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The second time that Mel leaves Frank and Becca alone together, there's one thing and one thing only on his mind.
It’s late - almost midnight - and if he were a smarter man he’d probably blame the question he’s about to ask on his exhaustion, but he got 8 hours of sleep last night and spent the entire day watching TV before taking the Kings to the movies, so he isn’t even tired. For the first time in months, he’s actually not tired at all. Mel, on the other hand, looks tired, very tired, but she waved away his selfless offer to run into the grocery store for her and instead left him alone in the car with Becca, who is sitting in the backseat and watching videos about the Pokemon Centre in Tokyo while slurping noisily at what’s left of her Fruitopia. And he really shouldn't interrupt the sanctity of her phone time - he knows that. According to Dr. J's latest TikTok, phone time is one of the most sacred, treasured parts of a young "girlypop's" day.
But…
Fuck it. He glances at her in the rearview mirror and sits up straighter in his seat. “Hey, Becca,” he begins, “can I ask you something?”
“Sure, Frank." He can hear the distinctive sound of her phone screen locking. "What’s up?”
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
“Of course I remember.” Still in the rearview mirror, he sees her frowning. “My stomach hurt really bad.”
“Right, yeah.” Maybe not the happiest memory to remind her of, but he already knows how he’s going to distract her, so he pushes forward. “Uh, do you remember when you said that your - that Mel said a lot of nice things about me?”
“Duh,” she replies. “She still says nice things about you. All the time.”
Jackpot. He chews on the inside cheek to stop himself from grinning like an idiot. “Yeah? … Like what?”
“Um… lots of stuff.” He turns his attention to the front windows of the grocery store, where he can’t yet see Mel paying for her bandaids and oat milk, so they’re still in the clear. “She always talks about how good of a doctor you are. While we were waiting for you to pick us up, she told me about how you saved a kid last week who was in a really bad car accident. She said that you were very smart, and very quick on your feet.”
Quick on your feet. He can hear the words in Mel’s voice so clearly in his mind and curls his fists around the steering wheel. “Well, she’s just as good of a doctor as I am,” he tells Becca. “Better, even.”
“She says the same thing about you.”
“Yeah, she would.” Still no sign of Mel at the checkout. He clears his throat. “Anything else?”
He knows that shouldn’t be indulging himself like this. There’s a long list of people in his life who would gladly tell him the last thing he needs is an even bigger head than the one he was born with, a long list with Robby right at the top. But Robby being back is the reason he needs the validation; Robby being back and still giving him the cold shoulder is the reason he can’t help himself from looking for that validation elsewhere. Besides, he also can’t help but notice that Becca is more than willing to share all the things her sister says about him behind his back, which… well, which is an ego booster in and of itself.
“Um, she told me last week that you smell good,” Becca tells him.
He cranks around in the seat to look at her. “She said I smell good,” he repeats. “Really?”
“Yeah. She said it was very… very… ugh, I can’t remember…”
“It’s alright, you don’t have to -”
“Oh, she - she said you smelled very nostalgic! Yeah, that was it. She said that you smelled like… like how getting a warm hug feels.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that.
“And she was telling me, earlier,” Becca continues, “when you were in the bathroom at the movies, about how good she thinks you look in that jacket. Which is - duh. It matches your eyes, like, perfectly.”
The jacket is one of his older jackets, a gift from Abby’s mom that he never got around to actually wearing in front of her because he skipped two Christmasses in a row after she gave it to him. “Really?”
“Yeah,” she replies. “And then she asked me if she looked good, and I told her that she probably should’ve done something a little different with her hair because the braid is kind of boring, but - it still looked good.”
“She always looks good.”
Frank can see Mel now, standing at the self checkout, frowning as she picks up a box of crackers and puts it back down, then frowning harder as picks it up and puts it back down again. Seeing it makes him especially glad that she didn’t let him go into the store in her place, because he hates the self checkout as much as she obviously does and would also hate to give her the chance to watch him fail at it the way she’s failing at it right now. (Though, y’know - hopefully she’d find it just as endearing.)
“But I gotta disagree with you, Becca. I love the braid.”
“You just haven’t seen her with her hair down yet. When we go to the ren faire, she puts it in curlers and takes them out right before we get there, and it’s just - woosh.” She makes a second wooshing noise to drive the point home. “It's like a waterfall.”
“Then you’ll have to invite me to come with you guys next time.”
“Um - hasn’t she already?” Becca is frowning again when he glances at her in the rearview mirror. “She said that she was going to.”
Now that Mel is crossing the parking lot, paper bag tucked under one armpit and anatomically correct heart-shaped purse tucked under the other, he turns the key in the ignition and then makes sure he re-activates the seat warmer before she opens the door. “Hey,” he greets, leaning over to take the paper bag from her when she hands it out to him. “Got everything?”
“Got everything and then some,” she answers as she buckles in and takes the bag back. “I meant to just get some bandaids and oat milk, like I was telling you earlier, but somehow a bunch of snacks fell into my basket… it’s so interesting how that always seems to happen, isn’t it?”
“Very interesting,” he replies. “And super suspicious. Someone should really do something about that.”
“How’d it go in here?” she asks, looking back and forth between Frank and Becca, going from playful to serious in the span of a second. “You guys didn’t… you didn’t talk about me or anything while I was in there, did you?”
“Nah,” Frank replies, at the same time Becca says, “Nope!”
“Alright. Good.”
Before he pulls out of the parking lot, Frank looks at Becca one last time in the rearview. He plans on giving her a wink to make sure that their conversation stays between them, but, to his surprise, she beats him to it.