Page 37

Frank Jr.

The doorbell rang, its chime bouncing off the empty living room walls, startling me from my concentration. I set down the cut crystal vase I’d been wrapping in newsprint and wiped my hands on my jeans.

“Coming!” I called toward the door as I stood and stretched. My back throbbed from sitting too long. I waded through a sea of boxes and packing paper. My hips were stiff and ached with each step. Damn . Getting older was a pain. Literally.

A young man in a red polo shirt stood on the porch, beads of sweat trickling down his brow from beneath his backward-turned baseball cap.

“Dragon Wok?” he said, holding up a plastic bag filled with small white cardboard containers.

“Yeah, right here,” I replied, fishing in my wallet for cash. I handed him a twenty. “Keep the change.”

“Thanks, mister,” he said, already halfway down the steps.

I closed the door and inhaled the piquant aroma of General Tso’s chicken and pork fried rice.

One nice thing about being back in Southern California—the food was so much better.

Except for barbecue. My stomach growled in anticipation.

I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, too consumed with the task of dismantling my mother’s life piece by piece.

In the dining room, I cleared a space on the cluttered table. Empty silver-plated photo frames and crumpled tissue paper formed a haphazard centerpiece. I opened one of the takeout containers and scooped up a bite with a pair of chopsticks, too hungry to bother with a plate.

The house felt cavernous and hollow without Mom’s things in their rightful places. The walls, once adorned with paintings, photographs, and eclectic art pieces, now stood bare, like stripped-bark trees in winter. Each room echoed with an almost tangible silence.

I’d been at it for two weeks, and each day followed the same pattern.

Mornings were spent sorting through Mom’s belongings—deciding what to keep, what to sell, what to donate, and what to throw away.

In the afternoons, I boxed everything up and labeled it.

Evenings, I collapsed from exhaustion—too tired to think, too sore to sleep.

And then there were the nights.

When the house was finally still, I read.

The stack of letters from Victor to my mother was the last thing I had expected to find hidden away in her closet. I thought I’d known their whole story. Not even close.

Victor’s words were almost lyrical—a quality I hadn’t at all expected. He had been an artist without doubt—his photographs were stunning and could have filled galleries if he’d ever sold them—but I’d never pegged him as a poet.

My eyes wandered to a photograph on the sideboard—one of the few I hadn’t packed away yet.

It was of Victor, taken in the mid-to-late sixties, around when I graduated from high school.

He was fifty or so in the photo, yet still every bit the dashing rogue he’d been in his youth—tall and broad-shouldered, dark hair slicked back with streaks of gray at the temples.

He wore a charcoal suit and a slim burgundy tie, his trademark pencil mustache as precise as an artist’s stroke.

Mom had placed that photo at her bedside the day Victor died back in 2006. He’d lived a full ninety years—fifty-four of them married to her.

I finished shoveling a mound of fried rice into my mouth and wiped my lips with a paper napkin.

My mind drifted back to the letters, to Victor.

In them, he was the same man I’d known all my life, yet more.

More passionate, more vulnerable. The depth of his love for Mom was staggering, and reading his words had reopened a well of memories.

I remembered the first time Victor took me horseback riding on Laguna Beach.

I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old.

The salty breeze tangled in my hair as we rode along the shoreline, the Pacific’s cool mist kissing our faces.

The early morning sun peeked through the marine haze, low and lazy, streaking the sky in pink and purple.

At first, I’d been terrified of the big chestnut mare Victor had set me atop.

She seemed ten feet tall to my child’s eyes, and her sheer size made me feel insignificant, fragile.

I clung to the saddle horn for dear life, my knuckles white and my heart pounding.

But Victor was patient. He walked beside me, holding the reins and gently encouraging me.

“You’re doing great, Frankie,” he said, his voice smooth and unhurried. “Just breathe. Let your body move with her. She knows what she’s doing.”

I swallowed hard and nodded. I trusted Victor, and if he said I could do this, then maybe I could. Within minutes, my fear melted into exhilaration as I imagined myself a dauntless cowboy. We spent hours that day riding up and down the beach, just the two of us.

I smiled at the memory. That day on the beach had been the beginning of many adventures with Victor. He taught me to ride a bike, stole me out of school to go to a Dodgers game, and hoisted me on his shoulders the day Disneyland opened in Anaheim.

Though not related by blood, Victor had been my dad in every way that mattered. He was the dad I needed—the one my own father had never been. He was the example I’d followed when it was my turn to raise a child.

I gathered the empty takeout containers and dropped them into the large black trash bag I had set up in the kitchen—an unfortunate necessity after I’d foolishly gotten rid of the trash can.

Thankfully, I hadn’t made the same mistake with the single-serve coffee maker.

I rinsed my cup in the sink, popped a pod in the machine, and brewed a steaming cup of medium roast Colombian.

Coffee mug in hand, I returned to the dining room table and pulled out the letters I had planned to read that night.

These were different from the ones I'd already read, and curiosity itched at the back of my mind.

Each of these letters had been written during May and June of 1951, and Victor had noted a countdown in the top margin of each letter: 58 days to go, 52 days to go, 39 days to go…

Victor’s letters read like a forbidden romance novel—the kind my daughter wrote. Except this was real life—Mom and Victor’s. And, in many ways, the foundation for my life too.

I spied the fortune cookie from my dinner. Something urged me to open it.

I unwrapped it and cracked the shell with a swift twist of my wrists. The scent of stale, dusty almond rose up as a brittle shard of cookie skittered across the table. I fished out the small strip of paper and smoothed it with my fingers.

Love is the only thing you can take with you.