Don Winslow - The winter of Frankie Machine

Frank’s old house is a beautiful two-story Victorian, white with yellow trim. He parks in the narrow driveway, hops out of the van, and finds the right key on his big chain. He has the key in the lock when Patty opens it from the inside, as if she heard the van pulling up, which maybe she did.

“Took you long enough,” she says as she lets him in.

She can still get to me, Frank thinks as he feels a pang of annoyance. And something else, too. Patty is still an attractive woman. She’s gotten a little matronly, maybe, around the hips, but she’s kept herself in good shape, and those brown almond-shaped eyes still have a way of, well, getting to him.

“I’m here now,” he says, kissing her on the cheek. He walks past her into the kitchen, where one half of the deep double sink looks like high tide in a Third World harbor someplace.

“It’s not working,” Patty says, coming in behind him.

“I can see that,” Frank says. He sniffs the air. “Are you making gnocchi?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And did you peel all the potatoes and try to put them down the disposal?” Frank asks as he rolls up his sleeve, plunges his hand into the dirty water, and feels around the drain.

“Potato peels are garbage,” Patty says. “I tried to dispose of the garbage. Isn’t that what a garbage disposal is supposed to do?”

“It’s ‘garbage disposal,’” Frank says. “Not ‘garbage dispose-all.’ I mean, you don’t put tin cans down there, do you? Ordo you?”

“You want some coffee?” she asks. “I’ll make some fresh.”

“Sounds good, thanks.”

He goes to a hallway closet to get his tool chest. They go through this routine every time. She’ll make some fresh, weak coffee in the Krups maker that he bought her and that she refuses to learn how to run properly, and he’ll take a polite sip while he works and then leave the rest in the cup. Frank has discovered that rituals like this are even more important to a peaceful relationship when you’re divorced than when you were actually married.

But when he comes back down the hallway, he hears the whir of a coffee grinder, and when he reaches the kitchen, there’s a French press sitting on the stove beside a kettle of water on the boil. He raises his eyebrows.

“This is the way you like it now, isn’t it?” Patty says. “Jill says this is the way you like it.”

“That’s how I make it, yeah.” He doesn’t say a word when she pours in the boiling water and presses the plunger down right away instead of waiting the requisite four minutes. Instead, he keeps his mouth shut and crawls into the cabinet under the sink, stretches out on his back, and starts to work the crescent wrench on the disposal trap, where the potato peels are no doubt trapped. He hears her set the coffee cup on the floor by his knee.

“Thanks.”

“You could take a minute and have a cup of coffee,” she says.

Actually, I can’t, Frank thinks. He still has to get back to the bait shack for the sunset rush, then go home, shower, shave, and dress, and go pick up Donna. But he doesn’t say this to her, either. The subject of Donna might cause Patty to kick the coffee over on his leg accidentally, or to try to flush an entire roll of paper towels down the upstairs toilet. Or maybe just to kick me in the balls while I’m vulnerable, Frank thinks.

“I have to get to the bait shop,” he says. But he slides out, sits up, and takes a sip of the coffee. It’s actually not bad, which surprises him. He didn’t marry Patty for her cooking. He married her more because she looked like that movie star Ida Lupino and still does, and he was crazy about her, and, her being a good Italian girl, she wouldn’t let him past second base without a ring on her finger. So Frank did the bulk of the cooking at home when they were married, and they were already divorced when the termcontrol freak came into vogue. Now he says, “This is good.”

“Surprise,” she says, sitting on the floor next to him. “That’s really something about Jill, isn’t it?”

“I’ll find a way to pay for it.”

“I’m not nagging you about money,” she says, looking a little hurt. “I just thought it would be nice to take a moment and share some parental pride.”

“You did a good job with that kid, Patty,” Frank says.

“We both did.”

Her eyes start to tear up, and Frank feels his own eyes get a little moist. He knows what they’re both thinking about-that morning in the delivery room, after the long, hard labor, when Jill was finally born. And it was a busy morning, lots of babies, so the doctors and nurses finished up with them, and Frank was so tired that he crawled onto the gurney with his wife and new baby and they all fell asleep together. She gets up suddenly and says, “Fix the damn thing. You’ve got to get to the bait shop, and I’m going to be late for yoga.”

“Yoga?” he says, getting back under the sink.

“At our age,” she says, “it’s ‘use it or lose it.’”

“No, look, I think it’s good.”

“It’s mostly women,” she says, so quickly that Frank instantly gets that it’s mostly women but there’s at least one man there. He feels this little twinge of jealousy. Which is irrational and unfair, he tells himself. You have Donna; Patty should have somebody in her life. But still, he doesn’t like the thought. He gets the trap off, then reaches in and pulls out a wad of sodden potato peels. He holds it up to her and says, “Patty, please? Cooked food, not raw, and not five pounds at a time, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, but can’t help adding, “They should make those things better, though.”

So he knows she’s going to do it again, or something just like it, and he thinks, Next time, let your boyfriend fix it. With all that yoga, he can get under the sink with no problem, right?

He puts the trap back on, tightens it down, and crawls back out from under the sink.

“You want to try the gnocchi?” she asks.

“I thought you had yoga.”

“I could skip a class.”

He thinks about it for a second, then says, “No, you want to keep up with that. ‘Use it or lose it,’ like they say.”

You jerk, he thinks when he sees her eyes get sharp and cold. What a stupid thing to say. And Patty being Patty, she isn’t going to let it slide. “You could use a little yoga yourself,” she says, looking at his belly.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll join your class.”

“That’s all I need.”

He washes his hands, then gives her another quick kiss on the cheek, which she tries to turn away from.

“See you Friday,” he says.

“If I’m not here,” she tells him, “just leave the envelope in the drawer.”

“Thanks for the coffee. It was really good.”

He gets back to the bait shack just in time for the dusk rush. The kid Abe can handle the slow midafternoon business, but he starts to panic when the night fishermen begin to line up and demand their bait. Besides, Frank wants to be there to close out the register. He helps the kid Abe through the rush, closes out, locks the joint up, and heads home to grab a quick shower and wash the fish smell off him.

He showers, shaves, changes into a suit with a dress shirt but open collar, and takes the Mercedes, not the van, out of the garage. He has time to drop by three new restaurants before he goes to pick up Donna. His routine is the same at each place: He has a tonic water at the bar and asks to see the manager or owner. Then he presents his card and says, “If you’re happy with your linen service, pardon the intrusion. If you’re not, give me a call and I’ll tell you what I can do for you.”

Nine times out of ten, he gets the call.

He picks Donna up at her condo, which is in a large complex overlooking the beach. He parks in a visitor’s slot and rings the bell, even though he has a key to her place in case of emergencies, or if she’s traveling and the plants need to be watered, or if he’s coming in late at night and doesn’t want to get her out of bed.