“You did? Spectacular. Who’s it from?”
“Xander. He’s back on our side of the Continental Divide.”
“Who’s Xander?” I said, hoping I sounded more innocent than I felt.
“Xander is my piano teacher. When he’s around.”
“Oh, yeah? How long have you been taking lessons?”
“Off and on since I was little.”
“You know, I’ve never heard you play.”
“I don’t like playing much. I’d rather listen.”
“So why do you take lessons?”
“Because my mother says my gifts shouldn’t be squandered. Also, Xander is my friend. He’s been coming here to play our piano since before I was born. He tried to teach my mom to play. She says she wasn’t any good because she was too old to learn, but she liked him and he likes our piano, so she gave him a key to our house so he could let himself in and play it anytime.”
I had to turn to the sink so he wouldn’t see the avid look on my face. Not that Frank was much for reading facial expressions, but it shamed me to show my evil twin, Nosey Parker, to anything more sentient than a crusty skillet. “So, Xander stays here?”
“Sometimes. When he’s in town. He makes money teaching piano lessons. He plays in restaurants, too, and fancy department stores until he gets a wad of cash up. Then he wanders all over the place until the money is gone. In my gallery I’ve mounted a retrospective of his postcards. Would you like to see?”
As someone who had vacuumed every inch of the house outside the forbidden zone of Mimi’s office, I had to wonder where this gallery might be. Frank led me through the sliding doors, blasted right past the art installation in the tree and stopped in front of the garage. I’d seen the garage a million times, but had gone so far past not noticing it backed up close to the stucco security perimeter that I’d never even wondered why the car wasn’t parked in it, ever. Unlike the house, it had a shake roof with moss growing on the wood shingles shaded by a eucalyptus tree, and stucco walls instead of floor-to-ceiling windows. All the better, I supposed, to stuff it floor to ceiling with junk.
Frank threw the door up with one hand and swept a bow to the interior, like Aladdin welcoming me to his cave. But it was neither cave nor junkyard, and in fact so not of a piece with the house that it took my breath away. The walls were whitewashed boards and exposed studs with a bank of windows on the backside tucked under the rough beam-and-plank ceiling that was also the floor to the loft spanning much of the garage. More light spilled in through skylights set on either side of the peaked roof. The concrete floor must have had some kind of seal on it because it shone like marble and there was neither oil stain nor faded memories of leaking radiator fluid to be seen anywhere. The oddest part was that there was nothing in the bottom floor at all, no old bicycles nor toys nor rusty tools nor screens to windows that didn’t exist anymore. Not even a rake or a hose. I’d never been in a cleaner garage in my life. Or a bigger one. It could have housed a dozen tractors.
“Look how nice it is in here,” I said. “You could eat off the floor.”
“Even gentleman could?”
“No, gentlemen could not. I didn’t mean you could literally eat off the floor. That’s just something people say when a floor is really clean. Most garages look like Dagwood Bumstead’s closet, with junk falling out all over the place every time you open the door.”
Frank lit up when I said that. “Fibber McGee had a closet like that, too, but since it was a radio program they had to convey its overstuffed nature through the medium of sound. My mother is not an archivist like I am and doesn’t believe in keeping things. She says the more you have, the more you have to lose. So if she doesn’t have any use for something, it’s gone before you can say ‘Fibber McGee’s Closet.’ Come on. The gallery is up here.” Frank scrambled halfway up a ladder of two-by-fours nailed between a pair of studs. There was a trapdoor up top that he pushed open and climbed through. He poked his head back into the frame of the hole to watch me ascend. “Careful,” he said. “The old lady fell off this ladder. And she was way closer to the bottom than you are.”
“What old lady?”