Free Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson Page B

tucked it under his jacket and rolled the window up again. We drove along in silence for a while after that, slipping past the Santa Monica Pier with its miniature amusement park, complete with Ferris wheel and a little roller coaster pinned there against the sky.
    â€œYou know what does sound like fun?” Frank said about then.
    â€œLay it on me,” I said, thinking he was checking out the rides.
    â€œLay what on you?”
    â€œNothing. Tell me what sounds like fun.”
    â€œGoing to the little airport where the antique planes take off. It’s around here someplace, but I haven’t been there since I was very young.”
    â€œBut now that you’re practically antique—” I said.
    â€œI’m not antique,” he said. “Things fifty years old or older are considered ‘antique.’ Anything thirty years old to fifty is called ‘vintage.’ So I’m not even close to vintage, although of course you are swiftly approaching that.”
    â€œThanks. So what does that make you?”
    â€œI’m a child. My mother, however, is antique.”
    â€œWell, let’s not tell her that, okay?”
    â€œWhy not? It’s true.”
    â€œLots of true things aren’t polite to say. If you’re not sure whether something you’re about to say might be rude, it’s better to keep yourmouth shut. That’s the kind of tact your mother was talking about, by the way. Having tact, t-a-c-t, means knowing when to keep your thoughts to yourself.”
    When he didn’t have a comeback to that I checked him in the mirror and saw I’d upset him. His face, of course, was as impassive as ever; his shoulders were the tipoff. They’d risen to his ears, which I knew by then was step one to Frank going stiff and wordless on me. “What do you say we look for that airport?” I asked.
    â€œI would like to see it again,” he said. I pulled to the side of the road right away and found the place on my cell phone.
    When we got there I parked in the lot by the airfield and Frank climbed over the seat to get the windshield view of all the private prop planes and petite jets coming and going. The thing that got us out of the car finally was a bright yellow biplane that kept taking off and circling back to land again. Frank got out first and stood there with his goggles pushed up on his forehead and the binoculars pressed to his eyes, watching until it just kept going and lost itself in the horizon. There was something so poignant about Frank standing there with the wind blowing his coat and scarf around him that I got out to photograph him with my phone.
    It occurred to me I should take a picture with Mimi’s phone, too. So I fished it out of my pocket and snapped the photo, and then I did something unfathomable. I scrolled through her list of contacts. It was the same kind of awful impulse that makes people inventory bathroom medicine cabinets when they’re using the facilities at someone else’s house. Until that moment I’d always considered myself above that kind of thing. But there I was, my eyes flicking down the list, past several Drs. This and That; Emergency Room, two listings; Home; and Hospital, a few selections there, too.
    Had she handed me her own personal cell phone or one she’d gotten as a free bonus gift with a year’s subscription to Accidents Waiting to Happen Weekly ? Where were her people, the Ellens and Eds, Dianes, Dicks and Sheilas most of us carry around in our pockets in case wereally, really need to tell someone we’re in line at the grocery, waiting to pay for cat food? Or had she deleted the names of anyone who mattered to her, anticipating my snoop through her connections when I never would have suspected something like that of myself?
    I spun through the entire list. I told myself I’d come across Mr. Vargas’s name at the end of it, and that finding his name would validate me, the