The Secret Life of Prince Charming

by Deb Caletti

  But first…I had to look.

  Back in the truck, as we sat in front of Abigail Renfrew’s house, after Frances Lee’s door had been slammed shut, and then Charlotte’s had and then Jake’s and mine, Frances Lee turned and faced us all. “Congratulations, my friends. We have now concluded the karmic quest.” And then she turned her key.

  Didn’t I tell you? There are things you don’t say straight to fate’s face.

  Ruh, ruh, ruh.

  “Fuck,” Frances Lee said succinctly.

  Ruh, ruh, ruh.

  She leaned back hard against the seat, ran her hands through her hair, and sighed dramatically. Jake looked at me and gave his head a small shake, and I rubbed my forehead in response. Then Frances Lee leaned forward again.

  Ruh, ruh, ruh.

  Jake reached for his backpack, unzipped it.

  “If anyone checks right now to see what time it is, you’re dead,” she said. Zip, back up again. “I’m aware we all have places we need to get to today. Very aware.”

  “We just need to wait,” I said. “Waiting worked before.” Hopefully, we just needed to wait, and hopefully not for too long. Our train would be leaving in just a few hours. “Besides, you guys said this would never happen. Didn’t you say it wouldn’t?” My voice sounded slightly pleading. “We wouldn’t get stuck here because if you expect it, you get something else, right?”

  “Yeah, but I was expecting to get hit by a semi,” Frances Lee said.

  Charlotte got out her notebook and pen, plucked the cap off with her teeth, and held it there. For a while there was no sound except the soft scritch of pen on paper and someone’s dog barking in the distance.

  “Anyone want music?” Jake asked.

  “No,” Frances Lee said.

  “What are you writing, Charlotte?” I asked.

  “Shopping list, what do you think? I’m writing what it feels like to be stuck in a truck with two sisters and a guitar player after visiting my father’s former peignoir.”

  “Amour,” I said. “A peignoir is one of those lacy top things.”

  “Amour, who cares? Point is, we’re stuck.”

  Frances Lee bammed her palm flat against the steering wheel. Frances Lee did have a bit of a temper.

  Ruh.

  “That’s not good,” Jake said.

  Rrr.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Frances Lee said.

  R.

  “Frannie,” Jake said.

  The truest thing about truth was that it needed to be seen no matter what it was and no matter how it came to you. “I know, okay? I know,” she said. “You fucked up my engine with that Coke.”

  It was fucked up already, I mouthed to Jake, and he nodded. He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it sweetly. Oh, I told my heart. Hold on.

  “God, Jake,” Frances Lee said. Frances Lee really liked to blame people when she was pissed.

  “Frannie,” Jake said softly. “I think it’s over.”

  R.

  “Yeah.” She laid her head on the steering wheel. In the side mirror, I could see Charlotte’s profile bent over her notebook, and Big Bob’s shiny checkered pants. It seemed polite to give Frances Lee a moment of silence, even though someone was pushing a foot down on my own internal panic accelerator. I was working my way toward What now?! from the fact that we were in a bad way, up a creek without a paddle, royally screwed, plus some, when I saw Frances Lee’s shoulders moving up and down, up and down. She was either laughing hysterically or…

  “Frances Lee?” Charlotte asked. The pen cap clicked back onto the pen.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Frances Lee cried.

  “We’ll figure something out,” I said. Hot water, really hot, dire straits, in a pickle. However it was that you could be in a pickle…We were in a very big pickle. Big as the one in Big Bob’s hamburger.

  “We’re never going to…”

  Charlotte put her hand on Frances Lee’s back and patted.

  “And my truck…,” she sobbed. “I can’t afford to fix this thing. I can’t afford this…”

  She cried her desperation into the steering wheel. There was only one thing to do. I hoisted myself over the seat, Jake giving my butt a helpful or self-serving nudge on the way. I landed in front. I put my arm around her. Charlotte unbuckled her seat belt and scooted over next to us.

  “Fucking money,” Frances Lee said.

  “We can help you,” I said.

  “We’ll hold a bake sale,” Charlotte said. “We’ll say it’s for the PTA.”

  “Or one of those car washes. Where the girls wear those tiny shorts and wave signs to bring in pervert old guys,” I said.

  Frances Lee’s shoulders stilled. If shoulders could smile, hers did then.

  “Magazine drive.” Her voice was small down there by the steering wheel.

  “We’ll buy Dog World for Ivar,” Charlotte said.

  “Now that he’s learned to read at school,” I said.

  Frances Lee started to laugh. I could feel Charlotte’s arms around me, her fingertips reaching toward Frances Lee’s shoulders. Frances Lee sat up, leaned in to us. She might have had a temper. She might have been unpredictable and occasionally cranky. She might have had a tendency to blame others when she was frustrated. But I think I loved Frances Lee.

  “Sisters,” Charlotte said.

  The word was large, so large. Bigger than it had been before. Family, too, a bigger word. That felt like a good thing. An essential thing. There was power in numbers.

  “Sisters,” Frances Lee said.

  “Sisters,” I said.

  “Sisters,” Jake said. Charlotte shot him a look. “Sorry. I just wanted to be part of things.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  We sat there together for a while in the front seat, until finally panic turned into a full-fledged bully—the kind that pokes you in the chest with one finger, and then does it again and again before finally shoving you hard to the ground. What were we going to do? There was no solution, none. We needed help. I climbed over the seat again, into the back. I kept looking at that brick house, its flat front, the leaded windows, the walkway. There was something I couldn’t get to, beyond that fortresslike surface. Frances Lee was leaving desperate messages for Gavin. If she could reach him, he could bring a friend’s truck. A two-and-a-half-hour drive each way.

  We’d never make it to the train station on time. Unless Gavin called in the next few minutes. Unless he called right back and drove real fast…

  “He said he might go out on the boat with Nate,” Frances Lee said to Jake.

  “Frannie, you can’t hear anything over that engine. I had to read lips for three days after we went with Nate,” Jake said. “What about Joelle?”

  “Away with Roy for the weekend. I think they’re up in Canada.”

  We sat in silence. And then, just right then, another little phone song rang from the front seat. “Gavin!” I said.

  “That is not my phone,” Frances Lee said. “I do not have the song that the farting warthog sings in The Lion King.”

  “‘Hakuna Matata,’” Jake said, and before the words were out of his mouth, I had flung my body over the seat—No!—and grabbed Charlotte, too late.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “No!” I said, again. Her phone never rang. Never! God, how could I have forgotten the pink emergency phone?

  “Hi, Mom.”

  I groaned. “Don’t tell her where we are!” I shout-whispered.

  I could hear Mom’s voice all the way in the backseat. Either Charlotte hadn’t yet discovered the volume controls, or Mom was yelling. “Your father’s not answering his phone! I checked Quinn’s cell bill, and there’s all these calls to the islands! Joelle Giofranco?” Charlotte’s eyes were wide. She looked stunned. “If someone doesn’t tell me what is going on right now, I’m calling the pol—”

  Charlotte snapped the phone shut. She held it tight to her chest.

  “Why did you hang up? She could help us
,” Jake said.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Give it to me,” I said. I grabbed it from her and shut it off.

  “What is going on here?” Frances Lee said. “I heard Mother Hysteria.”

  “A little problem,” I said. Frances Lee looked like she might strangle me. I took a big breath. “We never exactly told Mom we were going on this trip.”

  “She thinks we’re in Disneyland,” Charlotte said. “Well, she used to think we were in Disneyland.”

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Frances Lee said. Jake squinched his eyes closed as if to guard against oncoming pain. But Frances Lee just shook her head and sighed a Dear God, what next? sigh.

  “Your mom doesn’t know where you are,” Jake said. “She just knows you’re not where you said you’d be.”

  I nodded.

  “And you’re here at your dad’s former peignoir’s house?”

  I nodded again.

  “You’re dead,” Jake said.

  “If we can just make the train like we said…,” Charlotte said.

  We sat in silence. The rain had stopped, but it was getting steamy in the car. We rolled down the windows. The air smelled like damp earth. The sun had inched out, and the wet grass blades and tree leaves looked sparkly white. I was making frantic bargains in my head. Just, oh God, please let us somehow move from Abigail Renfrew’s front yard.

  “Jake, call one of the guys in the band to pick you up. At least you can make your gig,” Frances Lee said.

  “They won’t be coming in for a few hours. Anyway, you think I’m just going to ditch you people? No way,” he said.

  “You came all this way with us just to get there,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it turned out that the trip wasn’t about the ‘got there.’”

  “Musicians with integrity,” Frances Lee said. “What’s the world coming to.”

  “I’ll redeem our reputation by bashing hotel room furniture when I get famous.”

  “That’s a relief,” Frances Lee said. She leaned her head against the car seat.

  I sighed. My head was throbbing with the ugly pulse of complications. We were not going to be saved, I knew. “We don’t have any choice,” I said. “We’ve got to go back in there and ask Abigail Renfrew for help.”

  “Quinn, I know you’d hate that, but I think you’re right,” Frances Lee said.

  “She’s kind of nice,” Charlotte said.

  “They’re all nice,” Jake said.

  “It’s easier to be shitty to someone who’ll take it,” Frances Lee said. “Remember, you don’t have to be nice.” She poked Charlotte’s chest.

  “Ow,” Charlotte said.

  “Let’s get out of this blasted truck and get some help,” Frances Lee said.

  Slam, slam, slam, slam. Big Bob grinned and waved his cheeseburger, newly cleaned from rain. I wondered who I was supposed to be with Abigail Renfrew now that I couldn’t be a bitch.

  We hadn’t even left the side of the car/carcass yet (Frances Lee was just tucking her useless keys into the pocket of her jeans), when the front door of Abigail Renfrew’s house opened.

  “You’re still here,” she called to us. “Is everything all right? Of course everything’s not all right,” she said. She walked down the path in her bare feet. “My God, look at who you have in the back.”

  “The car died,” Frances Lee said.

  “Oh, dear God, no. What to do? I don’t know, let’s see. Actually, I have no idea.” Abigail Renfrew reminded me of Mom then. She always narrated every thought in a crisis. “Okay. All right. Wait. I’ll call Haden. Of course! Haden knows everything about cars.”

  “Definitely call Haden,” Frances Lee said.

  “He’ll be right over if I ask,” Abigail Renfrew said. It wasn’t bragging—just more thought narration.

  “Haden,” Frances Lee said. “Boyfriend?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No. Son. My son. I’ve sworn off men until I can be trusted with them. Until a panel of experts approves, I’m refraining, lest I continue to be a terrible role model.”

  “You sound like my mom,” I said. I guess it was an offering. An offering, but the truth, too.

  Abigail smiled. “Let me get Haden.”

  FRANCES LEE GIOFRANCO:

  You’ve got to go beyond the fact that you like his ass in those jeans. To get this right. Stop and think and lift up the big rock of your past and look at all the creepy shit underneath.

  I don’t know what’s going to happen with Gavin and me. We’re young, I’m not stupid about that. But I do know I’ve stopped to look at the pieces—my dad, my mom and dad, my mom, me and both of them. Their parents. What I have with Gavin is not made up of old stuff, some psycho merging of our fucked-up family trees. It’s new. It’s good. It’s whole on its own.

  And I know something else. Sometimes “two” can feel very lonely. Sometimes it can feel very crowded. But with Gavin, two is just the right number.

  Abigail and Charlotte and Frances Lee were inside, making lunch and waiting for Haden. Jake and I sat outside on those brick steps, where Dad had once stood holding Charlotte’s hand, urging me toward some new life I wanted no part of. Now here I was, on those same steps, sitting next to a boy whose dimple should have meant trouble but didn’t, who leaned in and kissed me again. Who knew a kiss could make you so happy? Who knew it was a whole new place the two of you could visit, a land that was just yours?

  “I’m going to miss seeing you every day,” Jake said.

  I brushed his curls off his forehead. “I’m going to miss seeing you every day,” I said.

  “I never would have guessed that Frances Lee would have a kind, beautiful, smart sister.” Jake smiled. I could see why this was so powerful. This feeling. To have someone see you in ways you had never been seen before—it was like one of Malcolm’s coloring books, an image made of black lines now filled with blues and yellows and greens. It felt so full when you don’t always feel very full. I could understand how it could cause you to take someone’s hand and follow them into a dark forest where there might be monsters and giants and witches. But I believed Jake’s eyes were sincere. Jake’s eyes were good eyes.

  I told him so. It got us kissing again, kissing interrupted by Charlotte, who bounded out of the door.

  “Lunch is rea—God, you two are getting sickening,” she said.

  Frances Lee was looking at Haden’s ass as he bent over the truck. Haden was close to Frances Lee’s age, and it was true that he looked great, really great, from behind. I knocked her with my elbow. Gavin, I mouthed. Who? she mouthed back, and smiled. She winked at me, a confirmation of Gavin-love.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do,” Haden said. “Last Rites, maybe? Other than that, you need a new engine.”

  Three hours left. We couldn’t even catch the real train if we wanted to now.

  “Okay, okay,” Abigail started narrating again. “What can we do? You said this Gavin could come in the morning with a truck, right? You could stay at my house. Or I could drive you home. In my two-seater, no. No. And we’ve got this rather large man with checkered pants to consider. What are our options? You have to call a parent. There’s no other way, of course. Your mother,” she said. She looked suddenly gray.

  “No,” I said.

  “No,” Abigail said.

  “Or their father?” Haden said.

  “You’ve forgotten? Definitely not,” Abigail said.

  “Definitely not,” I said.

  “Right. Definitely not,” Haden said.

  Before I knew what she was doing, before I could stop her, I realized that Charlotte had taken out her phone again, that little pink savior to be used only for emergencies and for taking up-close pictures of parts of me. I reached out to grab it, but a call from this phone right now was akin to usage of that red phone in the president’s office. Mom picked up on the first ring.

  “Mom?” Charlotte said.

  And then she ha
nded the phone to me.

  ANNIE HOFFMAN:

  Sometimes you’ve got to make a mess before you can clean up.

  I sat alone on those brick stairs, with the little pink phone folded shut. All of the biggest, worse phrases had been used. I’m so disappointed in you. I am ashamed of you. And the worst of all, when she found out exactly where we were, How could you do this to me?

  There was no way, No way! she would let us stay the night in that house, with that woman. She would come and get us, now! Right this minute! How could that woman let you into her house!

  One more thing, Mom. I had to say.

  What do you have to tell me? It better be an apology. A very big apology.

  Well, it did concern something very big.

  We need a truck, I said. We’ve got a ten-foot-tall cartoon character we need to deliver to Dad’s front lawn.

  Chapter Twenty

  While waiting for my mother to come, tiny Abigail Renfrew ate half a box of Mystic Mint cookies that she’d offered to us. She also ate an ice cream sandwich, and nearly half a bag of Fritos. She ate like this when she got stressed, she said, which must have meant that her life was pretty peaceful before we showed up at her door. Her eating reminded me of the way people buy out the grocery store when they know a storm is coming.

  The drive to Portland from Nine Mile Falls usually takes about two and a half hours. Mom arrived in two hours flat, and in a nice, new truck with roomy front seats and backseats. Hopefully, she didn’t steal it, because doing ninety-five in a stolen truck would have gotten her into a lot of trouble. We saw her pull up, two large round headlights screaming down the street. Weirdly, though, the doorbell didn’t ring for a long time. She was sitting in her car for a while, hopefully not downing anything alcoholic.

  Finally, when the bell did ring, Abigail rubbed her shoulders as if she were freezing, and then got up from the kitchen chair she was sitting in to answer the door. I got up to follow her. Frances Lee stopped me and took my hands.