Page 6 of The Hampton Beach Café 2
The pizza that Alex slid across to her looked amazing. It was remarkable what a little cheese and bacon could do.
“I have a favor,” she said, biting into her first slice.
“Hmm?” he mumbled through his own.
“I kind of said I'd come to visit...but I don't have a car, exactly, anymore. Did you, by some miracle, want to visit Salem with me this weekend?”
Alex looked up from his plate. She pushed her bottom lip out and exaggeratedly fluttered her eyelashes.
“Oh, fine…” he said, “…but I get to choose the music.”
She could happily make that deal, but she'd never let him know it.
“Really? Oh, come on, it'll be alternative punk rock no one's heard of in sixty years! Can we share? I'll let you go first!”
Even though her stomach hadn’t quite settled from the roller coaster of emotions the afternoon had brought her, Frances settled into her freshly renovated pizza and let herself enjoy Alex's company.
The pizza didn't hurt, either.
FOUR
“I haven't seen your mom in even longer than I hadn't seen you,” Alex said from the driver's seat. “This is going to be super awkward.”
Frances groaned and looked over at Alex in the driver's seat. Lucinda leaned forward and changed the song by tapping angrily at Alex's screen.
“Yeah, well, I've never met her,” she said sharply. “So I win.”
While Frances hadn't exactly been aiming for a day out with Alex alone, she had been surprised when Lucinda insisted on coming with them. Frances figured she was probably getting annoyed by being with Vincent all the time. He was a pretty temperamental artist, after all, and Lucinda didn't deal particularly well with stubbornness at the best of times.
Or punk rock, especially the sort of punk rock Alex liked. Frances did, but she had only indulged secretly during her workouts since Malcolm had looked like he was about to give birth to a whole litter of kittens when she took him to a show when they were dating. She was starting to feel like he never really liked her.
“You'll both be fine. Turn here,” she said, pointing at a large sign proclaiming the neighborhood. “she's three houses up from the big rock, apparently.”
Flicking his blinker on, Alex waited for a break in the traffic. It wasn't a busy road, especially by LA standards, but Frances could see why he was waiting.
“Oh, for the love of Peter and all the Saints, will you just go!?” Lucinda said.
Frances wanted to laugh, assuming her friend was joking, but the look on her face was one of genuine annoyance.
“Luce, no backseat driving. We're not all daredevils like you,” she tried to inject the humor back into her friend’s mood, but it did not seem to be working.
Her friend narrowed her eyes at her. There was something else going on there––Frances was sure of it. She had never seen Lucinda like this before.
The brakes squealed as they pulled up on a very neatly tended white clapboard house. The narrow lawn out the front had been largely replaced by large flat stones with grass poking through the pattern in irregular shapes ranging from no more than a hand span to a few feet across. The wooden steps up to the porch had been painted a light gray, but the railings that lined those steps were a bright, mint green.
“Maybe I should go walk off this mood,” Lucinda said suddenly. “I'm being a bit trash. I'm sorry.”
Before Frances could intervene, she exited the car and proceeded down the street.
“That woman walks fast,” Alex commented, watching Lucinda retreat in his side mirror.
“Hmm…” Frances said, “…she sure does.”
Exiting the car themselves, Frances and Alex looked up at the house.
“Nothing like your old place,” he said.
“Are you joking?”
