You might think this an easy game, since one of the players was a Julliard graduate, one a computerized piano, and one a nine-year-old boy, but Xander had come up with a way to mix up the material—some ragtime, a little classical, and a few choruses of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” that kept Mimi guessing, or pretending to guess. I could hear her laughing, as well as Frank’s monotone “ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” I had never managed to make Frank or Mimi laugh like that.
Not only was Xander more fun to be with than I was and worked a black T-shirt way better; he’d replaced the shattered sliding glass doors in three days using only the most primitive of tools. When I asked why he didn’t use an electric saw to cut the two-by-fours, he’d given me one of those cripplingly gorgeous Jay Gatsby smiles of his and said, “An electric saw? Around Frank?” He’d also snaked every drain in the house, vacuumed lint from the dryer engine and dust from the refrigerator coils, and changed all the fluids in the station wagon. When he wasn’t doing something useful, Xander played the piano with the joyful abandon of a golden retriever fetching an old tennis ball.
What’s his story? Mr. Vargas asked.
He just shows up from time to time, says Frank.
Why?
Started as Frank’s piano teacher. Now mostly fixes things. Far as I can tell.
Did Mimi send for him?
That hadn’t occurred to me, though it made perfect sense. Which bothered me, since I was the one who was supposed to be fixing things, or having them fixed. Dunno. I put my phone down to toss the salad. When the light started flashing I picked it up again.
How old is this Xander?
Old, I typed. The first time I saw Xander in daylight I’d been surprised by the lines across his forehead and bunched at the corners of his eyes. Veins mapped the back of his hands and his blond hair was a little silvery at his temples. But then I realized I sounded like Frank when he decided I was older than Methuselah for being in my twenties. I changed Old to Older than I expected. Forty at least. Midforties, maybe. Not fifty.
So. Young, Mr. Vargas wrote. Mind the feelings of your geriatric audience.
I was about to write You’ll never be old. But I flashed on the most wrenching thing Mr. Vargas had said to me at his wife’s funeral. “She never got to be old. We were going to be old together.”
Sorry, I wrote instead.
Forgiven. Keep an eye on him.
If Mr. Vargas only knew. With Frank finally settled in at school, I’d been taking my lunches that week over the sink to give me a clear view of Xander working in the yard.
Xander seems okay, I wrote. He’s a charming guy. Fun. Frank loves him.
Nonetheless. Remember, your job is to protect Mimi from cads and swindlers.
And here I thought I was supposed to be transcribing Mimi’s manuscript, of which I hadn’t seen a page. I was thinking about how to answer that when I felt somebody’s eyes on me. Frank stood in the doorway, wearing a deerstalker hat and a tweedy caped overcoat, with one of those pipes that blows soap bubbles clenched between his teeth. He was staring at my kneecaps with such concentration it’s a wonder they didn’t spontaneously combust.
I pocketed my phone. “What’s up, Sherlock?”
Frank took the pipe from his teeth and said, “I’m Frank.”
“I know, Frank.”
“What you may not know is that Sherlock Holmes has been depicted on film hundreds of times, perhaps more than any other fictional character. My favorite on-screen Sherlock was portrayed by Basil Rathbone, a cadaverous Brit who popularized the deerstalker hat, Inverness coat, and pipe. His films were made between the years of 1939 and 1946, a time when a war-torn world took solace in the idea of a lone gentleman of towering intellect rescuing the world from its demons. What does cadaverous mean? I tried to look it up in Webster’s but I am not a good speller. When I find a word I’m looking for there, it’s usually serendipitous.”
“Cadaverous? Thin to the point of being skeletal,” I said. “Hey, what did the skeleton say when he walked into the bar?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll have a beer and a mop.”
Xander got to the party in time to award my joke with a chuckle and a rasher of twinkle. “That’s one of my favorites,” he said.
“Favorite what?” Frank asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Knock knock,” I said.
“Oh. That means it’s a joke,” he explained to Xander.
“I got it. That’s why I laughed, Frank. See, the way a joke works is that it presents you with an impossible situation your brain recognizes as impossible, so you laugh at the absurdity of it. A skeleton, for example, couldn’t walk into a bar.”
“Franklin Delano Roosevelt walked into a bar,” Frank said, “an event rendered practically impossible by a bout of paralytic poliomyelitis he suffered in 1921.” Frank acknowledged his own comic gem with a rat-a-tat-tat hahahahaha. “Why aren’t you laughing?” he asked when we didn’t join in.
Xander ponied up a pretty convincing courtesy laugh.
“Why isn’t Alice laughing?” Frank asked.
“I’m slow on the uptake,” I said.
“I’m hungry,” Frank said.
“Your timing is impeccable,” I said. “Lunch is ready. Can you tell your mother?”
“She went back to work,” Xander said.