“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Frank sounded troubled by this, like a guy who hadn’t noticed an open manhole at his feet until he’d fallen into it.
When would I learn? “Knock knock. Keep talking.”
“—The Manhattan Project, which led to the American invention of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Did you know that the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atom bomb, was built in Omaha in 1945?”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “So, Frank, you must love school. You know more than most grown-ups I’ve met.”
“The other kids say I’m retarded.”
“I thought they said you were crazy.”
“They say that, too.”
“They’re probably mad because you’re smart and make good grades. Kids are stupid like that. The teachers love you, though, right?”
“I’ll tell you what my mother says teachers don’t love,” Frank said. “Being corrected.”
Sheesh. “You don’t do that, do you?”
“Only when teachers make factual errors.” In the mirror, his shoulders hadn’t tensed up, but he’d put his goggles over his eyes again. “Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade,” he added.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. Frank Lloyd Wright never finished high school. Neither did Cagney or Gershwin or Ansel Adams or Irving Berlin. Charlie Chaplin and No?l Coward never even finished grade school.”
“Is that true?”
“My mother keeps a list in the drawer of her bedside table. You can go look at it sometime if you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you.”
“I want to go home now.”
“You’re the boss,” I said and crept off the highway at the next exit. Neither one of us said anything for the rest of the trip. The next time I stole a look at Frank in the mirror, he was sleeping like a baby, his goggles down around his neck and his face pressed against the window.
When we pulled into the driveway I could hear Mimi hammering away on the typewriter through an open window. Frank started awake when I turned off the engine and ran for the house like an electrified rabbit with a live greyhound at its heels. I found him crouched outside Mimi’s bedroom door, rocking in a little chair invisible to Earthlings like me.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
“I just want to sit here with her for a while.”
I got that. I would have given anything to sit with my own mother again for a while. “That’s fine. Just don’t bother her while she’s working, all right?”
He nodded and I decided to trust him. I went to the kitchen and hot-potatoed Mimi’s cell phone out of my pocket and onto the counter so she would see and relieve me of it as soon as possible. Then I took the list of emergency contacts from another pocket and entered them into my phone so I’d never have to touch hers again, ever.
After all that guilty business was taken care of I sorted through the mail I’d picked up from the box as we came in, separating trashable junk from the bills. There was rarely much of anything else in her mailbox, though sometimes Mimi got fan mail, recognizable by virtue of being hand addressed and stamped. Or, more unsettlingly, stamp free, saying only “M. M. Banning” on the rumpled envelopes, missives clearly shoved through the mail slot by one of her fanatics. Every time I handed her one of those pieces of somebody’s heart sealed inside an envelope, she tossed it in the trash unread.
Today, however, there was a postcard. It showed a shack with big stuffed animals—the kind you win at a fair and then lug around regretfully for the rest of the day—nailed all over it like lumpy and disheveled siding. I flipped the card over, thinking it might be some kind of nutty advertisement for a roofing company or maybe an invitation to check out an unusually depressing day care center. The card was addressed to Frank. I didn’t mean to read it, but there was so little written there, my eyes couldn’t help taking it in.
Outside Salt Lake City. Xander.
Xander again. Who was Xander? I put the card, writing side down, by Mimi’s phone, pulled a big knife from the drawer by the sink and started savaging basil for tomato sauce. I put a pot on to boil and slopped some olive oil and crushed garlic into a saucepan, and after that, cherry tomatoes. By the time I had the noodles draining in the sink, Frank wandered into the kitchen and said, “I’m hungry.”
“Lucky you,” I said, and put a plate of pasta in front of him.
“Can I eat this on the couch?”
“‘May’ I eat this on the couch. No. Gentlemen do not eat on couches.”
“Why not?”
“Because mankind went to all the trouble of inventing tables to save good trousers from bad stains. Couches deserve the same consideration.”
“That makes perfect sense,” Frank said. Then, “She’s never coming out, is she?”
“She will. She has to eat, too. Look, you got a postcard.”
Frank ignored the postcard, too caught up in the thrilling fork pursuit of tomato around the velodrome of his pasta bowl. I nudged the card toward him when he was done.
“Look, I got a postcard,” he said.