Less Than Frank Read online

  Praise for

  LYNN BULOCK

  “Lynn Bulock writes with the kind of smart style that makes readers feel like the story is unfolding right before their eyes—and they can’t wait to know what happens next!”

  —Annie Jones, award-winning author of The Barefoot Believers

  “Lynn Bulock has a talent for combining a fun puzzle with a heartwarming cast of characters for a can’t-put-down read. I look forward to more!”

  —Hannah Alexander, Christy Award-winning author of Double Blind

  “Bulock’s reprise of the delightful Gracie Lee is pleasant and amusing.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Less Than Frank

  LYNN BULOCK

  Less Than

  FRANK

  Published by Steeple Hill Books™

  To Joe, always.

  And

  To his mother, Louise.

  Without her, there wouldn’t be a Gracie Lee.

  Acknowledgments

  As usual, I owe a great deal to so many for their help on this book. Thanks to Craig and Kristine Beeker for their help in reminding me to give God the glory in everything. To Lou Fiore and Dennis of Dreamtree Construction for showing me how skillful, honest contractors work so that I could make Frank their polar opposite. And through this deadline and several others, Leonardo, Letty and the rest of the crew at Three Amigos have kept me supplied with the best fish tacos in Ventura County. Thanks also to the three people, besides my wonderful family, who listen to me whine the most: Annie Jones, Linda F. and my fantastic agent, Nancy Yost.

  I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.

  Therefore be as shrewd as snakes

  and as innocent as doves.

  —Matthew 10:16

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter One

  I love my son dearly but I do believe he’s the worst bathroom hog in three counties. I’d forgotten how long Ben spent on the simpler tasks in life, such as taking a shower, until we had to share the same bathroom on a regular basis for the first time in over a year.

  I’m already getting ahead of myself. My name is Gracie Lee Harris, and I am a transplanted Midwesterner slowly getting used to a new life in Southern California. After nearly eighteen months here, I feel like I belong now—for the most part. It hasn’t been an easy time of it, but anyplace where you can wear shorts and a T-shirt the week after Thanksgiving has its good points.

  Of course, my friends who are natives would say that the mere fact that I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts this late into the fall was proof that I hadn’t adapted yet. My Missouri blood just hasn’t thinned enough to be cold yet at sixty degrees. To me, “cold” means you have to scrape stuff off your windshield and those little hairs inside your nose freeze when you go outside to get the newspaper. Here, “cold” means anything in the fifties or below, and that’s when folks start wearing their heavy sweaters.

  The change in weather and how people react to it has taken almost as much effort to get used to as the more severe changes in my life. I moved out here as a woman married less than two years to a handsome self-employed businessman. Then Dennis Peete promptly drove his car off the road, leaving him comatose in long-term care for close to six months while I bunked in with my mother-in-law. And that was the fun part.

  From there things only got worse, other than the fact that I found a wonderful group of women to support me during a really rough time when Dennis died. The Christian Friends group at Conejo Community Chapel kept me sane during what I can easily say was the worst period of my life so far. But even they, with their bountiful wisdom, didn’t have many hints on how to get a teenaged male out of the bathroom.

  In fact, in an odd twist of things, I am the only one in my particular group to have much experience with teenaged males at all. Linnette Parks, our group leader and my new best friend, has two daughters just past the teen stage and launching into adulthood. Dot Morgan, who is my landlady now that I am living in her garage apartment, has a daughter as well. Candace is in her thirties, but has Down syndrome and functions on a teen level most of the time. She lives in a group home in Camarillo, and I’ve met her several times when she’s come home to go to church with her mom and dad at Conejo Community Chapel with the rest of us.

  Lexy Adams doesn’t have kids yet, although not for lack of trying. She may look like an early-thirties go-getter attorney, but she’d love to have baby drool stains on that blazer lapel, believe me.

  The Christian Friends member I knew the least about, Paula Choi, lost her only daughter in a car crash a few years before I’d joined the group. And the newest member of the group besides me, Heather Taylor, has a beautiful nine-month-old daughter, Corinna Grace, who also happened to be my late husband Dennis’s child.

  It’s a long story, and one we’re done hashing over, for the most part. Heather and I are still trying to get our hands on the money that vanished once we gave it to Dennis, but that’s going to go on for a while. Thanks to the way he left things, his estate and his late mother’s have been tangled up together in a legal dispute that may take years to get through the courts.

  Of course that tangled legal web was somewhat to blame for me sharing one lone bathroom with my college freshman when he came home weekends and such from Pacific Oaks Christian College. He’d spent the long Thanksgiving weekend with me in the apartment, and even put off going back to his dorm today until he absolutely had to. Apparently my company was preferable to five other male suite-mates when it came to preparing for class on a Monday morning.

  Of course that didn’t help me out when he went into the bathroom, locked all the doors and took an hour-long shower. Dot and Buck have been planning to renovate the apartment ever since I moved in back in February. The original plans were for the galley kitchen and the bath to both be done when I came home from Ben’s high-school graduation in June with Ben in tow.

  Thanks to a variety of problems, from the endless number of permits required by the city of Rancho Conejo to the unavailability of some of the appliances they’d picked out and that unfortunate problem at the tile factory, nothing was even started at that point. There were great plans in the works, but no actual remodeling until some time in July. Naturally the first thing to show up then was the portable—how do I put it nicely?—facility that parked on the driveway, required by any construction project of this size. Since then we’d slogged through the kitchen remodel and started, just barely, on the bathroom. At this point Dot and Buck were getting fairly peeved, and personally I was ready to strangle the general contractor, Cousin Frank.

  Frank Collins really was a cousin, related to Dot on her mother’s side of the family in a distant way. He was one of those relatives she wasn’t particularly fond of claiming, and once he’d been working on the apartment where I now lived for a couple of weeks, I could see why.

  Somewhere in his late 30s or early 40s with thinning brown hair and a gut that overrode his fashionably low-hanging jeans, Frank was crude, loud and aggravating. He wasn’t nice to anybody that worked for him, and half the time didn’t even appear to remember their names. I had a sneaking suspicion that the Thermos he
carried to drink out of on breaks was loaded with something a lot stronger than plain black coffee, but I hadn’t shared my concerns with Dot. She had enough to deal with right now on the remodeling issues with Frank. Why add one more to the pile?

  Most mornings he drove a beat-up full-sized pickup truck to the job site before I was really ready to get out of bed, and expected to start work on the bathroom immediately. It was hard enough to deal with when I was the only one in the apartment. At times like this, when Ben was sharing it with me, it was way past annoying. If the early starts had meant that Frank was actually getting something done every day I could be more understanding. Instead, the work is still moving at a snail’s pace.

  The whole idea of this bathroom remodel was to make this a functioning apartment where two people could share all the facilities without getting in each other’s way too much. I think Buck and Dot are still considering that Candace may be back here some day, and while she enjoys as much independence as possible, she’s not capable of living on her own.

  Even with two independent adults, the new bathroom design will be great once it’s done. Dot had the idea to reshape the existing space into three smaller compartments, with a commode and sink in each of the side units, and a nice shower, tub and lots of storage in the middle unit. She says fancy housing developments call that a “Jack and Jill” bathroom and I’ll take her word for it. I’ve never been able to consider fancy housing developments on my take-home pay, especially in southern California.

  The partition walls are up now on all three parts of the bathroom, and if there was functioning plumbing in my side of the “Jack and Jill” part, life would be a lot easier when Ben showed up like this. Of course with my luck he’d still lock all the doors on all the connecting parts of the bathroom, making it impossible for me to use whatever he’s not using anyway. It’s a moot point right now, because only half the plumbing is finished to date. One can use “Jack’s” side of the bathroom, and the shower works. “Jill” and the tub are coming soon, according to Frank. But then everything has been slated to happen “soon” since Labor Day, so I’m not real optimistic.

  I’d gotten up early on this Monday morning hoping to get going with my routine before Ben had to bolt out the door to head for school. He had earlier classes than I did this semester, which was truly ironic since he is not a morning person at 18, while I definitely am at 39. But then, I’m “only” doing nine hours of graduate work and working two part-time jobs, while he’s taking a full load for a freshman.

  Setting that early alarm often gets me up before Frank shows up, and before Ben claims the bathroom on those mornings he’s here. But today I managed to hit the snooze button once and it was my undoing. I got about thirty seconds in the bathroom before Ben knocked on the door telling me he was going to be late for class if he didn’t get in there right away.

  At that point I brushed my teeth quickly, hollered through the closed door to his room that the bathroom was now his, unlocked his door and scuttled through the shower compartment to my room. I didn’t even see him through all of that; just heard him thumping around in his room and cranking up the music.

  I pulled on clothes, then went and made breakfast for the two of us. That took about half an hour, but of course his shower took longer. The cinnamon rolls out of a can that I’d put together were cold by now, I’d read the newspaper, and still the kid was showering. I’d looked out the front window a couple times expecting to see movement around Frank’s truck, but there wasn’t any. It was parked at the end of Dot and Buck’s long driveway as usual, and I dimly remembered hearing him pull in this morning, or at least I thought I had heard him. I’d heard some engine noises and door-slamming at some point, anyway.

  Beyond that I hadn’t heard anything else from him, which probably meant he was expecting to do something right away that needed two men. That usually posed a problem for Frank if he made those plans to happen first thing in the morning, because the only person less reliable than Cousin Frank was his helper, Darnell.

  There had been a lot of different subcontractors working with Frank over the months since he started this job, and I’d noticed one thing that they almost all had in common. Everybody had an apprentice or a helper, or something like that, depending on how organized their business was. If they were an actual union shop, there was an apprentice, maybe even somebody working up to journeyman status. The smaller organizations had a helper, and if it was a really small business, that helper was often family and might be part-time. Almost all of them were of the same variety as Darnell; tall, weedy, pushing thirty and likely to vanish on good surf days when they always claimed sickness or a death in the family.

  Darnell couldn’t claim the death-in-the-family routine because he was marginally related to Frank at about the same distance that Frank was related to Dot. But he found other reasons often enough to fail to show up, and this appeared to be one of those days. I figured he’d probably spent Thanksgiving either at the beach or in Vegas—again—and was recuperating this morning. Since the weather had been only marginal in the last four days, I expected it was Vegas that had claimed his attention. It’s only a five-or six-hour drive from Rancho Conejo to the Strip and the devotees take advantage of that whenever they can.

  When Frank was left alone like this, he usually commandeered the little house on the driveway and snatched my newspaper to keep him company. Maybe this morning he was turning over a new leaf, because I got my paper all to myself.

  It was verging on an hour now and Ben was still in the shower, or shaving with the water running hard, or something. All I knew was that the music thumped good and loud in his bedroom, the water was still running and all the doors were locked. I decided to do up the few dishes I’d used fixing breakfast. That was good time management, but probably a mistake otherwise. The moment my hands were in that lukewarm dishwater, I needed to be where Ben was. And naturally he couldn’t hear me knock over the music in the bedroom.

  Going down the outside stairs to ground level for the second time this morning, I decided to check the portable potty. Frank must have found another newspaper someplace, because the sign above the door latch was flipped to “occupied.” He was as responsive to my knock as Ben.

  Normally there would be an easy answer to my problem just on the other side of the driveway. Buck and Dot didn’t mind me coming over in emergencies, or even most nonemergencies. Being that close a distance to a friendly landlady was like having family living that close in all the good and bad ways that entailed. Dot felt like an aunt to me most of the time anyway. But this morning they weren’t around, having taken off even earlier than I’d gotten up to deliver a puppy from the kennels to a new owner several hours away.

  Buck was one of the best dog trainers in Ventura County, and the kennels behind their house were always at least half-full of really nice dogs. He didn’t go for purebreds as a rule, catering more towards the intelligent, friendly dogs he could train for movie stunt work or—his favorite—as therapy dogs at the nearby hospitals and nursing homes. Along with my first part-time job as a barista at the Coffee Corner at Pacific Oak, my second paid job was with Morgan Kennels helping out while they were between full-time workers.

  Normally I would have been feeding dogs and tidying kennels by now, but since they’d had to get up early for puppy delivery anyway, Dot told me she would take the morning shift today and give me a break. The puppy was the last of a litter to be handed out before Christmas; Buck was adamant about live animals not being Christmas gifts or birthday presents, so they were the one kennel in the area that did little business in December. We’d played with the feisty little lab mix all of Thanksgiving weekend, making sure he got socialized with every person and animal Buck could throw at him so that he’d be a good guy for his new owner. He was probably so worn out that he would sleep on the floor of the van in his crate all the way up to his new home this morning.

  Still, that didn’t help my current predicament. I went back up the stairs to knock
on Ben’s door. It remained locked, the music still blasting and I could still hear water running. That didn’t help me out any, either. I thought about trying to pop the lock and get into the bedroom at least, but it was a fairly sturdy door. Coupled with the fact that I had no desire whatsoever to see more of my son than I’d seen since he was about nine and stopped running around the house less than fully clothed, I passed on that idea.

  That left me only with going downstairs and knocking until I got a response out of Frank. He, at least, would open the door to where he was with all his clothes on, even though he’d probably have some rude or snide remark for me. At this point I was willing to endure either. The morning air felt colder every time I went out on the second story deck outside my front door. Going down the flight of stairs, I crossed the short expanse of asphalt to where the green-and-yellow facility stood. For the most part it was an aggravation to have it out on the driveway, where it had been since July. It was a reminder that work on the apartment had been slower than molasses in January, as my Granny Lou would have said. Right now, though, I was thankful to have the silly thing there.

  I’d hoped that maybe Frank would be outside on his cell phone by now, trying to figure out where Darnell was, but the pavement was still empty. First I knocked on the door and called Frank’s name softly. I don’t know who I was worried about disturbing; with Dot and Buck gone, nobody else could have heard me. When knocking politely didn’t work, I pounded on the door and jiggled the handle, which I saw wasn’t really set all the way to lock, but only about halfway. That made me hopeful that perhaps nobody was in there after all, and somebody had just closed the door that way for a prank.

  There was still no answer on the other side, but pounding on the door felt like there was something resisting the movement inside. “Come on, whatever’s going on in there, it’s not funny. Open the door,” I said. Or rather yelled by now. That much noise set the outside kennel dogs barking for the first time that morning, but didn’t cause any answer inside the facility.