Mr. Vargas came and knelt beside us. “You must be Frank,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
Frank pushed the goggles up on his forehead to get a better look at him. I guess he was on the fence about Mr. Vargas because he shut his eyes again after he checked him out but didn’t put the goggles back on.
“Look, I brought you a present, Frank. Is it all right for me to call you Frank?” Mr. Vargas stood, pulled a cylindrical something from his pocket, and gave it a long, rattling shake. “Alice said to bring flashlights. So I brought you this special one that’s powered by shaking. No batteries required.”
He had Frank’s attention then. The kid sat up and took the flashlight, shook it hard, turned it on, and nodded. “Well done,” he said. “Now that you’ve delivered it, please leave.”
ON DAY THREE of Mimi’s sequestration, Frank and I set off by city bus to fetch her home. Mr. Vargas offered to take us in his rental car, but Frank refused to set foot in it or even have him along on the bus ride. “Fine,” Mr. Vargas said. “I have important things to do here. I need to buy a few groceries. Rug shampoo. A new mop.”
“I’ll have a beer and a mop,” Frank said. “That’s what the skeleton said when he walked into the bar.” Whether the joke was meant for Mr. Vargas or me was impossible to say. Up until then Frank had insisted I stand between the two of them whenever we were together, as if the man were a rubber zombie mask that had sprouted arms and legs.
I’d been so paralyzed by our disaster that I hadn’t cleaned up the ashy footprints the firefighters had tracked through the house. “Oh, Mr. Vargas, don’t,” I said. “I’ll call a cleaning service. Or I’ll do it myself when we get home.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “It will keep me busy until you get back.”
So Frank and I set out by bus, stopping at every street corner in Los Angeles along the way. Frank insisted we visit the mall across the street to buy Mimi Valentine’s Day candy before the hospital. I gave in without a fight. There wasn’t any point in saying she’d been waiting too long for us already.
On the upside, one day post-Valentine’s the hearts were half-price. Frank chose the biggest ones still available, three of solid chocolate that cost twenty-five bucks apiece even on special. “Why three?” I asked, being careful not to sound confrontational.
“One for me, one for my mother, one for you,” he said. Just when you wanted to strangle the kid for being impossible, he’d come up with something like that to cut your anger off at the knees.
Mimi had checked herself out of the hospital and was long gone by the time we finally got there. I wasn’t surprised, but Frank was stunned. Before he launched into a seismic fit I managed to convince him that Mimi had called home, talked to Mr. Vargas, and was so excited to see him after so many years that she’d taken a cab back to Bel Air before we’d crawled through half of Los Angeles on the bus. “We could take a cab ourselves, you know, and get home much faster,” I added. We were talking on the bench at the hospital bus stop.
“I only ride in taxis with my mother, Alice,” Frank said. “If what you suggest is true, why didn’t she call to alert us of her departure?”
Because she hates me. “Because she never learned my number, I bet,” I said. “It was programmed into her cell.”
“I doubt that,” Frank said. “My mother has no problem with numbers in a series. She’d be the first to tell you that she’s good with numbers but terrible with money. I know because she’s told me that more times than I can count on my fingers and toes. Maybe your cell was turned off. Or you forgot to bring it.”
I rooted through my purse and all my pockets. “You’re right, Frank. I forgot my phone. I’m the stupidest person alive.”
“That’s not true. In every classroom I’ve ever been in there have been at least a couple of kids less intelligent than you are. Also one teacher. Who had me transferred to another class.”
We went inside in search of a pay phone. Hard to find these days, as noted earlier by Frank. Once we located one, I realized I’d never learned the number to the glass house because it was programmed into my cell. Mr. Vargas would be so disappointed in me. The man hated speed dial. He believed that memorized phone numbers were the sign of a civilized mind.
Frank didn’t know his home number, either, though he had memorized the girlhood phone number of his Alabama grandmother who’d died before he was born. Easily. It was “7.”