The Accidentals

by Sarina Bowen

  Henry looks up at the ceiling and sighs. Then he sets his phone down on the coffee table and follows Frederick upstairs.

  “Sorry, Ernie, but I’m going to knock with six.” I lay down my cards and cross my arms in front of my chest.

  For a long moment, Ernie just stares at me.

  “What? Do you have less?”

  He lays his cards down on the sofa. “Sorry. You just look so much like your mother that sometimes I’m startled.”

  “Wait…” What? “You knew my mother?”

  Ernie’s expressive eyes widen. “You didn’t know that?”

  I shake my head, speechless.

  He swallows hard, and for a moment I think he won’t say anything more. “We waited tables at the same diner,” he says eventually. “In Claiborne. She was going to the prep school. I was in college.”

  The hair stands up on the back of my neck. “Did Frederick work there too?”

  “No. He didn’t meet her until later.” Ernie clears his throat. “I introduced them at a party.”

  A party. I’m the product of a party.

  From upstairs comes the sound of Frederick shouting. “So we’ll be late! I don’t fucking care!” A door slams.

  Aftershocks.

  “I’m getting a drink of water,” Ernie says. “Want one?”

  “No thanks.”

  When he gets up to go into the kitchen, my gaze settles on Henry’s phone. The screen is still lit.

  I grab it off the table and press the menu button, then pull up Instagram. Sure enough, Henry is signed in as @FreddyRicks. I’ve been watching this account for years, thinking I was seeing the world as my father saw it.

  Yet never once have I seen a social media app open on Frederick’s phone. I don’t even think he has them downloaded.

  Later, I won’t know why I did it. But I aim Henry’s phone at the newspaper and frame a shot. Then I give it a caption. Just listening to a little 1D at home and reading up on their concert. Sounds awesome. #fanboy

  Then I post it.

  * * *

  Frederick spends the evening upstairs in the music room, playing the electric guitar. Alone. There’s some very angry playing coming through the ceiling. His mood is no match for the soundproofing.

  I spend the time reading Anna Karenina on the couch, too jittery to really concentrate. By my count, I’ve already cost Frederick a cool million and his mother’s approval. It’s no surprise that he doesn’t want to hang out with me.

  Even worse—the Instagram post about 1D got four thousand “likes” and a hundred enthusiastic comments before it was deleted. Nobody’s pointed a finger at me yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

  Someone knocks on the front door, which is odd. Frederick’s friends always announce their arrival just by tapping in the code. I pull the door open to find myself face to face with an older woman. Behind her, a taxi is pulling away from the curb.

  “Rachel,” she whispers, her smile quivering. “I’m Alice.”

  For a moment, I can only stare back. My grandmother is younger than I’d imagined. She has light brown hair and big hazel eyes.

  “Can I come in?”

  I jump back and open the door. Alice pulls a rolling suitcase behind her, but it gets stuck on the threshold, and I give it a yank to get it through the door.

  “Thank you, dear.” She pulls the door closed. “I’m so sorry to startle you. I’ve just had a nice long flight to get used to the idea of seeing you.”

  “Does he know you’re coming?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Should I…” I point upstairs.

  “What if you didn’t?” Alice asks.

  “Okay.”

  Alice glances around at Frederick’s living room. “Still living like a college boy, I see.” She wheels her suitcase toward the kitchen. Alice has been here before. “Come with me, would you?”

  In the kitchen, I watched as Alice unzips her bag. She removes a baggie full of what looks like flour, a stick of butter bagged with an ice pack, and a bag of chocolate chips. After a few more ingredients emerge, she lifts a plastic bowl and a cookie sheet from the bottom.

  “Rachel, you and I are going to make cookies. Because that’s what grandmothers do. And also so that I don’t just stare at you and cry.”

  “Okay.” I’m back to one-word answers again.

  Alice dumps the flour into the bowl. I pick up a baggie that contains what looks like both brown and white sugars, and pour those on top.

  “There you go,” my grandmother says. I look up to see Alice studying me. “Frederick is my only child,” she says. “I never expected to have a granddaughter.” Her eyes begin to look red. Alice sniffs. Then she dumps another white substance from a baggie into the bowl. Baking soda and salt, probably.

  I take a fork out of the drawer and stir the dry ingredients together.

  “I’m very angry with your father. I can’t even say ‘your father’ without my blood pressure rising five points. To think that I had a grandchild walking around in the world…” She puts a hand to her chest. “I’m sorry, Rachel. It didn’t have to be this way.”

  Apparently, it did. I keep that thought to myself. “Should I preheat the oven?”

  “That’s a fine idea.”

  I tap 375 into the key pad, and then discover that it’s also necessary to press “enter” before the oven will heat. Frederick’s oven is about twenty years newer than the one in my Orlando house.

  “Let’s adjust the rack…” Alice opens the oven. “Oh, heavens!” From inside she pulls a cardboard box. It reads: Accessories.

  “Oh,” I gulp. It’s lucky that Alice had found that box. “I almost started a fire.”

  Alice tosses the box on the countertop. Then she puts her head in her hands and laughs. “He’s never used his oven.” She looks up at the ceiling as if addressing him upstairs. “You are such a child, Frederick.” She laughs again, and then tears leak from her eyes.

  Of course there’s no mixer. “We’ll just have to mash it with a fork,” Alice announces. “It will take some muscle.”

  “I have a trick,” I offer.

  Alice waits with liquid eyes.

  “If you melt the butter first, it stirs together easily. But then you have to make bar cookies, because they spread.”

  Alice hands me the butter. “I’m in your hands.”

  * * *

  The cookies cut from the edges of the pan are crisp, while the ones in the center are gooey. “We have rare, medium, and well done,” I say, choosing a soft one and taking a bite. “They’re good.”

  Alice smiles. “Cheers!” She taps her cookie into mine. “You’re so skinny.”

  “I’m not always hungry,” I admit. I’ve been on the lose-your-mother diet for over a month now, and it probably shows.

  “Frederick eats irregular meals, I fear.”

  “Actually, he eats plenty,” I say, defending him.

  Alice shakes her head. “We can’t talk about him or I’ll burst.” She takes another bite, and then a sorrowful look comes over her face. “I’m so sorry about your mother, honey. I can’t even imagine.”

  There’s a moment of silence while we chew.

  “Rachel?” It’s Frederick’s voice, coming down the stairs.

  I watch Alice’s expression harden.

  “Something smells good.” He reaches the doorway and stops. “Mom.”

  Alice’s mouth gets tense, but then her eyes fill with tears. “I’m so angry with you, Frederick.”

  He leans on the door frame. “I know.” He looks beaten. But even as he stands there, his T-shirt askew, a few gray hairs glinting in the yellow kitchen light, he looks beautiful to me. It still shocks me every time he walks into the room.

  “Frederick,” Alice says through her tears. “It’s not just your life! How could you?”

  I hold my breath, because Alice has just asked the very thing that I’m afraid to.

  But it doesn’t matter, because Alice doesn’t get an
answer. “Where’s Dad?” he asks.

  “I left him in Kansas City. Crying in front of the Royals game.”

  * * *

  Grandma Alice sleeps in Frederick’s room, forcing him onto the sofa.

  “I’ll sleep downstairs,” I’d offered.

  “Oh no you won’t,” Alice had replied.

  Frederick didn’t even try to argue. In fact, he leaves us alone. When I get up the next morning, he isn’t home. Alice and I take ourselves out for brunch in Manhattan Beach. Then we poke into all the shops.

  “Oh this! This is what we need.” Alice pushes open the door to a nail salon.

  “Manicure pedicure?” asks a woman inside.

  “Two, please.”

  We’re soon seated side by side in pedicure chairs, with our feet in warm, soapy water. Until now, I’ve always considered the idea of paying someone else to paint my toenails a waste of money. As a technician massages my instep with skillful hands, I realize there’s a reason people pay for this.

  “I’ve always found it easier to think with my feet in a tub of water.” Alice sighs.

  “This is nice,” I agree. The pedicurist taps my foot, and I realize it’s a cue to remove it from the water. The woman rests my foot on the padded edge of the basin and begins buffing my toenails.

  “Rachel, do you want to tell me about your mother? Only if you think you can.”

  I take a deep breath and let it out. “Well, she was from Claiborne. But we moved to Orlando when I was two. She was a nurse at the hospital. On the pediatric ward…” I watch Alice’s widening eyes.

  “A pediatric nurse.” She shakes her head. “That’s a tough job. She must have been a wonderful person.”

  It buoys me to hear Alice say nice things about Mom. “She liked it most of the time. She said she never had to wonder whether her job made a difference or not.”

  Grandma Alice puts a hand on mine. “That’s wonderful, Rachel. There aren’t many people who can say that. She must have seen some very sad things, though.”

  It’s true. “One time the babysitter dropped me off at the hospital, because Mom and I were going somewhere together. And while I waited, I saw Mom give a white plaque to a crying woman.” I swallow. “When a child died at the hospital, one of my mom’s jobs was to make a plaster cast of…” I hold my own hands up, fingers splayed.

  Alice dabs at her eyes.

  “There were about a hundred nurses at her funeral,” I tell her as the manicurist pats my feet with a towel.

  “It couldn’t have been easy,” Alice says. “Being a single mom.”

  “If she hadn’t gotten sick…” I can’t keep talking about Mom any longer. “I got a scholarship to Claiborne Prep.”

  “Your mother’s genes at work,” Alice says quickly. “She never married?”

  “She never did.” Neither of my parents did, apparently.

  “I wish I’d met her. I wish I’d paid more attention. But I didn’t meet most of Frederick’s college friends. And I thought his music was only a phase.” She laughs, but the sound is bitter. “The last I remember, he was dating the drummer of his band.”

  “Definitely not the same person,” I say quickly, and Alice smiles.

  But it makes me wonder—if Frederick had a girlfriend, was my mom the other woman? I try that idea on. It doesn’t sound like Mom. But it might account for her bitterness. Maybe she thought he’d leave his drummer for her?

  And if she was the other woman, she might not have wanted to tell me that.

  At my feet, the stylist begins applying pink nail polish to my toes, with a motion so fine and fast that each nail takes only three strokes.

  * * *

  Frederick, Alice, and I endure a strained dinner at an Italian restaurant. Frederick barely touches his food, sipping instead from a glass of the bottle of red wine he ordered. And after I go to bed, I can hear strains of his acoustic guitar from the couch.

  After a time, I hear Alice emerge from Frederick’s room and go back downstairs. Their voices begin low but then escalate.

  “But why not?” Alice cries. “She should come immediately. She could finish her summer in a house with two grownups. Two people who haven’t neglected her for eighteen years!”

  I sit up in bed, my stomach clenching.

  “Because I have custody!” he shouts. “Insult me if you want, it will still be true.”

  Whatever Alice says next, I can’t hear it.

  “Go ahead and be angry. But she’s not going,” he says. And then, “No! I already said no.”

  My heart booms like a bass drum. I can’t lie down again until I hear Alice walk back upstairs and close the door to Frederick’s room.

  * * *

  When Carlos comes to take Grandma Alice away, she hugs me tightly. “I have to fly back now, because I have a job as a librarian, and a husband at home who is almost as helpless as Frederick. But I want you to come to Kansas City for the holidays, if not before,” Alice says. “I’m going to tell Frederick.”

  “Okay,” I agree. The holidays seem a hundred years off.

  “You are welcome any time. Any time, Rachel.”

  “Thank you.” I feel my eyes cloud.

  “Oh, honey.” Alice squeezes my hand. “You are not alone. I flew here to tell you that.”

  Carlos gives me a wave before he drives off. Frederick doesn’t even come outside.

  That night Frederick sits on the sofa with his guitar, which he does not play. Instead he sips from a glass of scotch. I perch tentatively at the other end, my book open in my lap.

  “I’m poor company tonight, kid,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t mind,” I tell him. And it’s true. Because he could have sent me away with Alice. He might have chosen to be finished with me. But he didn’t do it.

  He’s just being stubborn, my mother whispers in my ear.

  I ignore her.

  Chapter Eleven

  The week before my birthday, I return from the beach to find a powwow in progress. Besides Henry and Ernie, the young keyboardist and drummer are there. But nobody is playing. Instead, Henry paces the room, his sleeves rolled up, and Frederick is drinking a beer, guitar idle in his lap.

  “Henry, I know they want the album, like, yesterday,” Frederick says. “But I’m not there yet. If I give them some crap and it doesn’t sell, that helps nobody.”

  I tiptoe upstairs, and then listen from the landing.

  “This is your last album on this contract. If you become a problem child, they’re going to offer you shitty terms on the next one,” Henry argues.

  “You could always go indie,” Ernie puts in. “Maybe you should do that anyway.”

  “The simplest option is the Christmas record,” Henry says. “And it will make Ralph happy.”

  “Great,” Frederick mutters. “We can spend the rest of the summer caroling.” He strums his guitar. “Silver bells, silver bells. Freddy’s ca-reeeer is in the shitter.”

  Ernie snorts, but Henry sighs. “Okay, maybe it’s not your favorite idea.”

  That evening, from my hideout upstairs, I hear the front door open and close a number of times. Voices accumulate in the living room, both women’s and men’s. The conversation mingles with laughter, and someone begins spinning tunes from the vinyl record collection Frederick keeps in a milk crate near the piano.

  The self-appointed DJ, whoever he is, has eclectic taste. I heard Coltrane and the Beatles and David Bowie.

  I sit there on my bed, feeling forgotten, until my phone chimes with a text. No pirates here tonight, it reads. Still clear on your end?

  My smile blooms like a hothouse flower. I’ve abandoned my post to hide in my room.

  Who are you hiding from?

  My dad is having a party downstairs.

  And you don’t like his friends?

  I don’t know most of them, I admit. Ernie is downstairs, though. I could probably talk him into another game of rummy.

  Is there food? Jake asks. I’ll put up w
ith anyone for food.

  I laugh aloud in my empty bedroom. Then I sniff the air. I think there might be. Maybe Chinese? Something smells good, damn it. The idea that they’re eating down there makes me feel even grumpier and more invisible.

  You’d better investigate, Jake suggests.

  I will. But I’m not ready to let Jake go. Talking to him is the easiest thing in my life. What are you up to?

  It’s almost time to go to work. For once I’m happy to go and smell like fried clams because my mother has been chasing me around with catalogs, trying to get me to weigh in on khaki pants for school.

  I’ve been worrying about school clothes too. The Claiborne student handbook confuses me. Can I ask you a question about the dress code? I’m not sure I understand it.

  Sure!

  Incoming…

  I touch his avatar and hit “call.” He answers right away. “Hi,” I say, feeling a zing of self-consciousness.

  “Hey. The dress code reads strangely, right? I’ll tell you why—it was just redone to eliminate any reference to gender. The girls made a big stink about having to wear skirts a couple years ago. And then the guys piled on saying that ties were sexist.” Jake snickers. “A move of pure brilliance, if you ask me. So it was redone in those vague terms to show no gender preference.”

  “So what do girls wear?”

  “Well, you have to stay away from jeans or anything that looks like it’s sloppy on purpose. This is my personal rule—if the outfit says ‘Fuck you,’ they’ll call you out. But if it says, ‘I tried,’ you’re fine.”

  “Okay?” That really doesn’t tell me what I need to know. “But what do girls really wear?”

  He gets quiet for a second. “You mean, like, where do they shop?”

  “I only own shorts and T-shirts, Jake. Help me out here.”

  He laughs. “Well, I don’t have sisters, and I don’t pay much attention to clothes. That’s my disclaimer.”

  “Noted.”

  “But J. Crew is sort of ubiquitous. There’s plenty of Abercrombie. The super preps like Vineyard Vines. But not everyone is preppy. There are artsy people who wear a lot of black. No idea where they shop, though.”