Let's Be Frank (15 page)

She complies with my demand and tosses my empty bottle into a tidy stacking recycling bin. Returning to the counter, she mirrors my pose, so we’re nearly forehead-to-forehead. I turn the Kindle sideways so she can see, too.

Thumbing through the book sales lists, I swig from the beer bottle, then set it aside so I have better control of the e-reader. I drill down into the lists, narrowing, narrowing, narrowing.

“I’m looking for writers like Nick Hornby—ooh, there’s a good one! Lad lit!—but
not
English,” I explain.

In a horrible Cockney accent, she demands, “What’s wrong wiff British blokes, eh? Top o’ the mornin’ to you, laddie.”

I nearly drop my beloved e-reader as I wheeze, “You went from Michael Caine to Lucky Charms in about two-point-six seconds.”

She punches my shoulder. “Shut up. My question stands. Why no British guys? They’re hot.”

“They may well be, but a) that’s not one of my requirements or concerns and b) Fox and Dunn and Hornby sometimes use expressions that would probably be a lot funnier if I knew what they meant.”

“It’s not their fault you’re not multicultural, Nathaniel.” She pulls the device away from me and taps at the screen, eliminating parameters to widen my search. “Broaden your horizons.”

I grab my property back from her. “My horizons are plenty wide, thank you. It’s not that I
never
read that stuff, but this time, I want someone American. It has nothing to do with xenophobia and everything to do with laziness.”

The list of candidates dissolves from more than a half-million to less than ten thousand in a matter of taps. I reclaim my beer.

As we scroll down the page, Betty calls out the names we see, in case I can’t read, I guess. And I dismiss them for various reasons.

“Nick Alexander?”

“No Nicks.”

“Evan Llewellyn?”

“Too many ‘l’s.”

When she shoots me a disbelieving look, I keep my eyes pinned to the screen and state, “I don’t have to have good reasons. This is all about gut instinct.”

She snorts but stops staring at my profile and goes back to reading from the screen. I fill my mouth with more beer and continue scrolling.

The next name on the list, however, makes her gasp, and it turns my insides to ice.

Frank Lipton
.

Clinging to the pathetic hope that someone who’s
not
my girlfriend has already published ten books with sweet, illustrated pastel covers and under the name Frankie’s been planning to use for her pen name (bummer for her!), I tap to the “About the Author” page to see what this Frank Lipton dude looks like.

Oh… My…

Beer sprays from my mouth and onto my face… on my e-reader. I mean, my face is on my e-reader. In it. On it. Whatever. It’s
there
!

“Motherfucker!” I hiss, losing my grip on my beer bottle while jumping down from the stool. Golden liquid spreads across the granite as the bottle rolls. Betty straightens to avoid having her arms drenched, and the bottle drops between the counter and her body, landing with a sick crash at her feet.

“It’s okay!” she immediately says, but I’m not sure to what she’s referring. If she’s talking about my picture out there on the Web, associated with a bunch of books I didn’t write, then she’s way off-base.

I wipe the e-reader against my butt, effectively making me kiss my own ass. “Oh, shit!” I hiss when I make that connection. Holding the device in front of me again, I demand to a suddenly empty kitchen, “Do you know about this?”

Her head pops up to counter level again, followed shortly by the rest of her body. In her hand is a kitchen towel and several brown pieces of glass.

When I look at the screen, I half-expect the picture to have changed, and it has, because I’ve activated a link with my all my butt-rubbing, so I’m faced with a list of “Frank Lipton’s” book titles. I read them out loud, watching Betty’s face become paler with each title.

“Oh, my gosh…” I whisper. “You
do
know.”

She tosses everything in her hands into the nearby sink, rounds the counter, and stands in front of me. Grasping the drawstrings of my hoodie, she pulls them, bunching the hood against the back of my neck and pulling my face closer to hers, little puffs of alcohol-and-grape-scented air making me blink with each syllable when she says, “I had no idea. You have to believe me.”

I nod sickly but pull away from her, afraid my one-and-a-half beers are about to make an encore appearance. At the risk of hastening that occurrence, I reread the titles. None of them sound remotely familiar, but one—
Hippocratic Oaf—
practically bitch slaps me. I navigate to the previous page, my fingers tacky against the dried beer residue.

Yep, there I am again. I hold the device out to Betty so she can see. “When the eff was I ever wearing those black glasses? Never!”

She examines the picture. “Looks like a Photoshop job. A good one, but still… Where’d she get the original picture?”

I edge closer to her so I can look at the photo over her shoulder. At first, I draw a blank, but then I recognize the background as my parents’ living room. And that shirt… that was the one I wore the day we went to their house for lunch, the day I introduced her to them, and it all comes flooding back.

“C’mon… just a little picture. I don’t have any of you!” It was half-time of the game the three of them were eventually successful in forcing me to watch.

“Why now?” I asked, trying to evade the tiny circle on the back of her phone.

“Nathan! Let the girl get a picture of you,” Mom interfered from the other sofa, where she sat next to Dad.

I sighed but rearranged my features into something that felt unnatural but possibly acceptable. As soon as Frankie took the shot, I held out my hand. “Let me see.”

She clutched the phone to her chest. “No.”

“Yes! I want to make sure I don’t look like a moron.”

“You don’t look like a moron,” she promised. “You look like you. And I like it.”

It was the first time anyone other than my mother had said something so accepting, and it took me aback. “Oh. Okay. But don’t… put it all over Facebook,” I muttered.

“I won’t,” she reassured me, pocketing her phone without showing me the snapshot and cuddling against me to watch the rest of the game.

I rub my face at the memory. “She took that at my parents’ house,” I answer Betty.

Sounding shell-shocked, she says robotically, “It’s a good one. You’re photogenic.”

“I look like a smug hipster!”

A handsome, smart, smug hipster, but that… is beside the point!

I scan “Frank’s” author bio. “Oh, shit the bed,” I grumble.

A sigh comes from Betty. “Green Bay? She didn’t even change the hometown to something… bigger? How about New York City? Isn’t that where all writers live and blend in and get lost? Not here, where skimming the Sports section counts as ‘extensive daily reading.’”

My heart thunders. Sweat pops out along my hairline and on my upper lip. I manage to land a butt cheek on the nearby couch in time to ride out my lightheadedness.

Betty follows me and relinquishes the sticky e-reader. “This sucks,” she understates.

When I feel relatively composed, I go back to the page for
Hippocratic Oaf
and, dry-mouthed, silently read the blurb.

Pediatrician Bing Nathanson…

A squeak escapes my throat.

…never dreamed being in touch with his feminine side would be such an impediment to finding true love with a woman. But crying at weddings, singing to babies in the NICU, knitting baby booties in his spare time, and avidly reading women’s fiction has only resulted in one thing: ridicule from his family and utter loneliness.

Fed up with being labeled “too sensitive,” he gives himself a personality makeover, adopting the opposite of each of his natural personality traits to present a new and “improved” Dr. Nathanson to an online dating site.

There, he finds Kris, the perfect woman for him. Only… she’s perfect for the
old
him, the
real
him. She can’t stand the macho Dr. Nathanson. His quest to convince Kris of his true nature lands him in some outlandish situations as he works harder and harder to win her over. But a cynic like Kris isn’t an easy sell…

Swallowing repeatedly, I stare at the simple-yet-eye-catching cover art for
Hippocratic Oaf
. After a few seconds, I wordlessly hand the device to Betty. I can tell by her ever-widening eyes that she’s reading the blurb, and it’s new to her.

After a couple of minutes, she lifts her eyes warily and winces at me. “You don’t look so great,” she observes, perching on the arm of the couch and pushing down on my back. “Here. Uh… put your head between your legs… or something.”

Her advice is appropriate, so I obey. Staring down my boys, I muffle, “What am I going to do?”

“I guess you can start with telling her what you found.”

I laugh mirthlessly. “Oh, yeah. Sure. Here? With an audience?”

“I’ll keep everyone occupied out here, and you guys can have some time alone in your room.”

“I want to go home.”

She pauses, then says, “I don’t blame you. I don’t think you should be alone tonight, though. Do you think you could stay with your brother?”

I gulp. “I’m fine. It’s not the end of the world. I’m just… stunned. And upset she did all this behind my back.”

“Don’t leave,” Betty urges.

“I don’t want to ruin everyone’s weekend. They’ll hate me. Even more than they already do.”

“Nobody hates you.”

We both laugh at her unconvincing tone, and I marvel at my ability to laugh at anything right now.

Her cheeks flush, and her eyes flash. “Anyway, if they do hate you just because you don’t like zooming around on stupid snowmobiles, they’re morons. Forget them.”

I wish I could. But their presence is a huge factor in my decision. If it were just Frankie, Betty, and me here, I’d stick it out. Betty made the discovery with me, so it wouldn’t be a big deal if she heard Frankie and me talking about it. But… “I don’t want a bunch of strangers hearing Frankie and me argue.”

She bites her lower lip. “They won’t. There’s a bar in the closest town. We sometimes hang out there, so it won’t seem weird if I suggest we do that tonight. You guys’ll have time to talk, and if you want to leave after talking, you can, without a bunch of people watching you load up and drive away.”

The smells wafting from the kitchen remind me, “Your dinner. What about that?”

“You think you can pretend everything’s okay through dinner?”

I shake my head. “Probably not. I’m sorry. There’s no pretending
this
isn’t happening.” I flick the back of the e-reader in her hand.

She nods. “Okay. You’re right. Well…”

We both jump to our feet when we hear the others’ voices as they stamp the snow from their boots on the front porch.

Thrusting the electronic device at me, she hisses, “Go to your room. I’ll tell everyone you… you have diarrhea.”

“What?!”

She pushes on my shoulder, prodding me toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms. “Go! I’ll think of something to keep everyone away from you. Then I’ll suggest Frankie stays here with you when we go out later.”

I stumble down the hall with her pushing on my lower back. “Okay, but don’t say I have diarrhea. A headache will work just fine. Say I’m sleeping. Or something.”

“Whatever!”

She shoves me into the bedroom and slams the door.

I back up to the foot of the bed to sit and wait.

In the meantime, I know what I’ll be reading. I stab at the button that will send
Hippocratic Oaf
to my sticky e-reader and wait while it downloads.

*****

I’m a fast reader, so by the time I hear the cleanup efforts underway in the kitchen, I’m about halfway through
Hippocratic Oaf.

First of all, can we discuss the title for a second? If I weren’t the obvious inspiration for the oafish protagonist, I’d get a kick out of it, so I guess I have to give Frankie props for being clever. But it seems obvious, based on what I’ve read so far—heck, based on the protagonist’s name and some of the details in the blurb!—that I
am
the inspiration. Therefore, I’m offended to have inspired such a spaz of a character.

Propped against the headboard, I close my eyes and set the book aside on the bedspread, concentrating on breathing without hyperventilating. I need to detach if I’m going to continue reading without having a panic attack. Because if this is really how she sees me… why are we still together? I thought
I
thought some unflattering things about
her!
My petty complaints are nothing compared to how she’s portrayed this Dr. Bing Nathanson character.

Which brings me to the writing. I was hoping it would be amateurish and flat, but no… Frankie’s smugness when she talks about her writing is absolutely justified. That doesn’t make her attitude attractive, but it’s warranted. She’s good. Damn it. If she can market this well enough, she’ll be a big deal. Or
Frank
Lipton will be, anyway.