Fic for aurorawest: "Cowrie Shells" (gen)
Title: Cowrie Shells
Summary: Independent prequel to “Sepal” ( Pollen). Frank and Alex find their footing. (Gen; Danielle/Frank)
Rating: PG Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Dedication: For
aurorawest , a fellow fan of the boaties and an all-around awesome gal.
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Frank’s made friends with the little rock cove a few hundred feet northwest of the main camp. He’s not the only one who has - it’s private but not too far away, isolated enough to be safe - but he’s the one who makes the most use of it. Simply put, there aren’t a lot of bathing suits around, and he’d rather just leave his clothes on the rock and go for a quick dip to cool himself off. If Sawyer wants to show himself off for the whole camp, that’s his own affair, but Frank doesn’t think anyone’s too interested in seeing his naked old bones paraded around the place. Common courtesy is worth a lot more than most people give it credit for, even here.
Going to the cove after fire-tending duty is something of a ritual for him. They’re not trying to keep up a signal fire the way they were before he got here. That’s not going to help with anything. They’ve just got to keep something going because it’s not safe to assume they could get another one started that easily if it goes out. Keeping an eye and kindling on the thing is a round-the-clock job, and it’s a hell of an uncomfortable one. It would be a hell of a boring one too if you couldn’t multitask, although the compatible tasks aren’t always that interesting themselves: turning a big stone into a bowl leaves the mind plenty of room to wander.
He’s got soot on his face and rock grit all over his hands when he runs into Alex Rousseau, damn near trips over her in fact. “Didn’t expect to find you here,” he says.
“The fruit picking got finished early,” she says, as if by way of explanation.
“And I’m guessing you wanted some time to yourself?”
“Something like that.”
“I figured.” He sighs. “Look, I know you don’t think it’s any of my business, but you’ve been spending too much time by yourself here.”
“Not a whole lot of people to spend time with.”
“No, but we’re pretty much stuck with each other.” He sticks out a hand. “On your feet, kiddo.”
“Where are we going?”
He has to improvise on that one. “To collect seashells. There’s a good little patch of them past camp the other way.”
“What do you want seashells for?”
They sure don’t need them for souvenirs. “First things first. We can think about that once we’ve got ‘em.”
Alex gets to her feet and tags along after him with that coltish gait of hers, the kind of balanced gawkiness he can’t imagine Danielle ever had. Alex doesn’t bother to ask questions when he detours to pick up a small basket someone made for practice at the fire. Soon they’re at the shell bed and Frank is peering at the damp sand. It’s studded with what he supposes are the bones of dead little sea creatures. He’s never thought of it that way before, but he puts that out of mind. “You never picked up shells you liked from the beach?”
“It wasn’t exactly a special event.”
She has a point; living here, he guesses, she was probably bored of it before she could read. “I bet you know what all these are,” he offers.
“Yeah.” There’s a waver in her voice and she isn’t looking at him.
He gives her a minute to collect herself. “Well, why don’t you tell me a little more about them?”
“This one’s a humpback cowrie.” She doesn’t sound too interested in what she’s saying, but she holds up a shiny, rounded shell, dark brown and dotted with golden patches. “There are a lot of them.”
“It’s pretty.”
“I guess so… A lot of these are cowries. The plain white ones - I think they used to be money somewhere in Africa or something.” She shows him a glossy peach-coloured one with white edges. “Golden cowrie. They don’t turn up that often.”
“Well, put it in the basket, then.”
“Okay. If you find a sort of gold-coloured one with white spots, they’re rare too… The big flat ones are abalones. The holes are for breathing.”
“Abalones need to breathe?”
“I think so. Turn it over.”
Frank does. “We call this mother-of-pearl where I come from,” he says. “You can decorate with it, metal stuff.” He’d better not think of his mother’s old brooch.
“Do you miss it? Where you come from?” She sounds as if she’s anticipating a yes, and it occurs to Frank that she might have come along with him in the first place because she thought he was lonely.
“I’ll tell you what, I miss being safe. A couple of my buddies.”
“That’s it?”
Being safe and That’s it? don’t really go together in Frank’s mind, but that isn’t the point. “I’ve got a kid who’s nineteen or twenty. Joshua.”
“You miss him, don’t you?”
Frank lets out a dry, humourless laugh. “That, kiddo,” he says, sitting down on a dry patch of sand, “is a tough question for a man who knows the world’s airport bars better than his own son.” Probably still better than he ever knew his second wife, but that’s another issue. “I was the worst father you could’ve imagined.”
“Oh, really?”
“No, I guess not,” he says quietly. “I was sure the worst father I could’ve been.” Marriage fell apart for predictable reasons, partially contemporaneous with the next eighteen years of abusing his liver and screwing flight attendants, wound up here. He’s got some vanity in wanting his own son to be worried about him batting against a sliver of fatherly impulse hoping Josh isn’t. Frank sure never gave him any reason to.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Alex asks, sitting down beside him.
“Not really. Do you want to hear about it?”
“No… This is an ark shell.”
She hands it to Frank: a striped shell with a kind of rectangular base to it. He supposes it looks a little bit like a boat shape from a certain angle. “Like Noah’s ark?” he asks.
“Yeah. Like Noah’s ark.”
“What lives in these, a clam?”
“I think so. It’d be too small to eat.”
“Too small for pretty much anything.”
“Well, what are the rest of them good for?” She’d have to get back to that, wouldn’t she?
He shrugs. “Decorate something. Put them on baskets, make jewelry.”
“Why bother?”
“Sometimes you’ve just got to do things like that. Keeps you sane.” He’s not necessarily sure that’s an advantage here, but it might be worth a go. “Your mom’s been going pretty stir-crazy resting up all the time.”
“Juliet says she’s getting better.”
“She’s got a lot more healing to go before she’s back on her feet all the way.” Frank takes Alex’s silence as conceding the point. Danielle’s still not up for much beyond short little walks in the jungle, and even that much progress took three months. “You don’t have to worry about her. Juliet says she’ll be fine even when neither of you are around.”
“Will she?”
Frank’s breath catches in his throat at that one. He can’t tell whether Alex meant to let her guard down or if it happened on its own, but she’s not saying anything to take it back. They’re long past talking about the wound in Danielle’s side. “She’ll get as close to okay as she can manage,” he says. Maybe Alex would like him to break eye contact right now, but he’s not going to do it. “And that’s worth more than I think you expect.”
“How do you know?” A couple of tears escape despite her best effort to hold them, and she looks furious with herself.
“Because of you.” No reaction. “Alone like that for sixteen years - do you really think she wanted to be alive?”
“Enough to survive.”
“You don’t know by now you were the only reason she had?”
She presses her face to her knees. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“You know about cowrie shells.” Well, that isn’t a whole lot of help. “You know a hell of a lot more than you think.”
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice is muffled, and she lets Frank coax her head up. Alex isn’t the kind of girl who cries discreetly; her whole face is blotchy, streaming with tears and snot. Without thinking about it Frank rests a hand between her shoulder blades. “It’s all right.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. Alex starts crying harder and won’t do anything but shake her head in protest. Frank thinks he’d better shut his trap now and just stroke her hair. He’s never known why that’s soothing, but given time it’ll usually work. Alex squeezes her fists in the sand beside her and Frank knows he’s lucky he didn’t get punched. As it is, she clenches her hands and unclenches them over and over, and he doubts she could say whether it was something to hold she wishes she had right now or if it was something to crush.
After a while the tide starts getting a little aggressive with them, and he and Alex scoot back a few feet. She’s calmed down enough to extend a sand-dirtied hand over his and drop a pointy little corkscrew of a shell into it. “Auger snail,” she says, wiping a hand across her nose and smearing her face with dirt in the process.
“Anything special about it?”
“Not really.” She looks down again and after a minute she says quietly, “They were Karl’s favourite.”
That’s one can of worms you weren’t expecting, old man. “Why’d he like them?”
“See how the outer shell is almost white, with the spots on it?”
Frank examines the shell: rust-coloured dots running along the spiral. “Yeah, I see it.”
“When I was… seven or eight, I found a really good one and gave it to him. I told him it made me think of him.” She spends a minute blinking hard. “He had really pale skin, and he always had freckles. All over everything you could see… He told me it was stupid and seashells were for girls.”
“And later on I bet you’d always bring them to him.” She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t really need to. “I’m sorry that happened to the two of you.” He doesn’t have any words of inspiration to give her beyond that. He’s never much believed in them anyway.
They sit for a long while, Alex staring at the shells they’ve gathered but not looking much like she’s seeing them. The tide creeps up on them again, and they make another move backwards. Frank’s about to suggest they head back to camp when Alex says, “Do you like my mother?”
That one surprises him. “What, don’t you?”
“She’s my mother.” Frank guesses he didn’t really need to ask that one, even if there are plenty of teenage girls in the world who don’t. “Do you like her?”
“She’s one hell of a lady,” he says, and he offers a tight grin. “I do like her.”
Alex gives him a look that he wouldn’t exactly call appraising, just like she’s trying to make sense of some things. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”
This time he risks a little more of a grin. “Right now you want to tell me what you’re going do to me if I ever hurt her?”
Alex snorts. “You know what she’d do.”
That was a sore spot he didn’t need to hit. He wonders if Danielle told Alex about it: he was helping Danielle along one of her walks a few months in, and in the midst of explaining durians to him she broke off and said, “You know that I shot Robert.”
“I know.” It wasn’t exactly classified information. But he knew then that Danielle understood that she was being courted. By you, jackass. It was the least nice confirmation he could have expected, but if nothing else the cards were on the table. He’d wondered about it, before then: Danielle had forgotten so much, gotten so used to living like a savage, that he wasn’t sure she recognized the kisses on the hand or flowers on her tray for what they were or just accepted them as idiosyncrasies. “You ever imagine the way things should have been?” he asks Alex out of the blue. “If you hadn’t wound up here?”
“Sometimes,” she says. “It’s hard, though.”
He wonders what she thinks the rest of the world is like, what her idea of it is. “I’ll tell you how it should have gone,” he says. It’s all he can do right now. Alex looks confused, but she doesn’t stop him. “I should’ve been on the Honolulu-Papeete route still.” Would’ve been, too, if he hadn’t shown up to fly sloshed a couple of times. “They put us up at a hotel there, the Meridian.” You did the post-flight routine and after a shower and a change of clothes, you went down to the bar for a couple of drinks. “If things went the way they were supposed to, I’d be in the restaurant having dinner and when the waiter brought out my dinner, he’d point out a woman sitting at one of the other tables.”
“My mother?”
“Right in one. He’d tell me she was a famous scientist, studies things he and I can’t even understand the names of. Since we’re both by ourselves, I’d go over and ask if I could join her for dinner.”
“She’s alone?”
That’s going to be a tricky part for Alex. “Of course I can’t help asking why a pretty woman like her is sitting all by herself. I don’t know what she’d tell me - maybe she and your dad went their separate ways after a while. That’ll happen sometimes.” Maybe it would have, too; Frank is either selfish or pragmatic enough to entertain the possibility. “Anyway, we’d get to talking, and I wouldn’t understand a word she said about her work and she’d be none too interested in mine.”
“That sounds great.”
“Not the most auspicious of beginnings,” he admits. “But I ask if she’s got any family, and she starts telling me about her daughter. Beautiful girl, smart as a whip.”
Alex blushes. “Where would I be?”
“Burning off some youthful energy at the pool, maybe. Or at a movie with your friends. She’d keep some pictures of you in her wallet. Probably from you as a baby to going off to the prom.” He doubts Alex even knows what he’s talking about. “We’d spend a good hour dancing, and eventually you’d come on in and we’d all talk over dessert.” He wishes he could see it: a more or less carefree Alex, dressed like a teenage fashion victim and chatting about school and soccer over coffee and mille-feuille. “Maybe it would be the start of some passionate romance between your mother and I. Or maybe she and your dad are still together, he’s just away for the week, and I end up being one of those far-flung friends you get sometimes.” He waits for Alex to look at him again, letting the silence get a little bit awkward, before he says, “Don’t ever think I don’t know the second way is how it should’ve been. I don’t ever forget that.”
She looks down again. “The first way’s still a lot better than this.”
“I know that too.”
“You’ll take what you can get, though?”
“That isn’t how it works,” he tells her. “Here and now is all any of us can get.”
Alex nods but doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “What would she be like then?” she asks. “If you met her in that restaurant?”
“I think she’d still be herself.” Frank’s always imagined it that way, at least. “Maybe with a little less wear, but she’d still be Danielle.”
Alex actually smiles a little at that, and to Frank it looks genuine even though she’s crying again. Eventually she says, “Who’s going to give her the seashells?”
“I think you should.”
“She’ll know whose idea it was.”
Frank turns that one over in his mind a few times. “She probably will, kiddo. But I think they should be from you.”
Summary: Independent prequel to “Sepal” ( Pollen). Frank and Alex find their footing. (Gen; Danielle/Frank)
Rating: PG Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Dedication: For
aurorawest , a fellow fan of the boaties and an all-around awesome gal.
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Frank’s made friends with the little rock cove a few hundred feet northwest of the main camp. He’s not the only one who has - it’s private but not too far away, isolated enough to be safe - but he’s the one who makes the most use of it. Simply put, there aren’t a lot of bathing suits around, and he’d rather just leave his clothes on the rock and go for a quick dip to cool himself off. If Sawyer wants to show himself off for the whole camp, that’s his own affair, but Frank doesn’t think anyone’s too interested in seeing his naked old bones paraded around the place. Common courtesy is worth a lot more than most people give it credit for, even here.
Going to the cove after fire-tending duty is something of a ritual for him. They’re not trying to keep up a signal fire the way they were before he got here. That’s not going to help with anything. They’ve just got to keep something going because it’s not safe to assume they could get another one started that easily if it goes out. Keeping an eye and kindling on the thing is a round-the-clock job, and it’s a hell of an uncomfortable one. It would be a hell of a boring one too if you couldn’t multitask, although the compatible tasks aren’t always that interesting themselves: turning a big stone into a bowl leaves the mind plenty of room to wander.
He’s got soot on his face and rock grit all over his hands when he runs into Alex Rousseau, damn near trips over her in fact. “Didn’t expect to find you here,” he says.
“The fruit picking got finished early,” she says, as if by way of explanation.
“And I’m guessing you wanted some time to yourself?”
“Something like that.”
“I figured.” He sighs. “Look, I know you don’t think it’s any of my business, but you’ve been spending too much time by yourself here.”
“Not a whole lot of people to spend time with.”
“No, but we’re pretty much stuck with each other.” He sticks out a hand. “On your feet, kiddo.”
“Where are we going?”
He has to improvise on that one. “To collect seashells. There’s a good little patch of them past camp the other way.”
“What do you want seashells for?”
They sure don’t need them for souvenirs. “First things first. We can think about that once we’ve got ‘em.”
Alex gets to her feet and tags along after him with that coltish gait of hers, the kind of balanced gawkiness he can’t imagine Danielle ever had. Alex doesn’t bother to ask questions when he detours to pick up a small basket someone made for practice at the fire. Soon they’re at the shell bed and Frank is peering at the damp sand. It’s studded with what he supposes are the bones of dead little sea creatures. He’s never thought of it that way before, but he puts that out of mind. “You never picked up shells you liked from the beach?”
“It wasn’t exactly a special event.”
She has a point; living here, he guesses, she was probably bored of it before she could read. “I bet you know what all these are,” he offers.
“Yeah.” There’s a waver in her voice and she isn’t looking at him.
He gives her a minute to collect herself. “Well, why don’t you tell me a little more about them?”
“This one’s a humpback cowrie.” She doesn’t sound too interested in what she’s saying, but she holds up a shiny, rounded shell, dark brown and dotted with golden patches. “There are a lot of them.”
“It’s pretty.”
“I guess so… A lot of these are cowries. The plain white ones - I think they used to be money somewhere in Africa or something.” She shows him a glossy peach-coloured one with white edges. “Golden cowrie. They don’t turn up that often.”
“Well, put it in the basket, then.”
“Okay. If you find a sort of gold-coloured one with white spots, they’re rare too… The big flat ones are abalones. The holes are for breathing.”
“Abalones need to breathe?”
“I think so. Turn it over.”
Frank does. “We call this mother-of-pearl where I come from,” he says. “You can decorate with it, metal stuff.” He’d better not think of his mother’s old brooch.
“Do you miss it? Where you come from?” She sounds as if she’s anticipating a yes, and it occurs to Frank that she might have come along with him in the first place because she thought he was lonely.
“I’ll tell you what, I miss being safe. A couple of my buddies.”
“That’s it?”
Being safe and That’s it? don’t really go together in Frank’s mind, but that isn’t the point. “I’ve got a kid who’s nineteen or twenty. Joshua.”
“You miss him, don’t you?”
Frank lets out a dry, humourless laugh. “That, kiddo,” he says, sitting down on a dry patch of sand, “is a tough question for a man who knows the world’s airport bars better than his own son.” Probably still better than he ever knew his second wife, but that’s another issue. “I was the worst father you could’ve imagined.”
“Oh, really?”
“No, I guess not,” he says quietly. “I was sure the worst father I could’ve been.” Marriage fell apart for predictable reasons, partially contemporaneous with the next eighteen years of abusing his liver and screwing flight attendants, wound up here. He’s got some vanity in wanting his own son to be worried about him batting against a sliver of fatherly impulse hoping Josh isn’t. Frank sure never gave him any reason to.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Alex asks, sitting down beside him.
“Not really. Do you want to hear about it?”
“No… This is an ark shell.”
She hands it to Frank: a striped shell with a kind of rectangular base to it. He supposes it looks a little bit like a boat shape from a certain angle. “Like Noah’s ark?” he asks.
“Yeah. Like Noah’s ark.”
“What lives in these, a clam?”
“I think so. It’d be too small to eat.”
“Too small for pretty much anything.”
“Well, what are the rest of them good for?” She’d have to get back to that, wouldn’t she?
He shrugs. “Decorate something. Put them on baskets, make jewelry.”
“Why bother?”
“Sometimes you’ve just got to do things like that. Keeps you sane.” He’s not necessarily sure that’s an advantage here, but it might be worth a go. “Your mom’s been going pretty stir-crazy resting up all the time.”
“Juliet says she’s getting better.”
“She’s got a lot more healing to go before she’s back on her feet all the way.” Frank takes Alex’s silence as conceding the point. Danielle’s still not up for much beyond short little walks in the jungle, and even that much progress took three months. “You don’t have to worry about her. Juliet says she’ll be fine even when neither of you are around.”
“Will she?”
Frank’s breath catches in his throat at that one. He can’t tell whether Alex meant to let her guard down or if it happened on its own, but she’s not saying anything to take it back. They’re long past talking about the wound in Danielle’s side. “She’ll get as close to okay as she can manage,” he says. Maybe Alex would like him to break eye contact right now, but he’s not going to do it. “And that’s worth more than I think you expect.”
“How do you know?” A couple of tears escape despite her best effort to hold them, and she looks furious with herself.
“Because of you.” No reaction. “Alone like that for sixteen years - do you really think she wanted to be alive?”
“Enough to survive.”
“You don’t know by now you were the only reason she had?”
She presses her face to her knees. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“You know about cowrie shells.” Well, that isn’t a whole lot of help. “You know a hell of a lot more than you think.”
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice is muffled, and she lets Frank coax her head up. Alex isn’t the kind of girl who cries discreetly; her whole face is blotchy, streaming with tears and snot. Without thinking about it Frank rests a hand between her shoulder blades. “It’s all right.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. Alex starts crying harder and won’t do anything but shake her head in protest. Frank thinks he’d better shut his trap now and just stroke her hair. He’s never known why that’s soothing, but given time it’ll usually work. Alex squeezes her fists in the sand beside her and Frank knows he’s lucky he didn’t get punched. As it is, she clenches her hands and unclenches them over and over, and he doubts she could say whether it was something to hold she wishes she had right now or if it was something to crush.
After a while the tide starts getting a little aggressive with them, and he and Alex scoot back a few feet. She’s calmed down enough to extend a sand-dirtied hand over his and drop a pointy little corkscrew of a shell into it. “Auger snail,” she says, wiping a hand across her nose and smearing her face with dirt in the process.
“Anything special about it?”
“Not really.” She looks down again and after a minute she says quietly, “They were Karl’s favourite.”
That’s one can of worms you weren’t expecting, old man. “Why’d he like them?”
“See how the outer shell is almost white, with the spots on it?”
Frank examines the shell: rust-coloured dots running along the spiral. “Yeah, I see it.”
“When I was… seven or eight, I found a really good one and gave it to him. I told him it made me think of him.” She spends a minute blinking hard. “He had really pale skin, and he always had freckles. All over everything you could see… He told me it was stupid and seashells were for girls.”
“And later on I bet you’d always bring them to him.” She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t really need to. “I’m sorry that happened to the two of you.” He doesn’t have any words of inspiration to give her beyond that. He’s never much believed in them anyway.
They sit for a long while, Alex staring at the shells they’ve gathered but not looking much like she’s seeing them. The tide creeps up on them again, and they make another move backwards. Frank’s about to suggest they head back to camp when Alex says, “Do you like my mother?”
That one surprises him. “What, don’t you?”
“She’s my mother.” Frank guesses he didn’t really need to ask that one, even if there are plenty of teenage girls in the world who don’t. “Do you like her?”
“She’s one hell of a lady,” he says, and he offers a tight grin. “I do like her.”
Alex gives him a look that he wouldn’t exactly call appraising, just like she’s trying to make sense of some things. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”
This time he risks a little more of a grin. “Right now you want to tell me what you’re going do to me if I ever hurt her?”
Alex snorts. “You know what she’d do.”
That was a sore spot he didn’t need to hit. He wonders if Danielle told Alex about it: he was helping Danielle along one of her walks a few months in, and in the midst of explaining durians to him she broke off and said, “You know that I shot Robert.”
“I know.” It wasn’t exactly classified information. But he knew then that Danielle understood that she was being courted. By you, jackass. It was the least nice confirmation he could have expected, but if nothing else the cards were on the table. He’d wondered about it, before then: Danielle had forgotten so much, gotten so used to living like a savage, that he wasn’t sure she recognized the kisses on the hand or flowers on her tray for what they were or just accepted them as idiosyncrasies. “You ever imagine the way things should have been?” he asks Alex out of the blue. “If you hadn’t wound up here?”
“Sometimes,” she says. “It’s hard, though.”
He wonders what she thinks the rest of the world is like, what her idea of it is. “I’ll tell you how it should have gone,” he says. It’s all he can do right now. Alex looks confused, but she doesn’t stop him. “I should’ve been on the Honolulu-Papeete route still.” Would’ve been, too, if he hadn’t shown up to fly sloshed a couple of times. “They put us up at a hotel there, the Meridian.” You did the post-flight routine and after a shower and a change of clothes, you went down to the bar for a couple of drinks. “If things went the way they were supposed to, I’d be in the restaurant having dinner and when the waiter brought out my dinner, he’d point out a woman sitting at one of the other tables.”
“My mother?”
“Right in one. He’d tell me she was a famous scientist, studies things he and I can’t even understand the names of. Since we’re both by ourselves, I’d go over and ask if I could join her for dinner.”
“She’s alone?”
That’s going to be a tricky part for Alex. “Of course I can’t help asking why a pretty woman like her is sitting all by herself. I don’t know what she’d tell me - maybe she and your dad went their separate ways after a while. That’ll happen sometimes.” Maybe it would have, too; Frank is either selfish or pragmatic enough to entertain the possibility. “Anyway, we’d get to talking, and I wouldn’t understand a word she said about her work and she’d be none too interested in mine.”
“That sounds great.”
“Not the most auspicious of beginnings,” he admits. “But I ask if she’s got any family, and she starts telling me about her daughter. Beautiful girl, smart as a whip.”
Alex blushes. “Where would I be?”
“Burning off some youthful energy at the pool, maybe. Or at a movie with your friends. She’d keep some pictures of you in her wallet. Probably from you as a baby to going off to the prom.” He doubts Alex even knows what he’s talking about. “We’d spend a good hour dancing, and eventually you’d come on in and we’d all talk over dessert.” He wishes he could see it: a more or less carefree Alex, dressed like a teenage fashion victim and chatting about school and soccer over coffee and mille-feuille. “Maybe it would be the start of some passionate romance between your mother and I. Or maybe she and your dad are still together, he’s just away for the week, and I end up being one of those far-flung friends you get sometimes.” He waits for Alex to look at him again, letting the silence get a little bit awkward, before he says, “Don’t ever think I don’t know the second way is how it should’ve been. I don’t ever forget that.”
She looks down again. “The first way’s still a lot better than this.”
“I know that too.”
“You’ll take what you can get, though?”
“That isn’t how it works,” he tells her. “Here and now is all any of us can get.”
Alex nods but doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “What would she be like then?” she asks. “If you met her in that restaurant?”
“I think she’d still be herself.” Frank’s always imagined it that way, at least. “Maybe with a little less wear, but she’d still be Danielle.”
Alex actually smiles a little at that, and to Frank it looks genuine even though she’s crying again. Eventually she says, “Who’s going to give her the seashells?”
“I think you should.”
“She’ll know whose idea it was.”
Frank turns that one over in his mind a few times. “She probably will, kiddo. But I think they should be from you.”