Chapter Eleven Fran #2
“Oops, nope, we’re getting ready to do the primary bath tilework.
Justin here said he only had an hour today, but somehow I convinced him to hang out and give me until four!
” RJ started giggling. He was baked. She wasn’t going to let him drive London home.
She forced herself to give RJ a tolerant smile and kiss goodbye.
Back downstairs Fran said her farewells to Eben, extracted London, and buckled him into the car, driving along the north side of the Neck, pretty little houses dotting the hill to the left, the ocean stretching forever off on her right.
She was jealous of Eben and Max. She’d love a house on the Neck.
Before her father lost all that money, she’d dreamed about one day building her own.
That now seemed exceedingly unlikely. Fran had told RJ about the betting apps, about how much her father had lost, and RJ was outraged on her behalf, calling her brothers degenerates for getting her father gambling in the first place.
“Your brothers need to make this right. Kon should sell his Land Rover. Damien should sell his boat. Or maybe your parents should downsize.” Fran agreed with him, and her brothers had each coughed up a few thousand dollars to cover a mortgage payment, but it wasn’t close to enough.
Fran had her savings, but most of her money was locked up in her 401(k) or in the kids’ college funds.
She gave her parents ten grand to help, but they were still drowning in debt; their salaries had barely been enough before they had fallen behind.
Every time she thought about asking RJ to give them money, she felt sick.
She had refused to marry him when he was young and broke.
She hadn’t helped him with a penny of his student loans.
Instead, she had made it crystal clear that theirs was a partnership with boundaries, with limits.
She couldn’t now ask him to do for her the very thing she’d refused to do for him.
All along Fran had thought of herself as the stronger one.
RJ was the wild card, RJ was the loose cannon, and Fran was rock solid.
On some level Fran had refused to marry him because she was protecting herself from his potential chaos.
If she asked him for money, it would change the entire balance of their relationship.
It would make her vulnerable in a way she couldn’t tolerate.
She followed the curve of Jeffrey’s Neck Road down past the small beach where clammers waded, past the marshes, white with ice.
She passed Strawberry Hill, dog walkers winding through the tall winter grass, and the gates of Cuvilly, where the nuns ran a preschool in an old dairy barn.
She was all the way down on High Street by the Clam Box when her phone rang.
“Hi, is this Hale’s mom?” It was the school nurse.
“Yep. Me again.”
“So there’s no emergency, but Hale says his ‘windpipe’ hurts.”
Fran turned the car around.
Honolulu
If youth was wasted on the young, then business travel, Fran decided, was wasted on the childless.
Her trip to Honolulu would be her first time away from the kids, and even though she knew she should be anxious about leaving her boys, sick with the idea of missing them, she couldn’t quite hide the thrill building in her chest.
Fran did everything she could to make the week easy for RJ.
She made her own gift-a-day calendar, buying London and Hale seven little toys each—fidgets and Pokémon cards and ring pops—wrapping them in paper, numbering them so that they could open one every evening of her trip, taping a little love note to each.
London could read his notes, but Hale couldn’t, so his were mostly pictures of hearts and volcanos and bees.
She loaded the fridge with ingredients for tacos and sandwiches, she made and froze a lasagna.
Her mother had done this when Fran was in high school—she had gone away for a week when her sister had a baby—and when she came home the freezer was still full of food, Fran’s father having ordered the kids pizza seven nights in a row.
Fran hadn’t set foot in an office in years, her wardrobe consisted entirely of jeans and T-shirts, so Augusta insisted she come over and borrow some clothing.
“Fran, you can’t go to a professional conference dressed like the Celtics water boy,” she scolded.
She handed Fran a stack of blue and white tops and a navy swimsuit because, apparently, Fran’s current suit was “fine if you’re cleaning a fish tank, but otherwise not a viable piece of clothing. ”
On the flight Fran meant to work, but instead reveled in the novelty of travel without children.
She kept sitting up, suddenly worried she had forgotten a car seat, a stroller, and then remembering with a rush that she didn’t need to think about anyone but herself.
Her company had booked her in business class, and as guilty as Fran felt for the extravagance, she couldn’t help but enjoy it, peering discreetly at her fellow passengers, mostly men on laptops, and wondering what important things they did.
She drank a glass of white wine and watched six episodes of Modern Marvels, she ate an entire Share Size pack of chocolate-covered pretzels and read an issue of National Geographic cover to cover, she fell asleep and woke up with a jolt, smacking her legs into the tray table and hoping her seatmate didn’t notice.
It was the best flight of her life, all twelve hours of it.
When the plane landed in Honolulu it was five o’clock local time, so eleven back at home.
Fran sent RJ a text to let him know she had arrived safely, and he sent back a photo of the boys from earlier that afternoon, London flashing a peace sign and Hale clutching a plastic lizard.
There was a driver at baggage claim holding a placard with her name on it—again, giving Fran a private thrill and making her feel like a famous person—and he led her out the sliding doors to his car, the warm air hitting her face and sending a blast of happiness through her body.
Families hugged and put flowered leis around each other’s necks, bright purple plumeria so powerfully perfumed that Fran could smell them as she walked by.
After a day of recirculated air Fran felt her skin soaking up the humidity; she was like one of those little bath capsules that expanded in water, unfolding into a tiny foam crocodile or giraffe.
The hotel entrance was something out of a movie, lit with tiki torches, hot pink bougainvillea spilling down massive planters.
She checked in and a bellman led her to her room, pulling her suitcase ahead of her, winding down concrete paths past lava rock walls, trees cascading with yellow plumeria, and a dark and sexy restaurant where Fran could see the bar lit with candles.
Her room was on the second floor with a balcony overlooking the ocean.
The bellman pulled back the curtain and pointed to Moloka‘i, a silver mountain across the water she would have mistaken for a cloud. She handed him ten dollars, and when he left, instead of doing any of the things she would normally do when traveling with children—asking her boys who was hungry, who had to pee, frantically trying to find someone’s beloved stuffed animal so that he could go to sleep right away—she shucked off her shoes, pulled on her swimsuit, and tripped back down to the beach to plunge straight into the water.
Of course, she woke up at four in the morning, wired and convinced she had overslept. She had a text from Kon.
They need 5K for the mortgage by the 20th. I’m tapped out.
I’m traveling for work this week. Talk when I’m back.
She couldn’t think of the last time her brother had texted her just to be nice.
He only ever wanted things from her. Her father at least called her to thank her for the help.
He had cried over the phone the previous week, grateful and embarrassed, and Fran hated it so much she hung up as soon as she could.
She threw her phone in her bag and got dressed in Augusta’s clothes.
At the conference center she showed her ID to a man in a khaki suit and Hawaiian shirt who handed her a schedule, a lanyard printed with her name, and an envelope of cash. “What’s this?” she asked, peering at the neat stack of $50 bills.
“That’s your conference stipend. For dinner or coffee or whatever you need.”
“Oh, thanks.” Fran flushed. Her company had paid for her airfare and hotel, she knew the conference would be feeding her three meals a day, so she hadn’t anticipated cash on top of that.
She tucked the envelope into her bag. She studied the map and made her way down the carpeted hallways to the King Kamehameha Large Conference Room, where the team from Ingalls would start the day.
She smiled nervously, helping herself to a bottle of water and choosing a seat at the long table.
As Fran looked around at her colleagues, about two dozen people shuffling around the pastry platter and finding chairs, she saw she was the only woman in the room.
She wasn’t surprised—this was often the case in engineering—but since her group usually worked over email or Slack she hadn’t quite noticed how much she stood out.
The guy next to her beamed at her enthusiastically and Fran smiled back, suddenly realizing how this conference was going to unfold.