Commonwealth(72)

“Writing out a two-hundred-dollar ticket to some able-bodied asshole in a handicapped spot.” Fix shook his head. “That is a pleasure you’ll never know.”

Franny pushed the chair down the sidewalk blown over with sand. They took it all in: the gulls and the waves, the bikini-clad girls, the boys in board shorts, the lifeguard in his wooden tower watching over them like a god. Young people so beautiful they should have been making commercials for tanning lotion or ever-lasting youth played volleyball with no one watching. People ran with their dogs or ate sno-cones or stretched out on brightly patterned towels the size of bed sheets and baked.

“Don’t you wonder who all these people are?” Caroline marveled. “It’s Thursday. Doesn’t anyone have a job?”

“They’re celebrating my birthday,” Fix said. “I gave them all the day off.”

“Why aren’t those kids in school?” Caroline looked at a half dozen children with buckets beavering away on the rearrangement of sand.

“Do you remember when I used to bring you girls to the beach?” Fix said.

“Every year,” Franny said.

Fix looked out at the waves, at the tiny figures of men skating the water on bright-yellow boards. “I don’t see any girls out there,” Fix said.

“The girls are lying on their towels,” Franny said.

Fix shook his head. “That isn’t right. I would have taught you to surf. If you had lived out here with me I would have taught you to surf.”

Caroline reached out and combed back her father’s hair with her fingers. All she had ever wanted when she was young was to live with her father and no one would let her. “You didn’t know how to surf.”

Fix nodded slowly to the waves, taking it all into account. “I wasn’t a good swimmer,” he said.

They watched a boy with a pink-and-red dragon kite that raced straight up, spun in wild circles, and then plummeted down. They watched two girls in bikinis roller-blade past them, their long legs nearly brushing Fix’s knees.

“Your mother wasn’t like that,” Fix said, his eyes still on the surfers.

Franny didn’t know what he was talking about, the roller-blading girls? but Caroline picked it up. “Mom wasn’t an orthopedic surgeon?”

“Your mother was better than that, that’s all. I’m not one to go sticking up for your mother but I want you to know, she wasn’t the way that woman played her in the movie.”

The two sisters looked at each other over the wheelchair. Caroline gave her head a sideways tilt.

“Dad,” Franny said. “None of those people were us.”

‘That’s right,” Fix said and patted her hand as if to say he was glad she’d understood.

When they got back in the car Caroline and Franny both checked their phones. They’d turned them off for the movie and in the aftermath had forgotten to turn them on again.

“I wish I had a phone,” Fix said. “I could be a part of the club.”

“Check your Thomas Brothers guide,” Caroline said, her thumb rolling down an endless stream of texts from work.

Franny had two texts, one from Kumar wanting to know where the checkbook was, and one from Albie that said “CALL ME!!”

“One second,” Franny said, and got back out of the car.

He picked up on the first ring. “Are you still in L.A.?”

They had e-mailed a week or two ago. She had told him she was coming out for her father’s birthday. “I’m standing in front of the ocean right now.”

“I need a huge favor, which you owe me for not telling me that fucking movie was coming out this week.”

“Don’t see it,” Franny said. The kid still had the dragon kite up. There was just enough wind.

“My mother’s sick. She’s been really sick for three days and she won’t go to the hospital. She tells me she’s fine and she tells me she’s sick all at the same time, and I don’t think she’s fine. I can get down there by tonight but I’m worried she needs to go to the hospital now. I can’t get her neighbors on the phone, her best friend’s out of town. Mom was never exactly what you’d call social, or if she was social she didn’t tell me about it, so I don’t have a lot to work with. I don’t want to send an ambulance and scare her to death when maybe there really isn’t anything wrong with her.” Albie stopped for a minute, breathed in. “What I want to know is if you’d go over there and check on her. Jeanette’s in New York, Holly’s in fucking Switzerland. I can call Mom and tell her you’re coming. She’ll be mad but at least that way she’ll open the door.”

Franny looked back at the Crown Victoria, knowing the car could fly there. She looked at her father and sister in the front seat, staring at her through the window like two people who were late for an appointment. “Sure,” she said. “Give me the address. Then I’ll call you and tell you whether or not you should come.”

There was a pause on the line and Franny wondered if her phone had gone dead. She wasn’t great about remembering to plug it in. Then Albie’s voice came back. “Oh, Franny,” he said.

“Your mom doesn’t know about the movie, does she?”

“My mom doesn’t know about the book,” he said. “It turns out a novel isn’t the worst place to hide things.”