“Wait a minute,” Sara said. “February twelfth? Did all this happen last week? If you’re thinking of suing Xander for giving Frank fireworks or me for delivering them, you’re wasting your time. He has nothing and neither do I. We don’t even own a car.”
Before I could assure her we had no such intentions, Frank muscled in with, “That’s not true. You have Alec. I don’t know him personally but he looks like a keeper.”
“I have Alec. Yes. He is a keeper. You’re right.” She sounded less hostile after Frank said that.
“Tell me,” Frank said, “was Xander in jail long enough to be fitted for an orange jumpsuit?”
“I pawned my wedding ring as soon as he called so I could bail him out as fast as possible. Xander hates being in jail. Listen, everything you’re saying is news to me. All Xander told me was that he’d punched a cop.”
I was still grappling with wedding ring and so had fallen a couple of paces behind. “Wait,” I said. “Xander’s been in jail before?”
After a longish pause, Sara asked, “Exactly how well do you know Xander?”
“Well enough to know he doesn’t have a driver’s license, doesn’t do birthdays, and that he never graduated from Julliard because he broke his arm in two places during his last year there.”
“He never graduated because he broke his arm? Did he tell you how he broke his arm?”
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t think so.”
“How did he break his arm?” I asked.
“He needs to be the one to tell you that,” she said.
BEFORE WE LEFT the next day for the fancy department store where Sara told us Xander had a gig playing piano, I stopped by my former bedroom to let Mr. Vargas know we were leaving. I didn’t invite him along because I knew Frank would be absolutely against that.
When Mr. Vargas opened the door to my knock he was wearing a rumpled dress shirt with the tail untucked, a pair of suit pants, and socks. The guy’s hair was a mess. I’d never seen him look untidy before. “Did you sleep in your clothes, Mr. Vargas?” I asked.
“I forgot to pack pajamas,” he said. I saw that he had my notebook in his hand and that he’d flagged a number of pages with yellow Post-it notes.
Frank elbowed me aside and said to Mr. Vargas, “I like what you’ve done with your hair.”
Mr. Vargas was enough of a student of Frank already to know the kid was incapable of sarcasm. “Thank you, Frank,” he said. “I call this style ‘the Albert Einstein.’”
Frank’s eyes lit up. “If you borrowed one of my mother’s cardigan sweaters and a fake mustache from my collection you could star in a biopic of Albert Einstein,” he said. “May I loan you one of my mother’s cardigan sweaters and one of my fake mustaches?”
“Sure,” Mr. Vargas said.
“You’ll need shoes,” Frank said. “But no socks. Einstein didn’t wear socks.” He skedaddled off.
When Mr. Vargas sat on the red love seat to pull off his socks, I noticed the imprint of his body on top of my fluffy white comforter. He hadn’t even bothered to get under the covers last night. From the looks of him, I wasn’t sure he’d been to sleep at all.
Mr. Vargas asked, “How does Frank know about Einstein’s socks?”
“His lack of socks, you mean?” I asked. “How does Frank know anything?”
Mr. Vargas rolled his socks into a ball and tucked them into the corner of the suitcase he hadn’t unpacked. He put my notebook away in the desk drawer.
Once Mr. Frank of Bel Air was done with Mr. Vargas, he did kind of look like Albert Einstein. Frank was so pleased by the results that he said, “I think he should come with us on our adventure today, Alice, don’t you?”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I said. “But you need to invite him yourself. Be polite. Use his proper name when you ask him. That’s the way gentlemen like Mr. Vargas do it.”
“But I don’t know his name!” Frank screeched, so unexpectedly that both Mr. Vargas and I jumped. He drummed his forehead with the heels of his fists.
“Whoa. Frank. It’s okay. Calm down. I just said his name. It’s Mr. Vargas.”
Just like that, the jovial Mr. Frank of Bel Air was back. “He can use Xander’s bus pass,” he said. “I happen to have it right here in my wallet.” Frank pulled his wallet out to show us. The wallet was oxblood leather, looked older than I was, and had been embossed with the letters JG in gold, which made me suspect it had been Julian’s once. “The difference between Xander’s bus pass and my bus pass is that his is blue and mine is orange because the orange bus pass is for a child and adults are blue. Shall we three go now?”
I wasn’t about to argue about taking the bus or ask how Xander’s bus pass had jumped from my purse into his wallet.
“You there, sir,” Frank said to Mr. Vargas. “Allow me to hold on to this bus pass for you. I don’t want you to lose it as it represents much of Xander’s current net worth.”