BACK HOME, FRANK made a mad dash for his bedroom and slammed the door. Like mother, like son. I stood listening to the faint fusillade of Mimi’s typewriter keys sounding in the distance, enjoying a sweet-scented breeze rearranging the wisps of hair around my face.
Then it struck me that the breeze meant one of the flattened-out cardboard delivery boxes I’d taped over the door hole when the dry cleaner plastic tore must have slipped loose. I hadn’t quite gotten around to finding workmen to fix that door. Frank and I had driven to the nearest Home Depot a week or so ago to ask for recommendations and pick up some supplies. But when I pulled into the lot, the station wagon was besieged by a scrum of out-of-work day laborers who elbowed each other aside and pressed their desperate faces against the car windows, shouting you need help lady you need help you need help in half a dozen different accents. Frank started screaming and we’d had to beat it out of there fast.
I hung up the car keys and went to the living room to retape the cardboard. But it had all been taken down and folded in a neat pile. The door hole was framed out in raw wood and a brand-new set of sliding doors leaned against the living room wall.
I stood in the framed-out doorway. In the yard, bent over two-by-fours laid across sawhorses, his back to me, a man in a tight black T-shirt was going at the lumber with a handsaw. Old school. I was so mesmerized by the ticktock rhythm of his arm going up and back, up and back, that I didn’t hear Frank coming.
“There he is,” Frank said.
“There’s who?” I asked. “Don’t tell me that’s Hanes.”
“I won’t,” he said. “Because it isn’t.” He ran across the yard and grabbed the guy by the biceps and pressed his face against his shoulder blade. Black Shirt lay the saw across the two-by-fours, turned around and swept Frank up as if he still weighed no more than a toddler. Frank’s face went pink and he giggled wildly. I’d never seen him laugh like that.
Xander set the kid on his feet again and looked at me. “Long time no see,” he said and smiled in a way that made me feel noticed for the first time since I’d come to California.
Frank ran across the grass, grabbed my hand and dragged me forward. “Inside the Hanes T-shirt you will find Xander.” It dawned on me then that Xander, Frank’s sometime piano instructor and itinerant male role model, must also be Mimi’s Mr. Fix-it who did things around the house whenever he was in town.
“Xander was wearing an Egyptian cotton shirt with French cuffs and a spread collar this morning,” Frank continued, “but we decided for his trip to the lumber yard and subsequent carpentry, a T-shirt would be more appropriate. As you know, we have many boxes on hand.”
Ah. Then it was Xander who took the car, not Mimi. Now I remembered I’d noticed the faint tang of milled lumber in the station wagon when I’d gone to rescue Frank. In my panic I’d mistaken it for the smell of my own desperation. Thank god I hadn’t decided to investigate Mimi’s office.
“Who’s your girlfriend?” Xander asked Frank.
“Alice is not my girlfriend,” Frank said. “She’s way too old and bony.”
“I don’t know,” Xander said. “She looks pretty good to me.”
( 12 )
WHO IS THIS Xander, Xactly? Mr. Vargas texted. I worried for his editorial dignity if he ever discovered emoticons.
Xander Devlin, I typed back. Julliard graduate and general handyman. Seems harmless. After I pressed “send,” I deleted our exchange. I was paranoid about leaving even the most innocent back-and-forth there ever since Frank had coyoted my phone.
It was Saturday and I was in the kitchen making lunch while Frank and Xander played a game in the living room with Mimi. The game was called “Frank, Xander, or Piano.” It was a sort of combination of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and name-that-tune, in which Frank and Xander sat on the piano bench while Mimi, on the couch and blindfolded with one of the ubiquitous black T-shirts, listened to a few bars of a song. When it stopped, Mimi had five seconds to name the player manipulating the piano’s keys. Frank was the official timekeeper, which meant he got to shout “TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TIME’S UP!” like the world’s happiest time bomb.