Let's Be Frank (9 page)

Frankie squeezes my hand. “Well, I’m excited about having kids someday with someone special…” My heart lifts and races at this information, something she’s never shared with me before. Coyly looking away from me and back to my parents, she continues, “But I’m an only child, so the dynamic between siblings is fascinating to me. Psychology, in general, is really interesting.”

“It’s a pseudo-science,” I mumble, earning a glare from Dad.

“Being an only child comes with its own set of issues,” Mom says cheerfully, as if it’s such a wonderful thing there are enough psychoses to go around.

I quickly intervene. “We don’t have to get into them today, though, right? We should save that for a special occasion, like Easter.”

Mom rolls her eyes. “Oh, Nate…”

“I mean it. Why can’t we talk about the weather, like normal people?”

“I think Nate’s worried we’re going to tell you something embarrassing, like about his bedwetting, which is actually common and not anything to be ashamed of.”

“When I was a kid!” I hasten to clarify. “Not now.”

“I think that went without saying,” Dad says, as if I’m the one being inappropriate.

Frankie laughs behind her hand, then says to me, “It’s okay. I knew what she meant.”

“What would you prefer we talk about, your brother marrying the woman
you
were going to marry a few years ago?” Mom asks, as if she’s been doing me a favor by talking about my need for plastic sheets well into elementary school. (I was a deep sleeper, alright? Like she said, and I know from my work in medicine, a
real
science, bedwetting is a widespread issue, especially with young boys.)

“Oh, I already know all about Nick and Heidi,” Frankie casually assures my parents.

Mom laughs. “I should hope so. You’ll be Nate’s date to the wedding in May, right?”

There are so many awkward assumptions in that question that I don’t even know where my pique should begin.

Fortunately, nobody requires my participation in this conversation.

Frankie winces. “My dad’s sixtieth birthday is that weekend, and I already have plane tickets to Arizona to visit them.”

“What crappy timing!” Mom laments.

Dad begins clearing the dessert dishes. “It’s probably for the best.”

I’d love to ask him what he means by that.
How
could it be for the best that I go alone to the wedding of my brother to my former fiancée? How? I’m dreading it. And I can’t think of any way that it could be for the best. But I’d love more for this conversation to end, so I decide to table that discussion for another time, when he and I are alone. Now, I merely stare at his back as he walks away from the table into the kitchen to set the dirty dishes by the sink.

Frankie sips her coffee, then says, “I know it’s going to be a hard day for Nate—”

“Only because everyone’s going to be staring at me, waiting for me to make a scene,” I try to explain to a room of people apparently not interested in a single word I have to say on the topic.

“I wish I could be in two places at once. It would take a lot of the pressure off you if you had a date,” she states the obvious.

“It’s a long time from now.” I try to make it sound authoritative, like the last word. “We could all be dead by then.”

“Nice,” Dad grumbles upon his return to the table.

I laugh. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound that hopeful. I just meant… it’s not worth worrying about right now. It’ll be fine.”

Frankie gasps and grasps my hand. “Oh, my gosh! I have the best idea! You can take Betty as your date.”

At first, I think she’s kidding, but as soon as I study her eyes, the laughter dies in my throat. “You can’t be serious.”

“Who’s Betty?” Mom wonders, a grin spreading across her face. I can already tell she likes this harebrained idea… and that means I’m in trouble.

“My best friend,” Frankie explains.

“I thought you guys were, you know, arguing.” I still haven’t been able to get out of Frankie what transpired between Betty and her the other night at the pub while I was in the bathroom, but I know I wasn’t imagining the tension when I returned.

Ignoring my observation, she pushes, “Betty’s a ton of fun at family gatherings.”

I’m not sure if our definitions of “fun” sync up yet. Does she mean “fun,” as in, “gets rip-roaring drunk and silly within five minutes of having access to the open bar,” or “fun,” as in, “does a mean Conga,” or…

Frankie interrupts my musings with a leg-jolting brush of her fingers against my upper thigh under the table while she says to Mom and Dad, “You guys will love Betty. And she’s a workhorse. If you need help with last-minute stuff on the day of the wedding, she’ll pitch in.”

I wonder if Betty’s aware of all this work for which Frankie’s volunteering her. Then again, it’s hard for me to concentrate as Frankie’s fingers creep closer and closer to my lap.

To me, she urges, “C’mon! It would be perfect. You’d have a date, but I wouldn’t have to worry—”

“You don’t have to worry, because it’s not gonna happen.”

Mom smiles warmly at the two of us. “I think it’s a sweet, thoughtful idea.”

“Yeah, don’t dismiss the idea out-of-hand,” Dad agrees.

Oh, but I
am
dismissing it out-of-hand. “I don’t need a date for the sake of having one. Now, let’s talk about something else. Did I mention that Frankie’s a writer?” I blurt, hoping Frankie doesn’t kill me for telling my parents.

To my relief, she grins proudly when they look suitably impressed with this piece of information.

When Mom takes the bait and asks, “What genre?” I breathe a full breath for the first time in several minutes (it helps when Frankie returns her hand to her own lap).

“Women’s fiction. Chick lit, more specifically,” Frankie answers.

“Are you published?” Dad inquires.

Frankie’s lips pinch over her teeth.

“Uh… she’s kind of shy about sharing her work right now,” I jump in, before anyone thinks of abandoning this conversation in favor of one of the more hideous ones we’ve already explored. “She’s still considering her options and… and… thinking about pen names. Right?” I consult her, realizing I’m doing that annoying thing where I talk about someone in the third person, even though they’re sitting right there.

I know I’ve made the right decision to rescue her, though, when I see the gratitude—something I’ve rarely seen from her—in her eyes. She grips my hand on top of the table and says to my parents, “Actually, I was thinking about keeping my last name and shortening my first name to Frank.”

“Giving yourself a literary sex change, huh?” Dad jokes. “Interesting.”

Frankie nods enthusiastically. “It was Nate’s idea.”

I nearly choke on my coffee. “It was?”

“Yeah, remember? You suggested it at the pub, and it’s great, because you’re right; even though a lot of guys write chick lit, they’re still a minority and somewhat of a novelty, so they sell a ton of books.”

Mom and Dad exchange a look. I don’t know Betty and Frankie well enough to accurately interpret their nonverbal communiqués, but I’ve had decades of experience reading my parents’. And the look they just shared was similar to the one they gave each other when I announced I’d decided to become a pediatric nurse and was dropping my pre-med major.

Nick was already only a semester away from graduating with his undergraduate pre-med degree, and everyone assumed I’d follow smoothly in his wake. Looking back, I’m not sure why they made that assumption. I’d never done things exactly like Nick. He played football and hockey; I ran track and played soccer. He dated cheerleaders; I… didn’t. He was the life of every party; I was the guy everyone asked for copies of class notes the day before a test. He got As without studying; I had to spend hours studying to get that same A. It’s not that we were opposites, exactly, and everyone knew we were brothers, but nobody could accuse our parents of cloning.

When Nick and I both decided to pursue medical careers, it felt right. At first, I thought it was cool we would be doctors together someday. We even talked about starting a private general practice. But Nick decided he wanted to specialize (“That’s where the money is, Bro”), and I didn’t want to spend half my life in school, racking up all that debt before ever entering the workforce. When I did my residence in pediatrics and fell in love with helping kids, our different fates were sealed.

Now Mom muses, “In this day and age, it’s hard to keep something like that a secret. Aren’t you afraid it’ll backfire?”

“Writers do it all the time,” I intervene. “Even J.K. Rowling had a male pen name… for about two seconds. And when her true identity was discovered, it helped her sell more books, so it’s not like it was a huge scandal that hurt her career.”

“Hmm,” Mom utters noncommittally before saying, “I was thinking more about what it does to the psyche to live less-than-honestly, but… I see what you mean. I’d love to read your books, Frankie, no matter what name you decide to put on them.”

Like that, the tension dissolves at the table, and Dad sweetens the situation by suggesting we go into the living room to watch the football game.

I volunteer to clean up the kitchen. Watching football is bad enough. Watching it with Frankie is a whole new form of torture, which my parents are about to get an education in. I’d just prefer not to witness it.

Chapter Seven

My fifth consecutive swing and miss prompts Nick to say, “What’s your problem tonight, Bro?” from his position behind the chain link fence that separates us.

I shrug off his question and whiff at the next ball that flies at me from the pitching machine. I’d be embarrassed if we weren’t alone here on this freezing weekday evening in the indoor, unheated batting cages.

I let the next pitch go past without swinging. It clanks against the fence and joins its friends, amassing at my feet. I kick the baseballs away, so I won’t trip on any of them, and get back into my stance. The next ball whizzes at me, and I manage to get a piece of it, but it soars straight up. I duck and hold my plastic helmet more tightly against my head, anticipating the hard ball’s fall. It misses me and thunks at my feet.

“Get out of there before you get hurt,” Nick demands.

My heart’s not in it, and I’m almost out of the pitches I’ve paid for, anyway, so I don’t bother arguing. The point of this exercise was to work off some frustration, but it’s only causing more.

As soon as I round the fencing, I remove my batting helmet and toss it and my bat toward my equipment bag under the pine bench. I sink to the bench, prop my elbows on my knees, and watch Nick prepare for his turn. He feeds money into the machine, stands next to home plate, and crouches into his stance. The first pitch comes flying toward him, and he hits it hard, almost immediately preparing for the next ball.

“Mom tells me she and Dad met Frankie a couple of weeks ago,” he says, hitting another line drive.

I stare at his elbow a few seconds, contemplating what I’m going to say before replying dully, “Yeah.”

He straightens his legs, letting his bat hang impotently at his side, and turns to me between pitches. “Why are you so glum?”

“Watch the balls, alright?” I implore before answering, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? How can you not know?”

I sigh. “It’s complicated.” I tuck my hands into the front pouch of my hoodie and hunker lower into it.

He snorts. “Alright… what is it with this one? Did she use your toothbrush, or something?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, hoping if I play dumb, he’ll drop it.

“There’s always something. With that one chick, it was her breath.”

“It was bad! When I ended it with her, I recommended she see a doctor about it.”

“I’m sure that softened the blow and really endeared you to her,” he says with a laugh.

I snarl at the back of his head. “Hey, I was worried about her! And what do you think I should have done? Kept dating her, even though kissing her made my eyes water? In a bad way?”

He shrugs. “Okay, I’ll give you that one. That’s pretty insurmountable. But what about the chick in college?”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” I say with plenty of smarm. It’s fun to pretend I was a real ladies’ man at some point in my life.

“The one who farted when she sneezed.”

“I didn’t break up with her because she snarted. She picked at her feet, which is gross and unhygienic.” I wrinkle my nose and suppress my gag reflex at the memory.

“Okay, what about the one who swallowed her gum all the time?”

“Same person. She also didn’t know that Jerry Lee Lewis and Jerry Lewis were two different people; she paid people to write her term papers; and—oh, yeah—she screwed my roommate… on my bed… every Wednesday for an entire semester while I attended my biology practicum. So… I stand by my decision to break up with that one, thank you.”

Recovering from his first strike, he says, “Okay, fine. But my point is… you always find something.”

We both know there’s at least one exception to the rule: if Heidi hadn’t broken up with me, I’d be married to her right now, resigned to the many things about her that annoy me. Being her husband and the father of her children was worth whatever irritants came with the job. That’s what I thought at the time, anyway.