by Brea Brown
“I’ll stay home and take care of the kids. That will give me a chance to write. When they’re babies, I’ll work during nap times and in the evening, when you’re home. And when they’re in school, I’ll have all day to write, but I’ll also be available to volunteer at school and car pool and do all the things my mom certainly never bothered doing.”
I “uh-huh”-ed and “yeah”-ed and “okay”-ed in the right places while reassuring myself, This is way in the future, all hypothetical. This isn’t a contract negotiation. This is Frankie’s fantasy. She’s dreaming out loud. And isn’t it cute that she feels comfortable enough to do that in front of me? Yeah. It is. She’s gorgeous. And we’ll have beautiful children. That’s what I want, anyway, right?
I even saw those children while she continued to lay out how many books a year she’d write and publish and where we’d go on family vacations with her royalties. I saw myself holding those babies for the first time. I saw them toddling across my living room. I saw them wading in the surf during one of those royalty-funded vacations. I saw them hunched over homework at the very dining table where I was sitting. And I ignored the fact that I didn’t see Frankie with me in any of those visions.
My heartbeat slowed, a genuine smile returned to my face, and I reached around the dishes and across the table to clasp her hand in mine. “Plenty of time for all that,” I told both her and myself.
She squeezed my fingers, laughed, and blushed. “Yeah. Of course. Sorry. I… I get carried away sometimes.”
“Me, too,” I admitted. I’m sure it will be more and more true as time passes, too. Surely.
“So, whatcha readin’?” Betty interrupts my discomfiting memory.
I blink down at my e-reader. “Uh, nothing. I just finished the latest Jennifer Weiner book, and—”
“Oooh! I love her. How was it?”
“Amazing.” I jump from my chair, snagging my beer and carrying it with me to the breakfast bar, where I set down my Kindle and my bottle. Perching on a stool, I lean on my elbows on the counter and add, “It’s going to be hard to find something to follow it. Any ideas?”
She tosses a few names out, but they’re all authors whose entire catalogues I’ve already devoured. “I’m ready for something new. Something new new.”
“That shouldn’t be hard. Start browsing. The biggest challenge will be narrowing it down. There’s so much out there now.”
I tap around for a while before murmuring distractedly, “I want to read something written by a man.”
“Sexist!”
I laugh at her mock-outrage and the irony of her accusing a man of being a sexist after he’s waxed rhapsodic about a Jennifer Weiner book. “What I mean is, I want to discover the next Patrick Fox, Matt Dunn, or Nicholas Sparks.”
She wrinkles her nose.
“Yeah, you’re right. Not Sparks. That dude always makes me cry. I’m not in the mood to cry. I want to laugh.”
“Check out the ‘people who bought’ sections on those guys’ pages. That’ll give you a good place to start.”
Fifteen minutes later, she’s sliding a heavy glass pan layered with mouth-watering ingredients into the oven, but I’m no closer to deciding on a book. “Too many choices!” I groan. “I need another beer.”
She complies with my demand and tosses my empty bottle into a tidy stacking recycling bin. Returning to the counter, she mirrors my pose, so we’re nearly forehead-to-forehead. I turn the Kindle sideways so she can see, too.
Thumbing through the book sales lists, I swig from the beer bottle, then set it aside so I have better control of the e-reader. I drill down into the lists, narrowing, narrowing, narrowing.
“I’m looking for writers like Nick Hornby—ooh, there’s a good one! Lad lit!—but not English,” I explain.
In a horrible Cockney accent, she demands, “What’s wrong wiff British blokes, eh? Top o’ the mornin’ to you, laddie.”
I nearly drop my beloved e-reader as I wheeze, “You went from Michael Caine to Lucky Charms in about two-point-six seconds.”
She punches my shoulder. “Shut up. My question stands. Why no British guys? They’re hot.”
“They may well be, but a) that’s not one of my requirements or concerns and b) Fox and Dunn and Hornby sometimes use expressions that would probably be a lot funnier if I knew what they meant.”
“It’s not their fault you’re not multicultural, Nathaniel.” She pulls the device away from me and taps at the screen, eliminating parameters to widen my search. “Broaden your horizons.”
I grab my property back from her. “My horizons are plenty wide, thank you. It’s not that I never read that stuff, but this time, I want someone American. It has nothing to do with xenophobia and everything to do with laziness.”
The list of candidates dissolves from more than a half-million to less than ten thousand in a matter of taps. I reclaim my beer.
As we scroll down the page, Betty calls out the names we see, in case I can’t read, I guess. And I dismiss them for various reasons.
“Nick Alexander?”
“No Nicks.”
“Evan Llewellyn?”
“Too many ‘l’s.”
When she shoots me a disbelieving look, I keep my eyes pinned to the screen and state, “I don’t have to have good reasons. This is all about gut instinct.”
She snorts but stops staring at my profile and goes back to reading from the screen. I fill my mouth with more beer and continue scrolling.
The next name on the list, however, makes her gasp, and it turns my insides to ice.
Frank Lipton.
Clinging to the pathetic hope that someone who’s not my girlfriend has already published ten books with sweet, illustrated pastel covers and under the name Frankie’s been planning to use for her pen name (bummer for her!), I tap to the “About the Author” page to see what this Frank Lipton dude looks like.
Oh… My…
Beer sprays from my mouth and onto my face… on my e-reader. I mean, my face is on my e-reader. In it. On it. Whatever. It’s there!
“Motherfucker!” I hiss, losing my grip on my beer bottle while jumping down from the stool. Golden liquid spreads across the granite as the bottle rolls. Betty straightens to avoid having her arms drenched, and the bottle drops between the counter and her body, landing with a sick crash at her feet.
“It’s okay!” she immediately says, but I’m not sure to what she’s referring. If she’s talking about my picture out there on the Web, associated with a bunch of books I didn’t write, then she’s way off-base.
I wipe the e-reader against my butt, effectively making me kiss my own ass. “Oh, shit!” I hiss when I make that connection. Holding the device in front of me again, I demand to a suddenly empty kitchen, “Do you know about this?”
Her head pops up to counter level again, followed shortly by the rest of her body. In her hand is a kitchen towel and several brown pieces of glass.
When I look at the screen, I half-expect the picture to have changed, and it has, because I’ve activated a link with my all my butt-rubbing, so I’m faced with a list of “Frank Lipton’s” book titles. I read them out loud, watching Betty’s face become paler with each title.
“Oh, my gosh…” I whisper. “You do know.”
She tosses everything in her hands into the nearby sink, rounds the counter, and stands in front of me. Grasping the drawstrings of my hoodie, she pulls them, bunching the hood against the back of my neck and pulling my face closer to hers, little puffs of alcohol-and-grape-scented air making me blink with each syllable when she says, “I had no idea. You have to believe me.”
I nod sickly but pull away from her, afraid my one-and-a-half beers are about to make an encore appearance. At the risk of hastening that occurrence, I reread the titles. None of them sound remotely familiar, but one—Hippocratic Oaf—practically bitch slaps me. I navigate to the previous page, my fingers tacky against the dried beer residue.
Yep, there I am again. I hold the
device out to Betty so she can see. “When the eff was I ever wearing those black glasses? Never!”
She examines the picture. “Looks like a Photoshop job. A good one, but still… Where’d she get the original picture?”
I edge closer to her so I can look at the photo over her shoulder. At first, I draw a blank, but then I recognize the background as my parents’ living room. And that shirt… that was the one I wore the day we went to their house for lunch, the day I introduced her to them, and it all comes flooding back.
“C’mon… just a little picture. I don’t have any of you!” It was half-time of the game the three of them were eventually successful in forcing me to watch.
“Why now?” I asked, trying to evade the tiny circle on the back of her phone.
“Nathan! Let the girl get a picture of you,” Mom interfered from the other sofa, where she sat next to Dad.
I sighed but rearranged my features into something that felt unnatural but possibly acceptable. As soon as Frankie took the shot, I held out my hand. “Let me see.”
She clutched the phone to her chest. “No.”
“Yes! I want to make sure I don’t look like a moron.”
“You don’t look like a moron,” she promised. “You look like you. And I like it.”
It was the first time anyone other than my mother had said something so accepting, and it took me aback. “Oh. Okay. But don’t… put it all over Facebook,” I muttered.
“I won’t,” she reassured me, pocketing her phone without showing me the snapshot and cuddling against me to watch the rest of the game.
I rub my face at the memory. “She took that at my parents’ house,” I answer Betty.
Sounding shell-shocked, she says robotically, “It’s a good one. You’re photogenic.”
“I look like a smug hipster!”
A handsome, smart, smug hipster, but that… is beside the point!
I scan “Frank’s” author bio. “Oh, shit the bed,” I grumble.
A sigh comes from Betty. “Green Bay? She didn’t even change the hometown to something… bigger? How about New York City? Isn’t that where all writers live and blend in and get lost? Not here, where skimming the Sports section counts as ‘extensive daily reading.’”
My heart thunders. Sweat pops out along my hairline and on my upper lip. I manage to land a butt cheek on the nearby couch in time to ride out my lightheadedness.
Betty follows me and relinquishes the sticky e-reader. “This sucks,” she understates.
When I feel relatively composed, I go back to the page for Hippocratic Oaf and, dry-mouthed, silently read the blurb.
Pediatrician Bing Nathanson…
A squeak escapes my throat.
…never dreamed being in touch with his feminine side would be such an impediment to finding true love with a woman. But crying at weddings, singing to babies in the NICU, knitting baby booties in his spare time, and avidly reading women’s fiction has only resulted in one thing: ridicule from his family and utter loneliness.
Fed up with being labeled “too sensitive,” he gives himself a personality makeover, adopting the opposite of each of his natural personality traits to present a new and “improved” Dr. Nathanson to an online dating site.
There, he finds Kris, the perfect woman for him. Only… she’s perfect for the old him, the real him. She can’t stand the macho Dr. Nathanson. His quest to convince Kris of his true nature lands him in some outlandish situations as he works harder and harder to win her over. But a cynic like Kris isn’t an easy sell…
Swallowing repeatedly, I stare at the simple-yet-eye-catching cover art for Hippocratic Oaf. After a few seconds, I wordlessly hand the device to Betty. I can tell by her ever-widening eyes that she’s reading the blurb, and it’s new to her.
After a couple of minutes, she lifts her eyes warily and winces at me. “You don’t look so great,” she observes, perching on the arm of the couch and pushing down on my back. “Here. Uh… put your head between your legs… or something.”
Her advice is appropriate, so I obey. Staring down my boys, I muffle, “What am I going to do?”
“I guess you can start with telling her what you found.”
I laugh mirthlessly. “Oh, yeah. Sure. Here? With an audience?”
“I’ll keep everyone occupied out here, and you guys can have some time alone in your room.”
“I want to go home.”
She pauses, then says, “I don’t blame you. I don’t think you should be alone tonight, though. Do you think you could stay with your brother?”
I gulp. “I’m fine. It’s not the end of the world. I’m just… stunned. And upset she did all this behind my back.”
“Don’t leave,” Betty urges.
“I don’t want to ruin everyone’s weekend. They’ll hate me. Even more than they already do.”
“Nobody hates you.”
We both laugh at her unconvincing tone, and I marvel at my ability to laugh at anything right now.
Her cheeks flush, and her eyes flash. “Anyway, if they do hate you just because you don’t like zooming around on stupid snowmobiles, they’re morons. Forget them.”
I wish I could. But their presence is a huge factor in my decision. If it were just Frankie, Betty, and me here, I’d stick it out. Betty made the discovery with me, so it wouldn’t be a big deal if she heard Frankie and me talking about it. But… “I don’t want a bunch of strangers hearing Frankie and me argue.”
She bites her lower lip. “They won’t. There’s a bar in the closest town. We sometimes hang out there, so it won’t seem weird if I suggest we do that tonight. You guys’ll have time to talk, and if you want to leave after talking, you can, without a bunch of people watching you load up and drive away.”
The smells wafting from the kitchen remind me, “Your dinner. What about that?”
“You think you can pretend everything’s okay through dinner?”
I shake my head. “Probably not. I’m sorry. There’s no pretending this isn’t happening.” I flick the back of the e-reader in her hand.
She nods. “Okay. You’re right. Well…”
We both jump to our feet when we hear the others’ voices as they stamp the snow from their boots on the front porch.
Thrusting the electronic device at me, she hisses, “Go to your room. I’ll tell everyone you… you have diarrhea.”
“What?!”
She pushes on my shoulder, prodding me toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms. “Go! I’ll think of something to keep everyone away from you. Then I’ll suggest Frankie stays here with you when we go out later.”
I stumble down the hall with her pushing on my lower back. “Okay, but don’t say I have diarrhea. A headache will work just fine. Say I’m sleeping. Or something.”
“Whatever!”
She shoves me into the bedroom and slams the door.
I back up to the foot of the bed to sit and wait.
In the meantime, I know what I’ll be reading. I stab at the button that will send Hippocratic Oaf to my sticky e-reader and wait while it downloads.
*****
I’m a fast reader, so by the time I hear the cleanup efforts underway in the kitchen, I’m about halfway through Hippocratic Oaf.
First of all, can we discuss the title for a second? If I weren’t the obvious inspiration for the oafish protagonist, I’d get a kick out of it, so I guess I have to give Frankie props for being clever. But it seems obvious, based on what I’ve read so far—heck, based on the protagonist’s name and some of the details in the blurb!—that I am the inspiration. Therefore, I’m offended to have inspired such a spaz of a character.
Propped against the headboard, I close my eyes and set the book aside on the bedspread, concentrating on breathing without hyperventilating. I need to detach if I’m going to continue reading without having a panic attack. Because if this is really how she sees me… why are we still together? I thought I thought some unflattering things about her! My petty c
omplaints are nothing compared to how she’s portrayed this Dr. Bing Nathanson character.
Which brings me to the writing. I was hoping it would be amateurish and flat, but no… Frankie’s smugness when she talks about her writing is absolutely justified. That doesn’t make her attitude attractive, but it’s warranted. She’s good. Damn it. If she can market this well enough, she’ll be a big deal. Or Frank Lipton will be, anyway.
And the story. I’m hooked. Not just because I can’t turn away, either. No, she’s figured out that thing that good writers do to keep you saying, “One more chapter,” after every single chapter. She’s going to keep a lot of people up way past their bedtimes if all of her books are like this one.
The bedroom door creaks, and my eyes fly open.
Frankie tiptoes toward the bed. “Hey,” she whispers, taking in the scene. “How are you feeling?”
“Pretty sick,” I answer honestly and shortly, trying to contain my rage.
The corners of her mouth turn down in a huge frownie face reminiscent of an emoticon, and it’s all I can do not to scream at her sickening insincerity.
“Is everyone else gone?” I check, realizing it sounds to me like I’m making sure there are no witnesses… to her murder.
I must not sound as menacing to her, because she nods and perches next to me on the bed. She reaches out to brush my hair from my forehead. “Yeah. I wanted to stay here with you, though.”
I jerk my head away from her fingers. “I’m sure.”
Her face hardens. “What does that mean? Are you still mad about earlier? Is that what this is all about? Are you in here, pouting?”
When I snort a denial, she says, “Well, that’s what it seems like.”
I toss my e-reader into her lap. It’s been idle for so long while I’ve taken a break from looking into its horrific hall of mirrors that it’s gone into sleep mode, so I wake it up with a push of the power button and a swipe across the screen. Chapter Seventeen pops up, but it takes a few seconds of Frankie reading the words for her to recognize them as her own.
