Cousins waited another minute, hoping that Beverly would come back for the baby like she’d said, but she didn’t come, and it was hours past time for him to go. “I don’t know her name,” he said.
“Frances.”
“Really?” He looked again at the pretty girl. “You named her for yourself?”
Fix nodded. “Francis got me into a lot of fights when I was a kid. There was no one in the neighborhood who forgot to tell me I had a girl’s name, so I figured, why not name a girl Frances?”
“What if she’d been a boy?” Cousins asked.
“I would have named him Francis,” Fix said, yet again making Cousins feel he had asked a stupid question.
“When the first one was a girl we named her after Kennedy’s daughter. I thought, that’s fine, I’ll wait, but now—” Fix stopped, looking down at his daughter. There had been a miscarriage between the two girls, fairly late. They were lucky to get this second one, that’s what the doctor had said, though there was no point in telling that to the deputy district attorney. “It works out this way.”
“It’s a good name,” Cousins said, but what he thought was,Lucky you didn’t wait.
“What about you?” Fix said. “You’ve got a little Albert at home?”
“My son’s name is Calvin. We call him Cal. And the girls, no. No Albertas.”
“But you’ve got one coming up.”
“In December,” he said. Cousins remembered how it was before Cal was born, how he and Teresa would lie in bed at night saying names to one another in the dark. One name would remind her of a kid who got picked on in grade school, a kid who wore stained shirts and bit his thumbs. Some other name would remind him of a boy he never liked, a bully, but when they got to Cal both of them were happy. It was something like that when they were thinking up names for Holly, too. Maybe they’d spent less time on it, maybe they didn’t talk about it in bed, her head up on his shoulder, his hand on her stomach, but they’d picked it out together. She wasn’t named for anybody, just for herself, because her parents thought it was a beautiful name. And Jeanette? He didn’t even remember talking about a name for Jeanette. He’d been late getting to the hospital just that one time and if memory served he’d gone into the room and Teresa said,This is Jeanette.She would have been Daphne if anyone had asked him about it. They should talk about what they were going to name this new one. It would give them something to talk about.
“Name this one Albert,” Fix said.
“If it’s a boy.”
“It’ll be a boy. You’re due.”
Cousins looked at Frances asleep in her father’s arms. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if they had another girl, but if it was a boy then maybe they would call him Albert. “You think?”
“Absolutely,” Fix said.
He never did talk about it with Teresa but he was there in the waiting room when the baby was born and he filled out the birth certificate—Albert John Cousins—after himself. Teresa had never much liked her husband’s name but when would there have been an opportunity to bring that up? As soon as they were home from the hospital she started calling the baby Albie, Al-bee. Cousins told her not to but he wasn’t ever around. What was he going to do, stop her? The other kids liked it. They called the baby Albie, too.
2
“So you’re telling me that you named Albie?” Franny said.
“I didn’t name Albie,” her father said, the two of them following the nurse down a long, bright hall. “If I’d named Albie I wouldn’t have given him such a stupid name. You could trace a lot of that kid’s problems back to his name.”
Franny thought of her stepbrother. “There was probably more to it than that.”
“Did you know I got him out of Juvenile once? Fourteen years old and he tried to set his school on fire.”
“I remember,” Franny said.
“Your mother called and asked me to get him out.” He tapped his chest. “She said it would be a favor to her, like I was so interested in doing her favors. When you think about all the cops Bert knew in L.A. you have to wonder why they were bothering me.”
“You helped Albie,” she said. “He was a kid and you helped him. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“He didn’t even know how to set a decent fire. I drove him over to see your uncle Tom at the fire station once I got him out. Tom was back in L.A. then. I said to Bert’s kid, ‘You want to burn up a school full of children then these are the guys who can teach you how to do it.’ You know what he said to me?”
“I do,” Franny said, not pointing out that there had been no children in the school when Albie had set it on fire, and that he’d done a pretty good job. Say what you will for Albie, he knew how to set things on fire.
“He said he wasn’t interested anymore.” Fix stopped, which made Franny stop, and then the nurse stopped too to wait for them. “People don’t still call him that, do they?” Fix asked.
“Albie? I don’t know. That’s what I’ve always called him.”
