it all over the place. It did work. Brought me right around. I’ve carried my own little spritzer ever since. Have you been on the gondola?” God, I was rambling again. I had to stop.
“Yes, I have,” David said. “I know what you mean. It’s disorienting.”
I wondered again if he was saying this sort of thing for my benefit. If he was, it was working. “What are you looking for?” I asked. “Anything in particular?”
He shrugged. “Something to bring back for Ana. She’s hard to buy for, though.”
Did that mean she was hard to please or that she already had everything she needed? “Is she picky?”
“Yeah, she is kind of picky.”
Kind of picky. “Would she return a gift you gave her if she didn’t like it?” I never returned a gift unless it was a piece of clothing and the size was wrong. I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
“She’s done it, yes. But that’s fine. She’s got very particular tastes.”
She was a gift returner, then. “Well, I guess as long as it doesn’t hurt your feelings…”
“I just want her to be happy.”
How sweet he was. I hoped Ana appreciated it.
I looked at the woman trying on the shawl. She’d switched to one in lavender, and when she turned, I thought for a moment she was Christy Costigan from my class at Hampstead High. Christy had sat across from me in three-dimensional art. I could still see those long tables and the cabinets filled with sculpting tools and paints and brushes. I could smell the paper and glue, the clay, the paint thinner. And I could see the teacher—petite, blond, pretty. She was a little bit of a free spirit. What was her name? Miss Bain, Miss Blair, something like that. No, wait a minute. It was Miss Baird. Jeanette Baird.
She taught sculpture. She was a sculptor. She showed us pictures of her work. Some of it was in galleries. An effervescent feeling enveloped me. Miss Baird could fix the hand. If she was still in the area, I’d find her and get her to do it. It was a brilliant idea. So brilliant I could have danced around the room. I’d figured out a way to resolve the hand dilemma. I turned to David, who was leafing through a coffee-table book. “I’ve got an idea about the hand. We can ask someone to help us.”
He closed the book and put it back on the shelf. “What? No. Definitely not. We tried that at the art store, remember? It turned out to be way too complicated.”
“I mean we could ask an artist. A real artist. I was thinking of Miss Baird, one of my high-school teachers. She was a wonderful sculptor. She could fix that thing in her sleep.”