“She’s in a meeting,” Frankie says matter-of-factly. “She said she’d come over after it’s done.”
“Oh,” I say again, like an idiot. “How do you know?” I try to be sneaky.
“She told me,” Frankie says simply.
I remember that information from a five-year-old is like getting directions from a very drunk person (profoundly convoluted and full of holes), so I quickly abandon all hope and decide to wait for Lina to come over.
* * *
This newly formed Girl Gang freezes in the middle of dinner, Frankie with her spoon halfway to her mouth, and it would be kinda funny if it weren’t so obvious they were engaging in some sort of seemingly illicit activity.
“So I take this silence to mean I’ve been spending five hundred dollars a month for an after-school program you don’t even attend?” I continue.
“I’ve been hanging out with Lina.” Frankie decides to take the sanctimonious route. “You said she was family, and it’s okay to hang out with family after school.”
“But every day? What did we say about imposing on people?—”
“Hey,” Lina says calmly, placing her hand on top of mine. “Don’t get on her case about it. You shouldn’t be annoyed at anyone right now,” she says more pointedly, “but if you are going to be, it should be me.”
“I’m not annoyed,” I say, annoyed, “but the fact that no one told me about it combined with the fact that you two are acting very suspiciously makes me feel like I do actually have a reason to be annoyed.”
“Okay, you can be annoyed that we’ve essentially lit five hundred dollars on fire—” Lina begins to concede.
“I’ve already paid for October, so more like a thousand dollars at this point,” I make sure to clarify.
“—but Frankie is in no way imposing on me. Most of the work I have after school has to be done on my computer, so I’m there, anyway. She’s very well-behaved and she’d rather read a book than be social. I get it. I feel like that sometimes.”
“Frankie, why aren’t you hanging out with your friends in after-school?” I demand to know. “Isn’t Evie in the program with you? And Ramona? They’re your best friends. They’re the reason I signed you up for that program in the first place.”
I feel Lina’s foot pressing down on mine under the table. She gives me a look, a minute shake of her head todrop it.
Frankie is pushing the food around on her plate.
“You know you can tell us about anything,” I say more gently.
“I just want to hang out with Lina after school,” Frankie says sorely.
“It’s also okay if you aren’t ready to talk about it,” Lina says to both of us.
Frankie mulls this over. “I’m not ready to talk about it.”
“Okay,” Lina says, ending the conversation.
I’m not done. “But I still don’t like that you’re spending every day after school in Lina’s office. She’s in charge of a thousand people, and she’s very busy, and I don’t want you to be in there.”
“Drop it, Dom,” Lina says dangerously. “I told you it’s okay. And whenever it’s not okay, if I have a meeting or if I can’t be in my office, I always communicate this to Frankie and she takes herself to after-school.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me about this?”
She shrugs. “Frankie wasn’t comfortable talking about it, so I wanted to respect her wishes.”
Frankie’s head is bouncing between the two of us, looking alarmed.
I model taking deep, cleansing breaths. Then some more. Lina is doing the same. “Okay,” I say finally. “I can respect that you don’t want to tell me about what’s keeping you from after-school, but I need you to tell me when you’re going to be with Lina. For safety reasons. I just want to know where you are, and it doesn’t make me feel good that I thought you were somewhere every day for a month and you weren’t actually there.”
“I was in the school,” she mutters grumpily.
“But not in the cafeteria. What if there was an emergency, and I had to come get you in the cafeteria and you weren’t there?”
