Let's Be Frank

by Brea Brown

  She flicks my pink bow tie. “And this is heinous. When—not if—I get married, there will be no matchy-matchy wedding party attire.”

  “On behalf of all men everywhere, thank you. It’s not ‘mauve,’ like Heidi tried to tell me; it’s straight-up pink, m’kay? And I’m not happy about it. I’ll never make anyone I consider even close to being a friend wear something this color. Nick’s lucky he’s my only sibling. If I had a spare or two, I’d disown him for this.”

  “But hot pink looks good on you.”

  I look at her sideways, trying to judge if she’s being sincere.

  “Really, it does! It’s still not nice to make a guy find that out about himself. But it could be worse. I went to a wedding once where the guys had to wear lavender top hats and tails. Lavender, Nathaniel. It was like the couple had hired Lewis Carroll on acid as their wedding planner. So count your blessings.”

  “How does that even happen, anyway? I mean, why don’t guys get any say in what goes on or what their friends have to wear?”

  “Do I really need to explain this to you?”

  “Yes!”

  She sighs as if it’s a huge imposition. “Most women—not I, but most—have been clipping pictures of dresses and cakes and flowers from every wedding magazine on newsstands since they were eleven years old. It’s their dream.” She rests her head on my chest and flutters her eyelids at me.

  In an effort to drown out the sound of my physical reaction to that gesture, I say, “It’s one day!”

  “I agree.” She lifts her head and speaks normally. “So using that same logic, why do you care what you’re wearing or how the floral arrangements or centerpieces look on that one day?”

  I laugh. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about flowers or wedding favors, but giving either half of a couple complete and final control over all of the wedding-day decisions sets a horrible precedent for marital misery.”

  “Say that five times fast,” she teases.

  I ignore her. “Anyway, when I was eleven years old, I wanted every major event in my life to have a Transformers theme. Does that mean I get to say my vows in my best Optimus Prime voice?”

  She throws her head back and shrieks at the ceiling, earning every attendee’s attention. “Oh my gosh, I’m gonna pee!”

  I clamp my hand over her mouth while trying to keep my own laughter in check.

  When she calms down, I return my hand to her waist, and we snicker quietly together. Finally, she says, “That’s different. You outgrew your Transformers preoccupation, I’m assuming…?”

  I grin. “Yeah, so what? My point is, I’m not going to let an eleven-year-old girl’s concept of romance dictate what happens on my wedding day. No Optimus Prime, then no horse-drawn glass carriage, either.”

  A jazzier song comes on, so I spin her out and pull her back toward me in the only swing move I’ve ever mastered. She pushes away but remains facing me as she shimmies to the beat.

  “Your cheesy move reminds me of something else that won’t be happening at my wedding: the choreographed first dance.”

  I groan. “Oh, those are the worst!”

  “And nobody better put condoms and toilet paper on the getaway car, like you instructed those young boys to do earlier. I’m riding away in a sleek town car, no shoe polish allowed.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m a lot of fun, where it counts.”

  I choose not to comment and instead focus on trying to remember how to dance to a fast song.

  We don’t say anything else for the duration of the peppy number, but when it transitions into another slow dance, Betty says, “You’re a decent dancer.”

  “Thanks… I guess.” I turn to walk back to the table, but she snags my cummerbund.

  “Wait. Nate.”

  I slingshot toward her, nearly slipping in my shiny, slick-soled shoes. Her unintentional rhyme and use of my real name get my attention more than her serious tone, but the latter two tell me she means business.

  “What is it?”

  “One more dance.”

  “People are going to start talking,” I say, trying to cover up my unease with a joke.

  “Who gives a shit? Come on. I need to talk to you about something. For real.”

  Rather than give her a hard time and make an even bigger scene, I acquiesce, pulling her against me. “Fine.” Then I wait.

  “I came to your house last Saturday, because…” She presses closer to me and lowers her head. After several seconds, she starts over and says in a rush, “I had a feeling you didn’t know where Frankie was staying in Chicago, and I thought you should know, but once I was there, and it was clear you didn’t know, I started to doubt my instinct to tell you.”

  Since I’m not sure it would have been right for her to tell me, I say nothing but simply stare over her head while biting the inside of my cheek.

  Her hair grazes my chin when she abruptly lifts her head to look at me. “I’m sorry. I’m still not sure I did the right thing. I… I’m so confused.”

  That admission makes me feel like I did that time I drank a full jar of pickle juice on a dare: vindicated, yet nauseated.

  “Say something,” she begs in a whisper.

  Feeling like I’m toeing a great, big, definitive, unambiguous line, a line everyone in a committed relationship is well aware of and can never claim ignorance about, I weigh each word before saying, “I understand how you might feel conflicted.”

  “You do?”

  Her blue eyes sparkle hopefully, then dim when I answer, “You’re friends with both Frankie and me, but you’ve been friends with her longer, so your loyalty is with her.”

  “Not if she’s doing something… wrong… by you.”

  And there it is. The confirmation I’ve been dreading. Still wishing to hear anything to make it not true, to not make the past six months a complete waste, I ask, “Do you know she is? For a fact?”

  My knees nearly give out when she shakes her head. “No. I don’t have any proof. She hardly ever talks to me anymore, unless it has to do with Frank.”

  The hurt in her face awakens a fierce protectiveness in me. By instinct, my arms contract around her back, pulling her closer to my chest in a hug. “I’m sorry,” I say against her hair.

  She laughs bitterly. “My best friend might be cheating on you, and you’re consoling me.”

  Still hanging onto every possible last shred of dignity I may have, I claim, “We don’t know anything. According to her, nothing happened.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I think I have to.”

  The song ends, and she separates from me. I’m dismayed to see tears on her face. Her mouth trembles as she opens it to talk, so she screws her lips to the side, pauses, then chokes, “Heidi’s right. You’re a really good guy,” before rushing from the dance floor, leaving me there with my arms hanging limply at my sides.

  People are definitely staring now.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Apparently, Frank’s popularity hasn’t made it to Duluth. There’s still an hour left for today’s event, but it feels like we’ve already been here for days. It’s been one of the “painful” appearances the Phoenix bookstore owner derided all those weeks ago.

  Prolonging the agony is the silence that’s stretched—with few interruptions—for a month now between Betty and me, despite the fact that we spend nearly every weekend participating in Frank-related pursuits. We’ve perfected non-verbal communication, as well as the use of the well-timed grunt or monosyllable. It’s miserable. The longest “conversations” on these trips are between myself and the voice in my GPS (I call her Wanda) as she directs me to our event venues.

  Following Betty’s departure from the dance floor at Nick and Heidi’s wedding reception, I returned to the table to resume hiding from my nosy, obnoxious, getting-drunker-by-the-minute relatives. Mom and Dad stopped by the table as I was finishing up my third whiskey and Coke, but their visit was a short one, probably
due, in part, to my growled responses to their polite inquiries into my mental and physical wellbeing and their compliments on my fancy footwork with Betty. Taking the hint, for once, that I wasn’t in the mood for a free therapy session, Mom simply informed me Nick and Heidi were changing into their “going away outfits” (#3,217 on Nate’s List of Wedding No-Nos) and would be leaving any minute. Then she and Dad made their own escape, and I got to my wobbly feet to find my date.

  I looked everywhere for her. An informal poll outside the ladies’ room convinced me she wasn’t holed up in a stall, but I couldn’t find her anywhere else, either.

  As the D.J. was announcing “Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Bingham’s” impending departure, I shot Betty a quick text: Where r u?

  Almost immediately, I received the reply, Home.

  I wanted to know more, like “Why?” and “What’s wrong?” but alcohol and a suddenly overwhelming and irrational sense of rejection were beating the shit out of my curiosity, so I simply shot back, Fantastic. Thanks.

  Not even my babysitter could handle a full evening with me.

  Today, we’re five hours from home, sitting behind a table in an independent bookstore, watching people walk past us. Most of them ignore us altogether, but a few of them have slowed down to glance at the books propped and stacked in front of us before speeding up again and studiously avoiding eye contact.

  I’m sick of them pretending we’re not here, but they’re strangers; their indifference doesn’t hurt. The detachment from the person sitting next to me is another story.

  “Three hours is too long,” I state the obvious, rolling my signing Sharpie along my knuckles. My voice sounds rusty from disuse.

  Betty, slumped over a stack of books—a stack too big for the end of an event—sighs. “Yeah. This is awful. This store isn’t even big enough to hold a crowd that would warrant more than a two-hour event.”

  “If anyone had shown up.”

  “I swear, I did all the usual advertising and promotion for this one, the same things I did for the signing in Eau Claire, and that was a huge success. I don’t know what the hell happened…”

  I give her back a casual, consoling pat, then return my hand to the table. “It’s not your fault. I bet this is pretty common.”

  She straightens, arching her back and pushing her arms over her head. “Still makes us look like major losers.”

  Studying her face, I take in the dark circles under her eyes. And is it just me, or is she wearing less makeup than usual? There’s definitely something… different… about her skin. Duller, maybe. I fish a bottle of water from the cooler at my feet and slide it across the table. It stops directly in front of her, leaving a wet trail in its wake.

  “You getting enough sleep?” I inquire, then nod toward the bottle. “Drinking plenty of water? Eating well?”

  She shrugs. “Probably no on all counts. Not enough time.”

  “It doesn’t take a lot of time to drink water.”

  Twisting off the cap seems to require more strength than she has to give, and she winces. “Yeah, but water doesn’t help me stay awake late at night, while I’m updating Frank’s website. Or sending out requests to book bloggers and searching for conferences for you to attend.”

  I’d prefer continuing my health homily, but the last thing she said has my undivided attention. “Conferences? Please, tell me you’re kidding.”

  I have to wait for her to stop gulping water for her to answer, “Not kidding. Frankie wants you to hit at least two before the end of the year. I already have you signed up for a smallish indie one in Atlanta at the end of August; now I’m trying to find another, bigger one that would give her books the most exposure.”

  I silently lament the vacation time I’ll probably have to take to go to something I don’t even want to attend. Not for the first time, I wonder what the hell we’re doing and why we continue to keep doing it.

  Before I can consult Betty to see if she has a better answer than the one I keep telling myself, she says while staring into the middle distance, “You’re doing such a good job at all of this. You’ll be a huge hit at conferences.”

  “You’re giving me heart palpitations,” I tell her.

  She blinks and smiles over at me. “Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. A chance to get away, meet some crazy writers… It’ll be worth some laughs, if nothing else.”

  “I’m going to puke.”

  “Okay, I’ll stop talking about it, then,” she says, tenderly patting my cheek. “So sensitive.” The plastic water bottle pops and crinkles in her grip as she returns her attention to it and sucks down the remainder of the liquid.

  I avert my eyes, checking the time on my phone for the hundredth time in the past ten minutes.

  Her voice cuts through my despair at the slow passage of time. “We’ve hit a bit of a sales slump, too. I need to figure that out.”

  I look up to see her nibbling on her thumb nail. Pulling her hand away from her mouth, I say, “From what I’ve read, that’s typical going into summer. People spend more time outside, doing active things. Not everyone spends their weekends in bookstores. Remember when we didn’t?”

  “No,” she half-jokes with a chuckle. “Anyway, Frankie’s books are great beach reads. We need to capitalize on that. Maybe I can ask people to post pictures of themselves reading her books on vacation. E-books, paperbacks, whatever. Books in the wild.” She muses about that for a while, staring into space once more.

  “That’s a good idea,” I encourage. “But don’t make yourself sick with all this work.”

  “Well, if Frankie’s going to quit her job with Quimby-Rex, so she can concentrate on writing full-time, like she wants to, I need to ramp up my game.”

  I drop the Sharpie and bend down to pick it up, nearly falling from my chair in the process. Righting myself, I sit upright and push Frank’s glasses higher on my nose. I try to pretend her statement isn’t a dreadful diagnosis I’ve just heard for the first time when I say, “Maybe it’s not feasible for her to do that right now.”

  “She seems to think it is. Kyle crunched some numbers for her, and he says it’s possible, if she withdraws some money from her 401K—”

  “That’s ridiculous, irresponsible advice!” I’m aware my reaction makes it obvious this is the first I’ve heard of all this, but at this point, I don’t care.

  In contrast to the strain between Betty and me lately, things have been better with Frankie. I woke up the day after Nick’s wedding to a text from her that simply said, I’m sorry. Call me. We had a long talk about her weekend in Chicago, and she meekly reiterated there was nothing to be jealous about. She claimed he was at work most of the weekend, and she spent her time writing on the balcony at his place. When I eventually told her I believed her—it seemed petty to keep accusing her of lying when I didn’t have proof she was—she said, relief heavy in her voice, “I’d never cheat on you, Nate. I love you! I wish I wasn’t stuck here at my parents’; I’d come over there and prove it to you.”

  As much as I would have liked that under normal circumstances (whatever those are), I had to admit it was probably for the best she couldn’t, since I was suffering through an astounding hangover attacking every pain receptor from my gut upwards. I told her I’d gladly accept a rain check.

  I haven’t been able to collect on it yet, because she’s still spending most of her free time writing, but she at least seems regretful about it and apologizes often for not being more available. She’s even backed up those apologies with some big promises. (“When I’m finished with this book, we’ll go away for a weekend. Maybe in the fall? A spa weekend would be awesome, wouldn’t it? I know how much you love soaking in bathtubs. And you deserve it. You’ve been so awesome.”)

  I guess she’s been too busy to let me in on this writing career plan of hers, though.

  Betty has the grace not to make me explicitly admit my ignorance but simply continues as I catch up, “Yeah, well… she’s determined. And I agree with you about her retirement
fund; that’s why I want to do whatever I can to make sure she doesn’t have to touch it.”

  “What is she willing to do to realize this goal?” I wonder out loud, making the executive decision to pull the plug on this event as I start to pack up nearly all of the books and merchandise we arrived with.

  Betty follows my lead. “Type her fingers off, I guess.”

  “Helpful,” I scoff.

  “The bigger the back stock—”

  “She has a big enough back stock. We can hardly market and sell the books she already has out there.”

  Glancing nervously around us, Betty says, “Hey, I just realized… maybe we should wait and talk about this later, when we’re alone.”

  I roll my eyes. “Nobody here gives a shit or knows who the hell we are,” I grumble but drop the topic. It’s only pissing me off, anyway. Of course, just because we’re not talking about it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it while we finish our tear-down.

  I’m so sick of being in the dark about everything, even though this has taken over my life. I’m so sick of Kyle MacDonald having more of a say about what Frankie does—what I do—than I do. I’m so sick of never seeing my girlfriend. I’m so sick of driving rental cars and turning in expense reports—to my girlfriend. I’m so sick of having one day every weekend—if I’m lucky—to do everything I need or want to do around my house… or nothing at all, if I’d prefer to simply rest.

  While I violently stack boxes on the hand cart, preparing for our departure, Betty freezes me with a hand on my lower back. “Hey. I thought you knew.”

  I remain turned away from her. “Yeah. Well, I bet you’re not that surprised I didn’t.”

  “Let’s put this stuff in the car and go for a walk before we hit the road,” she suggests. “I can’t handle the idea of sitting for another five hours right now.”

  Glancing at her over my shoulder, I can tell she’s not exaggerating. She looks almost as undone as I feel. “Fine. I could use the exercise, too,” I agree.

  She smiles. “Great. I’ll go find the manager and let her know we’re leaving early.”