I pulled the kid inside with me so Mr. Vargas and Mimi could talk in private. The funny thing was, they weren’t saying anything yet. The two of them were just standing there, staring at each other. Just as I turned to sneak a look, Mr. Vargas said, “You could never disappoint me, Mimi. Look at you. You’re just the same as ever. Except for this.” He touched her one white eyebrow with a fingertip. Instead of answering, she reached up, closed her hand over his, and held it against her cheek. I shoved the kid in the room and closed the door behind us.
“I’ll get the Band-Aids from your purse,” Frank said. By then the kid was as familiar with the contents of it as I was. Then he instructed me to sit on the toilet while he took off my shoes and socks. He held my hand while I stepped into the tub and sat down on its edge. “For once, it’s a good thing you were wearing shorts, Alice,” he said. “Because if you’d had on long pants, they’d be torn all to pieces. That would have been bad. Pants don’t heal the way skin does.”
WHEN FRANK, MY bandaged knees, and I emerged from the bathroom, Mr. Vargas and Mimi were gathering up her things. All business. I took Frank with me and went out to recover Mimi’s forgotten laundry basket. It had been upended in all the excitement, so I had to shake things out and refold them before I handed them to Frank to put in the basket again.
While we were busy with that, Mimi came out with her suitcase, which Mr. Vargas was trying to wrestle from her. “Let me,” he said. “You go check out.”
“I wish I’d known you were coming,” she said. “They made me pay for my room a week in advance.”
Well, I thought. Whose fault is that? Take your cell phone with you next time. Don’t make tracking you down into a scavenger hunt.
Frank carried the laundry to his mother. “Look what a nice job I did putting these back in the basket,” he said. “You know what else I did? I rescued your novel. I saved the old ones, too. Did our good friend Mr. Vargas tell you that?” I guess I wouldn’t need to write that name on Frank’s hand in Sharpie anymore.
Mimi let go of her suitcase and hugged him. “What would I do without you, Frank?” she said.
“I ask myself that all the time,” Frank said.
I hung back, watching. Now that I knew him, it really was amazing how much that kid could convey while hardly moving his face. Too bad he and Buster Keaton had never met. They had so much in common. I bet they would have been friends, even if the guy were as old or older than Frank’s dead grandfather, Dr. Frank.
Mimi shook me out of my reverie, snapping, “Why are you just standing there, Alice?” She added, “Make yourself useful. Come look under the beds and make sure we’re not leaving anything behind.”
FRANK SAT UP front with me on the trip home. “Xander says I’m a man now, remember? So I get to sit up front.”
I was too frazzled to argue. Mimi and Mr. Vargas had to tough it out in the backseat. I suspected that was fine by them.
We were climbing out of Studio City through Laurel Canyon when Frank said to Mimi, “There’s something I need to ask you, Mommie. Something that has been bothering me ever since I read your book. Why is Alice half the title and Alice, Alice, Alice all the way through it when Frank’s not in it anywhere? You’ve known me ten times as long as you’ve known her.”
“You read my book, Frank?” she asked.
“Of course I read it.” Frank unbuckled his seat belt and turned around on his knees to get a better look at Mimi. “I missed you, Mama. I wanted to hear your voice.”
I checked Mimi in the rearview mirror to see if she was going to bust the kid for being a dangerous passenger, but she was staring out the window. We were almost all the way up the long hill, close to the red light where Laurel Canyon crosses over Mulholland Drive.
“Frank,” I said when it was clear Mimi wasn’t going to reprimand him. “Sit facing forward. Put your seat belt back on. Right now.”
He sat down and rebuckled. “Mother,” he persisted. “I’d like that explanation now please.”
Mimi sighed. “Well, Frank,” she said, “when I said I’d finished my book, that didn’t mean I was a hundred percent done. I wasn’t ready for anybody else to read it. When I was trying to get started I got so caught up in inventing names for my characters that I wasn’t writing a word. So one day I decided I’d use the first names that popped into my head. That was the day you and Alice drove to the beach. Do you remember that?”
“I remember that,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Mimi said. “Anyway, Frank, I always intended to change the names. You know, before anybody else saw what names I was using.”
Mr. Vargas and I exchanged looks in the rearview mirror. I could see he was thinking the same thing I was. That maybe Mimi hadn’t been so much crazy as embarrassed when she refused to hand over her pages. Embarrassed, and a little crazy to let something so ridiculous get in the way of her progress. Particularly when changing that name she’d chosen so impulsively was something you could fix throughout a manuscript with just a couple of keystrokes on a computer. Oh, but wait. Mimi didn’t work on computers. I did. Alice. A name I’d crowbarred into her manuscript by saying “Alice” every time she called me “Penny.” To Mimi, everything that had gone wrong since I’d arrived must have seemed like all my fault. Me and my stupid name.