Chapter Five Fran
Five
Fran
The Queen Ball
Fran Gianopoulos talked in her sleep. She mumbled, she laughed, she carried on full conversations, and once she had even sung “The Star Spangled Banner” from beginning to end.
RJ teased her endlessly about it, sometimes grabbing his phone in the middle of the night to record the really crazy stuff.
On those mornings Fran would wake up and RJ would crack an eye open and just start laughing before tossing her his phone to listen for herself.
“You know you’re a liability, right?” RJ said. “If the North Koreans knew about you, they’d snatch you out of bed.”
Fran rolled her eyes, but it was sort of true. She worked for an engineering company with Navy contracts, and she’d signed about a zillion nondisclosure agreements promising never to talk about when, where, or how they repaired submarines.
“If I start talking about work you can just put a pillow over my head and smother me, okay?”
“Loose lips sink ships, Fran,” RJ said seriously.
Those were their weekend mornings together, leisurely lie-ins where the kids crawled between them, where they put on movies in bed, letting everyone snack and get crumbs everywhere.
Otherwise, RJ was out the door before Fran even made coffee.
He was a contractor, and all his guys were on the building sites by seven at the latest, eating lunch at ten, done for the day at three.
Fran, meanwhile, worked remotely supporting a team on Oahu, and so her hours were shifted five time zones.
She fed the kids breakfast, she got them off to school or camp, she threw something in the slow cooker, she did laundry, she picked them up, and then she logged onto her computer from three until eleven, taking her lunch break for family dinner.
It meant that she and RJ barely saw each other during the week, that they passed the kids like a baton, that they overlapped only in their sleep, but there they were, a two-income family socking away all they could for their retirement, even if it meant they were ships in the night.
It was worth it, though. Fran was making good money, and after everything with her own family, that mattered more than anything.
It was a Sunday in August, and everyone was in her bed. RJ was dozing, London was watching a TV show about alligators in the Everglades, and Fran was helping Hale carefully arrange stickers in a volcano workbook.
“Pumice is a vewy soft stone, filled with bubbles of air,” Hale informed her, smoothing the sticker with his thumb.
“Nice, bud, that’s right,” Fran said absently. Hale was four and a born professor, constantly spouting facts, at least 30 percent of them accurate.
“But you have to be careful of lava bombs. Lava bombs are vewy dangerous.”
“They sound bad!” Fran had never heard of a lava bomb but as Hale peeled up a triangular black sticker she read the blurb about them, little spurts of molten lava that flew up into the air during an eruption and hardened in flight.
“Can you bring me back a lava bomb from Hawaii?”
“I’ll try,” Fran promised. “I’m not sure they sell them at the gift shop.
” It would be her first trip away from the kids, her first time going to Hawaii, and even though it was six months away, even though she’d spend the entire time with a team of engineers in conference rooms, she was deliriously excited.
The hotel was on the beach, there was a swimming pool, and Fran had already looked up the restaurant menu and picked exactly which type of cocktail—lychee martini—she would have the night of her arrival.
She was also pretty sure the weed would be extraordinary in Hawaii but figured the Navy guys she worked with were unlikely to want to spark a jay.
“Mom, are you going to go surfing?” London asked, glancing briefly away from the TV. His hair—dark and shiny like Fran’s—was still sticking up from sleep.
“Nah, I don’t think so. It’s a work trip so I’m mostly going to be in meetings.”
“But you’re always in meetings. Why do you have to go all the way to Hawaii for that?”
It was a good question, one Fran had wondered herself, but after seven years working with the group it was the first time she’d been invited, and she wasn’t going to say no to a tropical getaway on someone else’s dime.
“My company gets hired by people who live in Hawaii and sometimes they want to meet you face-to-face. But that’s it, pal, just meetings, nothing fun. I’ll save my surfing for when the whole family can go back together.”
Hale snugged his head under her chin, and she inhaled his smell.
She knew sometimes her kids were stinky and gamey.
Hale had sweaty little hands and feet and she had recently instituted a rule where he had to swap back and forth between two pairs of sneakers so they could air out for a day in between, but she still loved his smell.
He was going into pre-K and she worried about him in a huge classroom, twenty kids and only one teacher.
The previous year, whenever his nursery school had emailed photos from the day, she saw he had somehow managed to wriggle into the teacher’s lap as she read a book, his little head under her chin.
It made a small pinch in her heart to see him like that, still so sweet, out there in the world.
At nine thirty she put the kids in soccer shirts, pulled her hair in a ponytail, and drove the three of them to the athletic fields on Linebrook Road, where she spent two hours studiously ignoring both the soccer and the other parents while she played with her phone.
She knew it was antisocial, but she had real friends.
After the games were over Fran detoured on the way to her parents’ house, picking RJ up for lunch.
Sundays were RJ’s day, so Fran knew he would have eaten a weed gummy already and would spend the afternoon with her family pleasantly buzzed and smiling.
It was how they survived parenthood and life with small children: They took turns dosing themselves with weed, mushrooms, and booze, whatever made the hard edges softer.
Fran had woken up the day before and dropped a tincture of CBD into her coffee, had eaten a square of shroom chocolate with her peanut butter toast, and had spent hours happily building a Lego dragon’s lair with London.
They were responsible about it, though, they always made sure one of them was sober enough to play soccer with London, to brush Hale’s teeth, to—God forbid—drive anyone who needed stitches to the emergency room.
They were also both really careful never to drive drunk.
RJ had a friend, a real estate broker from Boston, who had gotten so many DUIs his car had been outfitted with a Breathalyzer.
Every ten minutes he had to blow into a tube or the engine would shut off and RJ loved to imitate him driving fancy clients around to different apartments, blowing the tube in the middle of Storrow Drive while pitching a $2 million duplex in Southie with granite countertops.
There were already six cars parked around the circular driveway in front of Fran’s parents’ house, her brother Damien’s BMW, her brother Kon’s Mercedes Benz, an assortment of luxury cars all new and shiny, traded in every year for the latest models.
The house looked new and shiny too, even though they had moved in nearly thirty years ago.
The front door was framed by columns with wisteria climbing the portico, the garden was filled in for the summer with pink roses.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think the Gianopoulos family was rich.
You’d think they actually owned all this nice stuff.
Fran sent RJ and the kids to the backyard and let herself into the house, waving hello to her father, her brothers, and their teenagers who were watching baseball in the living room, heading to the kitchen to help with lunch.
Her mother was slicing tomatoes and arranging them on a platter with lettuce and onion and Fran took a quick peek at the wineglass tucked in the corner by the toaster oven, filled up to the very brim.
Her mother claimed she liked to keep her drink out of the way while she was cooking, so that she wouldn’t break a glass, but Fran knew it was something more than that, maybe the feeling that by keeping it out of plain sight nobody would notice how often the glass was refilled.
“How was church, Mom?” Fran’s parents went to Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the Greek Orthodox church in town, and Fran had grown up spending every weekend there.
“Everyone asked about you. They wonder why your brothers come but you don’t, Francesca.” Some parents had mastered the art of the subtle guilt trip. Fran’s had not.
“I told you, the boys have soccer.”
“Don’t sign them for the next season. London is old enough to come sit with me.”
“Okay, Mom.” The idea of London sitting still for a service was laughable.
Together they chopped dill and made lemon rice, they toasted buns for the hamburgers, and Fran fetched her kids’ water bottles out of her bag and put them on the table along with the glasses and cloth napkins.
She could hear London shouting happily in the yard, and Fran couldn’t help but notice that RJ was the only adult male in the place actually making himself useful.
Sure, he was absolutely baked, but at least he was keeping an eye on the kids and contributing, unlike all the other guys watching TV, cursing and cheering at the game, oblivious to the work being done.