Chapter 3
“He probably doesn’t have his phone, Yaya.” Frankie glanced at the passenger seat. Yaya had the phone held to her ear as she waited for Mr. Santino to pick up and stared out the front windshield.
“Maybe he’s talking to the press. He’s a hero,” Frankie suggested, hoping to take her mind off the fact that he was shot and focus on the fact that he was indeed a hero. “It sounds like he saved Taylor’s life.”
“Mmmhmm.”
The call Yaya had gotten when they were leaving the house was from Cindy.
She told Yaya that Taylor, a woman who Frankie had met a few times over the three weeks she’d been in town and liked, was cleaning out a cottage she’d lived in next to the retirement home.
She was packing up her final boxes when her abusive ex showed up with a gun and tried to abduct her.
Arthur apparently not only stopped him, he held him there until the cops came.
Unfortunately, he ended up taking a bullet to his shoulder.
When Cindy was relaying the information on speaker as they drove to the hospital, Yaya hadn’t said a word, it was Frankie who asked questions and then thanked her for letting them know before they said goodbye.
In twenty-nine years as the only granddaughter to Lydia Calliope Costas, Frankie had heard her grandmother talk through weddings, funerals, baptisms, movies in theaters, memorials, recitals, and even televised tragedies.
Yaya’s running commentary was so constant, the absence of it was more alarming than an air raid.
But for the twenty-five-minute drive up the highway, she’d been silent as a Trappist monk.
Not an anecdote, not a complaint, not a single backseat correction of Frankie’s driving, despite the fact that she was clearly exceeding the speed limit through every mountain curve.
It was a kind of silence that gathered mass and pressed in on Frankie’s eardrums, making her acutely aware of every tick of the blinker and the rumble of the air conditioning blowing in through the dash.
Frankie had tried to fill the silence with small talk about the latest episode of The Housewives franchise they’d watched, the river flowing beside the highway and even the gossip from Yaya’s weekly canasta group she’d heard at Brewed Awakenings, the local coffee shop.
Each attempt had fallen flat, with Yaya offering no more than a distracted “mmhmm” or vague nod.
She gripped her phone the entire way, flipping it over and over in her hand, obsessively double-checking the ringer was on, sometimes just staring at the locked screen as if she could manifest Mr. Santino’s call or text into existence by sheer force of Mediterranean willpower.
By the time they pulled into the hospital parking lot, Frankie felt like she’d spent the past half hour with a ghost riding shotgun.
Yaya’s face was pale, lips pinched, and her silver-gray hair pulled back so tight it seemed to yank the lines of her face even sharper.
She said nothing as they climbed from the truck, crossed the pavement, and entered through the sliding glass doors into the disinfected whoosh of air of the ER waiting area.
Yaya and Frankie approached the front desk and were met with the indifferent gaze of a nurse in teal scrubs that nearly matched her eyes and complemented her honey blonde hair, worn in two Dutch braids.
“Hi, we’re here to see Arthur Santino. He was brought in with a gunshot wound.” Frankie used her most polite, I-am-definitely-not-hiding-illicit-drugs-or-weapons voice. Next to her, Yaya clutched the handle of her purse to her chest with white-knuckled tenacity.
The nurse checked the computer, then raised a single eyebrow at Frankie. “And you are?”
“Family,” Yaya blurted, her voice hoarse but decisive. “This is Arthur’s only granddaughter.” She reached over and clamped Frankie’s arm, as if to physically bind them together in her fictional tale.
Frankie had never heard her grandma lie.
The closest thing she’d witnessed was asking the pastor to come over to fix things that were only borderline broken out of loneliness.
But this, this was a flat-out, bald-faced untruth.
She watched the nurse process this, skepticism flickering in her highly discerning gaze.
Their only hope was that hospital protocol was built on plausible deniability rather than strict genealogy.
After several seconds of breath-holding and finger-crossing suspense, the nurse slid a sign-in sheet across the counter and handed Frankie two visitor badges. “Through the double doors. He’s in trauma bay nine.”
Yaya didn’t even wait for Frankie to thank the woman or to get her pass.
The second she heard where Mr. Santino was, her feet were moving.
She arrived at the doors before the nurse had even buzzed them in, and her first attempt to enter was denied.
Frankie hurried to join her, badges in hand.
The second the buzz sounded, Yaya pushed the silver bar again, this time both doors automatically opened, and they were in.
They’d breached the emergency room under false pretenses.
Frankie wondered if lying counted as violating HIPAA.
Yaya was shuffling faster than Frankie had ever seen her grandma move.
She was barely able to keep up with her.
Her stride appeared driven by dread and the ancient survival instincts that had helped her ancestors survive plagues and invasions, as she glanced around frantically until her eyes landed on the man they’d come to see, at which point she stopped.
“Arthur!” Yaya stood in the doorway of the room.
Frankie paused and took in the scene.
Caleb “Hot Pastor” Harrison, who had gone viral for a tweet comparing him to “Hot Priest” from the show Fleabag and “Hot Rabbi” from Nobody Wants This before he reunited with Taylor, who was now his wife, sat beside her.
She occupied the other bed in the trauma bay.
It was her ex who had shown up and tried to abduct her.
Owen, their son, stood next to his mom. Another woman who Frankie met at a book club she’d gone to a couple weeks before named Adriana was also there with her son Jonah, who looked to be about the same age as Owen.
“You were shot!” Yaya ran to Mr. Santino’s bedside.
Frankie glanced over at Adriana and Taylor, silently asking if they knew exactly how involved her grandma and Mr. Santino were. It was clear by their shrugs that they were as much in the dark as she was.
“Okayyyy.” Adriana clapped her hands together. “Well, I’m gonna get these two out of here. Let me know if you guys need anything.”
"Thanks.” Caleb stood and grabbed Owen’s backpack.
“Bye, Mom.” Owen leaned over and gave his mom a hug. “Love you.”
Caleb handed Owen his backpack and gave him some cash. “Grab some candy and soda for the ride home in case you get low. And I’ll call you when we know what’s going on here.”
Yaya had told her that Owen had some serious medical issues, diabetes being one.
She watched as Owen hugged his dad, and her chest tightened.
She wanted to have kids so badly, to have a family.
Adriana and the boys said goodbye and headed out of the room.
Frankie moved out of the doorway to let them go by, and as she did, her phone vibrated.
She pulled it out hoping and praying it was Zee, only to be disappointed that it was another text from Tristan.
Tristan: Can we talk? Please?
Over the past few weeks, her ex had been confused as to why she hadn’t told her mom about their breakup.
He also wanted to know where she was since she’d packed up and left without so much as a goodbye.
The mature thing to do was to have a conversation with him, and she would.
But not right now. She didn’t have to do it on his time. Not after what he’d done to her.
“Knock, knock.”
Frankie looked up and saw a pretty brunette in canary yellow scrubs with her hair in a ponytail and a wide smile.
There was something so familiar about her, like she was an old friend.
Something in her eyes. Or maybe it was her smile…
Frankie was fairly certain she’d never met her before, so why did she feel like she knew her?
“Hi, Mr. Santino, I’m Poppy, and I need to take you for some more pictures.”
Frankie glanced over at Mr. Santino, whose face looked like he’d just sucked on a sour lemon. “I’ve already done that.”
“I know, but the doctor ordered more because he didn’t quite see every angle he needed to see.” Poppy chirped cheerily as she rolled the wheelchair in, unlocked, and unfolded it.
“If you do the job right the first time, you don’t have to do it again,” Mr. Santino protested grumpily.
His negativity didn’t faze Poppy in the slightest as she smiled and held out her hand to assist him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Arthur, stop. You be nice,” Yaya reprimanded him. “She only does what a doctor tells her to do.”
“Who said I was talking about her not doing her job?!” Arthur snapped back as he placed his hand in Poppy’s palm and allowed her to help him into the wheelchair. As Poppy pushed him out of the room, he mumbled, “You women take things so personally.”
“No, no, no!” Yaya wagged her finger at him as she walked behind him. “You can’t say things like this!”
Mr. Santino glanced over his shoulder at her, and Frankie would swear that there was a glimmer of mischief in his eyes as he gazed up at her grandma.
As they disappeared out of the ER, Frankie tilted her head to the side as she crossed her arms. “He only said that to wind her up, didn’t he?”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Caleb co-signed her assessment.
Taylor agreed, “Me too.”
“Well, she loves getting wound up, so if he loves winding her up, this is a match made in heaven." Frankie smiled as she shook her head. “They are the perfect couple.”