Chapter Five Fran #4
“No, no, no. You’re not going to be bashing around with a metal rod.” Fran directed the older boys to return the metal thing to the neighbor’s driveway and get Hale a different stick. Hale burst into tears and Fran pulled him into her lap, giving him a juice box and shooing the other children away.
As Fran cuddled Hale and wiped his sweaty forehead there was suddenly a shout on the basketball court, grunting and scuffling and a mess of elbows and knees and then two of the men fell to the asphalt.
Colin was down, his brother-in-law, Eben, sprawled on top of him.
“What the FUCK?” Colin shouted. The others helped them up, and Fran watched as they circled around Colin, looking at his hand.
“It’s fucking broken,” Colin cursed. His hair was mussed and he had a red mark on his cheek, maybe from the pavement.
He held up his arm and Fran could see that his pinky finger was sticking out at an odd angle.
Caroline leaped up and she and Van rushed Colin across the parking lot to her house to get ice.
“Shit. But he was pulling on my shirt and fucking with me,” Eben said, exasperated. Max muttered something Fran couldn’t quite hear. “Yeah, let’s go.” Eben and his husband made to walk to their car.
“Dude, you can’t leave.” RJ jogged after them. “You have to hang out and make sure Colin’s okay.”
“It’s his finger,” Max said, rolling his eyes. “He’s not a concert pianist, he’s fine.”
“No, come on, Eben,” RJ protested. “Your sister is going to freak out. If you leave then this becomes a big thing with Augusta too. Just stay until Colin comes back out. Stavros and I against you two. Come on.”
“Fine.” Eben and Max reluctantly walked back to the court and checked the ball to start.
Would this be the day Colin and Eben finally had it out? Fran had been bracing herself for an eruption between them ever since Augusta’s wedding. It seemed like such a small thing—a finger—but it really could tip them over the edge. It was funny how often life worked that way.
Back in high school, when they all started drinking and going out, they became obsessed with “the shampoo effect.” When they had a big night of partying and followed it with a beer the next morning, they could get drunk again in an instant, the way a second squirt of shampoo in the shower produced outsized suds.
It was because the alcohol hadn’t been fully metabolized, because instead of starting with a blood alcohol content of zero they were really starting with .
03 or something. Fran thought about the shampoo effect at moments like this, and the way it applied to so many interpersonal dynamics—the way that in these old relationships nobody was ever really working from a clean slate, new feelings were built on old feelings.
Fran’s own brothers had been so rude to her for so long that even a grunt or an eye roll was enough to send her spiraling into a dark mood.
Van and Bailey had been sleeping together for so long that they fell back into bed with each other at the slightest provocation.
Colin and Eben, best friends, now brothers-in-law, had so much unspoken frustration between them that a small moment in a pickup basketball game could instantly work them into a lather.
Fran waited nervously for Colin to come back to the asphalt court, watching Max and Eben play against RJ and Stavros, but when Colin strolled down from Caroline’s house, waving his hand and laughing, she saw he was going to sweep it under the rug and let the tension between him and Eben go.
“Look, Caroline taped my finger to a popsicle stick!” He leaned in and showed off his hand to Fran.
“And we decided that holding a cold beer counted as icing.” He flopped down in Caroline’s beach chair and popped the can open, sipping deeply and closing his eyes.
They sat there together, Hale sipping his juice box, Colin his beer.
There was a thing they said at Hale’s school when he was having a hard day.
They said he was having “big feelings.” That never really went away, did it?
You just got better at swallowing them, pushing them down to a place where those big feelings didn’t show quite so much.
“Hey Fran!” hollered RJ. “If I hit this shot you have to do bedtime stories tonight!”
“No!” Fran called back, but RJ had already tossed the ball high in the air and she watched as it fell, dropping neatly through the hoop with a swish.
“Damn it.” Fran cursed and Colin winked at her.
In the late afternoon the game broke up, Colin shepherding Charlie into the car and driving off, waving his splinted hand out the window, Eben and Max heading home to shower before a dinner reservation in Gloucester, Stavros promising his kids pizza if they left their sticks behind.
Caroline and Van were going to grill, so Fran and RJ decided to stay, ushering the boys across the parking lot and over to Caroline’s cottage, where they could clamber on the rocks of Pavilion Beach while the grown-ups cooked and talked.
RJ was sweaty and red, and he drained beer after beer because, honestly, beer just tasted better than water when it was hot out.
“Hey, it’s my day to get fucked up,” Fran objected.
“It’s just beer,” RJ replied. “I drink beer to sober up.”
RJ strongly believed that if he had too much whiskey, he could get himself back on track with a few beers. It made no sense, but they were both big advocates of cognitive liberty, so Fran let it lie.
Caroline set plates and napkins on the picnic table and put together a salad while Van manned the grill, chicken for the grown-ups and hot dogs for the kids. The boys were playing by the tide pools down below and Fran could see Hale was using his T-shirt as a basket for rocks and shells.
“So, how long have you and RJ been married?” Caroline asked.
“We’ve been together nine years.” Fran smiled.
“We’re not married,” RJ corrected.
“Oh, my bad. I didn’t mean—”
“I was broke when we met and Fran didn’t want to marry a bum,” joked RJ.
“Stop.” Fran shook her head. They didn’t need to have this conversation again.
All their friends already thought they were weird, the way they kept their finances separate, but it worked for them.
Unlike 90 percent of couples out there, she and RJ never fought about money, never fought about a thing.
“I ask her to marry me all the time,” RJ told Caroline. “I think a guy should marry the mother of his children—no offense, Van.”
“None taken,” Van called over his shoulder.
“RJ and I work just the way we are,” Fran said firmly.
“And I saved ten grand on a diamond,” RJ interrupted.
“See? Everyone’s happy.” Fran ruffled his hair.
He was her person. Sure, she sometimes wished he took life more seriously, wished he worked as hard as she did to make their life nicer, but if she’d wanted to marry some straight-arrow investment banker she would have done that.
Instead, she’d chosen someone who made her laugh.