Be Frank With Me - Julia Claiborne Johnson Page 0,3

love you if she’ll let herself. In the meantime, don’t let her scare you off.”

I wiped my feet on the mat and squared my shoulders. Don’t let her scare you off. I practiced my smile. Businesslike, but with enough warmth to keep me from coming off as too Nurse Ratched. I mumbled lines I’d worked on during my flight. Nobody knows single motherhood better than I do. It was just me and my mom growing up. . . . No, I’m good, I ate on the plane, thanks. Just a glass of water, I’ll get it myself, tell me where. . . . So this must be Frank! Only nine years old? You seem much older.

Little did I know.

I probably stood there longer than I should have, because the recluse herself opened the door before I could ring the bell and demanded, “Who are you? I’ve been watching you on the security cameras since you came through the gate.”

I was so surprised I gasped “M. M. Banning!” like a toddler might squeal “Santa!” if she stumbled on the guy in the red suit and fake beard sneaking a cigarette out back of the mall during his break. To be honest, I’m not sure I would have recognized her if I’d passed her on the street. In the years since that book jacket photo had been taken, her hair had grown out into a grayish-brown ponytail, she’d developed a big furrow between her eyebrows, and her jawline had gone soft. But her eyes were the same fathomless brown, so dark that the iris and pupil seemed one. She still wore glasses and a cardigan, too, except now the cardigan made her look less like a writer than a middle-aged librarian. A vengeful middle-aged librarian brandishing a portable phone.

“You’d better be the girl Isaac Vargas sent,” she said, “because I have the police on speed dial.”

I WASN’T ALWAYS an M. M. Banning fan.

When I read my mother’s battered copy of Pitched for eighth grade English, I confess I didn’t see what the fuss was about. “I hate how the guy is just called ‘The Pitcher,’” I complained to her. “Why doesn’t he have a name?” My mother said she guessed the author did that to make the story feel universal, to help readers imagine the character as their own brother or son. “I don’t have a brother or son,” I said. “It just makes it easier for me to imagine him as a water jug with a handle.” My poor mother. Her favorite book, trashed by her only child. What can I say? Junior High Alice preferred Jay Gatsby, with his million-dollar smile and mansion and all those beautiful shirts.

I reread Pitched as coursework in Twentieth-Century Lit when I was a junior in college, soon after my mother died unexpectedly of undiagnosed heart disease. It was a different book to me then. That time it tore me apart. I confessed in class that I’d cried my eyes out when I finished.

“You realize now,” my professor commented drily, “that youth isn’t wasted on the young. Literature is.”

WHEN M. M. Banning called Mr. Vargas, I was sitting at my desk just outside his open office door. They talked for almost an hour. He said very little other than “uh-huh, uh-huh,” “Oh, no,” and “I’m so sorry, Mimi.” The gist of it was that she’d been swindled of her fortune by a crooked investment adviser who’d just been thrown in jail for life that March for bilking the rich and super-rich across America. By June, she was on the brink of losing not just her house but also the to her book, collateral she’d given high-end loan sharks who marketed themselves as money managers to the rich and clueless.

“They had an office on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills,” she told Mr. Vargas. “They sent a car for me. They had nice office furniture. I wanted to believe they could save me.” That was the thing she said that really broke his heart. “My wife’s oncologist had nice office furniture, too,” he told me. A few months after I came to work for him, Mr. Vargas’s wife had died of pancreatic cancer. That fall, his daughter Carolyn shipped out to an expensive private university on the West Coast. On top of all that, the publishing company he’d worked for his whole career had been acquired by a media conglomerate. When he answered M. M. Banning’s call Mr. Vargas said he’d half-expected Personnel, phoning to tell