“In 1894, huh?” I said. “He’d be one hundred and fifteen years old if he were alive.”
“He’s probably glad he isn’t, though I wish he were. I suspect we’d have a lot in common.” Frank paged past a series of black-and-white photos: Mimi’s mother, in a two-piece bathing suit that looked like bulletproof underwear, a kerchief on her hair and red lipstick that showed black in the photo. Dr. Frank smiling at his wife as he settled his tuxedo jacket around her shoulders at their wedding, his young bride staring straight into the camera and grinning. Alongside that, another yellowed newspaper clipping, no picture, with the headline “Banning Marie Allen weds Julian Francis Gillespie” and a first line that read, “Under an antique veil of finest illusion—”
Before I could read any further, Frank turned the page.
After that, toddler versions of Julian and Mimi with chocolate-smeared faces, holding hands and squinting across a battlefield of ruined birthday cake. Preteen Julian and Mimi in a photo Christmas card, sitting back to back on the horse, Mimi facing the mane and Julian the tail, all three wearing Santa hats. Printed across it the line “We don’t know if we’re going or coming this Christmas!”
The color shots hadn’t aged as well. A Polaroid of Julian in his pitcher’s uniform on the mound, hair and face faded to a pale green. A prom portrait of him in a sky-blue tuxedo, face and hair yellowed out, a necktie knotted around his head like a kamikaze pilot’s, his arm around an empty space where his date should have been. Mimi at what must have been her high school graduation, dressed in a shiny black gown and mortarboard and looking worried.
Frank closed the album and put it on the ground beside him. “The end,” he said. “Everybody in these pictures is dead except for my mother.”
“Well,” I said, “who’s hungry?” But what I was thinking was, What about your daddy? Where’s his picture? Is his photograph not in there because he’s not dead yet?
The kid was right about having uncanny intuition because just then he said, “My mom has pictures of my dad somewhere, but she says he doesn’t belong to our family so they don’t go in this album.”
“Because your dad’s not—” I couldn’t figure out a tactful way to finish that sentence.
“Dead? I don’t think so. Maybe. I’ve never met him.”
“Have you seen the pictures?” I asked.
“Yes. But we keep our photos put away because otherwise they make my mother feel too sad. We don’t talk about him, anyway.” Frank picked up the album and tucked it under his arm. “I know how to make waffles. I’m very good at not spilling the batter.”
“I love waffles.”
He offered me a hand up. I knew I was allowed to accept it because he’d offered his hand to me, as stated in the Second Rule of Frank. “Of course you love waffles,” he said as he hauled me up. “You aren’t crazy.”
“How do you know that?” I asked as I followed him down the hall to the kitchen.
“The kids at school say I’m crazy and you don’t remind me much of me. Also, I just know things. For example, Thomas Jefferson had a waffle iron he bought in France.”
“You’re lucky. When I want to know something, I have to look it up. You’ve got so much stuffed in your cranium, Frank, I don’t know how you remember anything.”
“My mother says my brain is so full of facts that there’s no room for nuance. Our waffle iron is from China. We ordered it from a catalog called Williams-Sonoma. There was a sale for very special customers.” He dragged a stool to the counter, climbed onto it, and stood on his toes, straining to reach the waffle iron, still in its somewhat-battered original box, stored on the top shelf.
“Here,” I said. “Let me get that down for you.”
Everything happened fast after that. Frank shrieked, “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO,” swatted the box and sent it flying toward me. I covered my face with my arms and ducked. The box crash-landed someplace behind me and I lowered my arms and looked over my shoulder to see where. When I turned back, Frank was laid out on the linoleum like a corpse on a mortician’s slab, his eyes closed and hands bunched into fists. His straw boater rolled toward me in slow motion like a freed hubcap in the aftermath of a car crash.
“Frank?” I asked. “Are you all right?”
Mimi bounded into the kitchen in her nightgown then, one side of her face still creased by her pillow and her hair in two messy braids. She picked up his boater, stepped over the waffle iron box and knelt beside Frank. “Did he bang his head?” she asked.
“Bang his head? I don’t think so. I don’t know what happened. Does Frank have some kind of seizure disorder?”
“No, Frank does not have some kind of seizure disorder. For god’s sake. You’ve upset him somehow. Obviously.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” I said.