Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

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.

  That, or Mimi never really liked me. That was also possible.

  “I would think my name would pop into your head before anybody else’s,” Frank said.

  “How could your name pop into my head when it’s always in there already?” Mimi asked. “I never stop thinking about you, Frank. Not even when I’m sleeping.”

  “That makes perfect sense, now that you’ve explained it. I have one more question. What happens to the little boy in your book after the story is over? What happens to him in the end?”

  We’d made it through the light at last and left the Valley for the downhill slope of the Schwab’s side of Lookout Mountain. Mimi watched Los Angeles rushing up to meet us for about a mile before she said to Frank, “I wish I knew.”

  ( 29 )

  I’D PROMISED I would leave as soon as Mimi’s book was done, so I booked a seat on a 6:00 A.M. flight out of Los Angeles and packed my bags as soon as we got back to the glass house. Mr. Vargas would follow in a couple of days. At least that’s what he told me.

  I said good-bye and good night early and hustled off to bed. For probably the first time in my life I was glad to set my alarm for 3:30 A.M. A predawn departure, I decided, would cut down on the chances of a tearful farewell. As if either Frank or Mimi were ones for that. There’s something to be said for being an emotional flatliner. I can appreciate that now.

  I woke up before my alarm went off, but only because Half-Pint E. F. Hutton had put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Alice, wake up.”

  I bolted upright and switched on the light. “What’s wrong, Frank?”

  “I just performed an inventory of your suitcases.”

  “Of course you did.” I’d left them packed and ready by the front door. I might as well have attached a note to them that read, “Search me.”

  Search you? Why? Do you have the answer on a piece of paper tucked in your pocket? Is that the sort of thing you’re writing when you’re scribbling in that notebook?

  Oh, Frank. I cleared my throat. “Did I forget anything?”

  “Just this.” Frank plunked a leather bag I’d never seen before on my lap. It looked about a hundred years old, like something a doctor might have carried on his horse-drawn buggy to make house calls.

  “Did that bag belong to your grandfather, Frank?” I asked.

  “This bag? Yes. Don’t tell my mother. She doesn’t know I know where she keeps it.” He opened and extracted the chocolate heart he’d bought me on our way to pick Mimi up at the psych ward. That seemed a lifetime ago but it hadn’t even been a week.

  “Okay,” I managed to choke out.

  “This heart was on the shelf in the repository of my childhood, so it’s not surprising you overlooked it. The bad news is I’m not sure it will fit inside either of your bags. Trust me, I tried.”

  I closed my eyes and took a steadying breath or two. “Alice,” Frank said. “Are you asleep again?”

  I opened my eyes again and checked my watch. The alarm wouldn’t go off for forty-five minutes yet. “Nope,” I said. “Get your flashlight and meet me in the kitchen.”

  AFTER WE GATHERED up our tools, we eased out into the yard. The moon was still up and close to full, so we didn’t need the flashlight. I’d changed out of my pajamas and into the clothes I’d laid out to wear on the plane, so Frank did the digging for us. He used a big silver serving spoon from the kitchen to shovel a grave for my chocolate heart, under what was left of the tree outside Mimi’s office.

  “I may not have stayed here as long as Dr. Livingstone lived in Africa,” I said to Frank as he pushed the dirt back in the hole with a triangular pie server and used that to pat it smooth, “but this heart of mine still belongs here with you. Since, you know, I’m still using the real one.”

  Frank sat back on his heels and stared at the ground so long that I worried he was tuning up to cry. Until he said, “We need to put something heavy over this so the raccoons don’t dig that heart up.”

  He could have used my real heart to cover the hole, since it weighed about a ton after he said that. While I was wallowing in how much I’d miss him, Frank was thinking about raccoons. Of course.

  We ended up manhandling the blue slate paver from under the closest downspout, where it had been placed to keep the cataracts of guttered rain from washing away the hillside. “You have to put this stone back before it rains again, Frank,” I said once we flopped the thing in place. “Tell Xander the next time you see him. He’ll help you do it.”

  “I’ll help Frank do what?” Xander asked. Forget raising your hand to make a taxi appear. The way the guy showed up at exactly the right time was pretty close to magic.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Frank told me you were clearing out at four A.M. You didn’t think I’d let you get away without saying good-bye, did you?” He reached for my cheek but I leaned away. I didn’t want Frank to see. Not that he was looking at us. He’d remembered his flashlight and was using it to signal his close personal friends in outer space.

  “Frank told you?” I asked. “How?”

  Xander looked puzzled. “How? He called me on the telephone.”

  “But Frank’s terrible at memorizing phone numbers. He told me so himself.”

  “Who said anything about Frank knowing my number? When he needs to talk to me he hijacks Mimi’s cell and calls me. When he calls, I come running. If I can.”

  Frank was going to be okay.

  Or not.

  I sighed and told myself to let it go. Energy spent on worrying about a future you can’t control is energy wasted. It doesn’t do anybody one bit of good.


  I knew then I’d lived in California too long. I’d gone native.

  “Of course,” I said to Xander. “Mimi has you in her cell phone. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  As for Xander’s number, of course by then I sort of had it, too. I knew that you could count on him sometimes, just not always. He would never pick up the check because he couldn’t cover it. Xander wouldn’t fail spectacularly at anything because he didn’t have it in him anymore to try hard enough for that to happen. But we all have our strengths and weaknesses. Xander had a good heart and a knack for being happy. He assumed everybody he met would like him because everybody usually did. At first, anyway, before he decided he’d only be a disappointment if he stuck around.

  Xander, to his credit, had found his people, ones who understood and loved him the only way he could be understood and loved. Mimi and Frank gave him broken things to fix so he could feel like he was taking care of them. He had them to circle back to when his life felt like it didn’t add up to all that much. Mimi and Frank would keep Xander from disappearing, and he’d do the same for them.

  The alarm on my watch sounded. “I have to get myself together,” I said. “I don’t want to miss my plane.”

  “We’ll take you to the airport,” Xander said.

  “You will, huh? Who’s driving? You or Frank?”

  “What I meant was we could go with you in the cab.”

  “What about Mimi?” I asked.

  “I don’t need my mother with me anymore to take a cab,” Frank said. “As long as Xander’s around.”

  “I’ll always be here, pal,” Xander said. “Sooner or later.”

  “Well, I can take a cab all by myself, so that’s what I’m going to do. And you, Frank, have to put your grandfather’s doctor bag away before your mother realizes it’s missing.”

  Frank ran for the house as if coyotes were at his heels. By the time Xander and I got back inside, the bag had been dealt with and Frank had called a cab for me.

  “You called a cab for me already?” I asked. “Gee, Frank, thanks. Is that your way of saying, ‘Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out’?”

  “What screen door?”

  “Knock knock,” I said.

  I let each of the boys carry one of my bags out the gate for me.

  “We’ll wait with you until the cab comes,” Xander said.

  “No,” I said. I’d had enough of a struggle already, getting myself together. “Absolutely not. It’s cold out here. Go back inside. This is not a negotiation.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Mimi,” Xander said. “I guess it really is time for you to go.”

  That made me laugh. Which was good, since it could have gone either way for me about then.

  “Here,” Frank said, and handed me his pocket square. “From the configuration of your facial features, I gather you may need this soon.”

  “Good noticing, Frank,” I said. “Thank you. I’m so proud of you. You know that, right?”

  “I know,” he said. “You should be.”

  Acknowledgments

  I WANT TO thank my friend Sara Kenney, who read every single chapter as soon as I wrote it, even the ones that should never see the light of day. Thanks to her intervention, they never will. Also Gayle Abrams and Carolyn Ramsey, enthusiastic early readers. I thank Carolyn, too, for connecting me to Isaac Burks, a gentlemanly retiree of the Los Angeles Fire Department, who explained to me why cars don't blow up like they do in movies, and other incendiary things I needed to know to write this book. I’m grateful to my favorite teacher in the world, Leslie Epstein, who took me under his wing when I wasn’t old enough to know better, and always believed I had a novel in me even if it did take a few decades to work its way out. My agent Lisa Bankoff somehow saw in my first draft what this book could be someday and nudged me in the right direction. Charlotte Simms stumbled onto the scene just when I needed somebody to laugh at all my jokes. My genius editor Kate Nintzel thought the same things were hilarious and heartbreaking that I did, and made everything she touched so much better that I count myself insanely lucky to have landed with her. Most of all I’m thankful to my mother and my children, who taught me how very little I knew about raising children right, but loved and indulged me anyway and gave me extra credit for trying hard. Also my husband, the funniest man alive, who’s patient and handsome and smarter than anybody I’ve ever met. He also has just one dimple, which is absolutely killer.

  About the Author

  JULIA CLAIBORNE JOHNSON worked at Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines before marrying and moving to Los Angeles, where she lives with her comedy-writer husband and their two children.

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  Credits

  Cover design by Kaitlyn Vincent

  Cover illustrations © Olia Fedorovsky

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  BE FRANK WITH ME. Copyright © 2016 by Julia Claiborne Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-241371-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-06-245906-0 (international edition)

  EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN 9780062413734

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