She took her glasses off and rubbed her nose. “He’s a character.”
Outside, Frank dropped the T-ball bat and wandered over to have a word with the battered black Mercedes station wagon parked in the driveway. He and the wagon’s luggage rack came to some kind of understanding and Frank took off his belt, looped the buckle end, and opened the car door. He stood on its sill while he tied the notched end to the rack.
M. M. Banning jumped up and went to the sliding glass door. She struggled with it, but the door was stuck.
“Here, let me help you with that,” I said.
“I’ve been meaning to get somebody to come out and fix this,” she said, “but the man I have do things is out of town and I don’t like having strange people in my house. What’s Frank doing out there?”
The kid went about his business, slipping his wrist through the loop in his belt, then hopping down and closing the door, being careful to raise his arm to keep the belt from getting caught. Then he kicked a leg back, fell against the door, kicked and fell again, using his free hand to alternately mimic a pistol firing at the luggage rack and make his coattails flap behind himself. I was reminded of the black-and-white westerns I watched on TV in the afternoons after school. “I think he’s robbing a stagecoach,” I said.
M. M. Banning put a hand on her chest and stepped back from the glass. “Yes. He’s playing. He’s all right. The door can wait. He’s fine. Calm down.” She didn’t seem to be talking to me.
“No worries,” I said. I’m not a person who says slacker things like “no worries” or “enjoy,” but I’ve found the best way to handle anyone difficult—rich worrywart moms, the famished Manhattan vegan ordering a late lunch—is to exude the bland calm of the heavily medicated and go about my business. I kept fiddling with the door. “It jumped the track, that’s all.” I gave the door a fierce jiggle that popped it back in its groove. “When it’s stuck, you do this.” I showed her the lift-and-bounce maneuver. “Listen, when your guy comes back, tell him to replace this glass,” I said, tracing a long jagged line that split one of the giant panes. “That’s an accident waiting to happen. What cracked it? An earthquake?” I didn’t like thinking about earthquakes, but in Los Angeles, how could I not? Still, every place I’d ever lived in had come with its own brand of potential disaster—tornadoes in Nebraska, muggings in New York. I guess beneath my thick veneer of boring beat a heart primed to fall in love with danger.
“Frank’s head cracked it,” M. M. Banning said.
“Ouch. That kind of thing happens more than you might think. The glass is really clean, the kid isn’t paying attention. You should put stickers on the glass at his eye level so he’ll see the doors are closed when he’s running outside to play.”
“Since you know so much about what I ought to be doing, will these stickers of yours keep Frank from pounding his head against the glass when the door has jumped the track and he’s frustrated because it’s hard to open?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well in that case, forget the stickers. I’ll have to show him how to get the door back on track.”
“You do that,” she said, sliding the door closed again. Open. Closed. “Stickers. Ha. You’re not from New York, are you?”
“I’m from Nebraska.”
“Of course you’re from Nebraska. The Show-Me State.”
“I think that’s Missouri.”
“Those states in the middle are all the same,” she said, and opened the door to call, “Come here, Frank. Be quick.” She closed the door, using just her pinkie to move it as she squinted through the glass. “This could take a while,” she said, and checked her watch.
“Coming, Ma,” Frank shouted. He freed himself of his shackles, put his belt back on, and holstered his imaginary six-shooter. Took a turn around the yard and stopped to snap a rose from its stem just below the blossom, stroking its petals intently and giving it some clinical sniffs before stuffing it in his breast pocket and then arranging the petal tips to form a sort of pocket square. Plunged through a border of lemon trees interspersed with huge lavender bushes. Ran back and forth alongside a big evergreen hedge, brushing his fingertips along its top. Clasped his hands behind his back and tilted toward the denuded peach tree until the tilt turned into a spectacular pratfall, set to a symphony of Looney Tunes whistles, explosions, shrieks and groans, all loud enough for us to hear through the glass. After that, Frank lay there for a while, first pretending to be dead, then scratching patterns into the dust with his fingers.
M. M. Banning looked at her watch again. “Five minutes.” She opened the door and called, “Frank! While we’re young.” Then she looked at me and said, “While you’re young, anyway. How old are you?”