Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [28]
“No way.”
“Daddy would like that.”
“You send it then.”
“It’s you right now.”
“God, I hope not.”
Angie gives her a look. Here it comes, Alice thinks. The appearances are not everything speech. The it’s what’s inside that counts speech.
Yup. There she goes. Launches right in. With embellishments even. Alice tunes out the sounds and watches her mother’s very pretty mouth forming the familiar words.
Alice does not make the appropriate murmuring noises in response, the oh, mom, thanks so much, you really understand, don’t you, and instead just looks at her mother thinking, why do you do this, when we both know it’s total garbage?
These silent looks are like a little ticking bomb.
At first Alice can see Angie thinking, in a clenched teeth sort of way, I’m not going to rise to the bait, but before you know it, in a nanosecond, she’s furious.
“You’re making a mess.”
“I am not.”
“I spent days organizing these photos.”
“Days?”
“Any order I had managed to—”
“I’ll put it all back.”
“The way it was?”
“Yeah. Exactly the way it was.”
Just go away, Alice thinks. I was perfectly fine before you walked in here. Angie opens her mouth to say something else, thinks better of it, and turns on her heel and leaves.
Now Alice is thinking maybe it is a dumb photo. Now she’s thinking about how she’s not pretty and how that’s probably evident in this photo. It’s probably been evident forever, even in her baby pictures. Now she’s thinking about this crap when before she was just looking for a photo where she and her dad were having fun and goofing around and it didn’t have anything to do with being pretty.
This is why girls hate their mothers, Alice thinks, as she finds the photo.
They’re in the garden, standing in the middle of their pumpkin patch. Dad is holding a pitchfork; Alice is holding a shovel. There are two bushel baskets tipped over like cornucopia, full of corn and peppers and zucchini and gourds and tomatoes. They’re wearing matching Red Wings T-shirts and baseball hats, and they’re both trying—and failing—to look serious.
There’s another one and another one—a little series of shots she hadn’t remembered. Uncle Eddie caught them laughing and making faces and pretending their biggest pumpkin was too heavy to lift.
She rifles through the box to find the negatives, pockets them, and puts the originals back exactly where she found them. She’s going to send her dad the whole series.
She raids the change jar before hopping on her bike to go to the drugstore at the Four Corners to make copies. On her way out the door she tells Ellie she’ll be back in half an hour max and then they can seal up the box and take it to the post office.
“Get some batteries,” Ellie yells after her. “They all need double As!”
Alice pops back inside.
“Mom! I’m taking five dollars to get Dad batteries!”
And she’s out, she’s on her bike. Only now does she realize how cold it still is. There’s a misting kind of rain and the roads are all slushy. She’s gonna get soaked if she rides in the street. She veers off onto the sidewalk, which is marginally better but at least she won’t get sprayed by the passing cars. She pedals past Mrs. Piantowski’s and Mrs. Minty’s and then there’s Gram’s restaurant, with people waiting outside even in this weather. Happens every Saturday and Sunday, people queuing up around the block.
At the drugstore she marches up to the very tall, very skinny high school boy manning the photo machine, explains what she wants, begs him to make her photos right now, this very minute, it’s urgent, and then heads off to find batteries.
True to his word, Steven—she reads his badge—has her photos ready. While checking out, she looks at her dad’s watch. Eleven o’clock. They’ll just make it.
Outside Henry is standing next to her bike.
“Hey, Alice.”
“Hi, Henry.”
“You want to go sit at the counter at your Gram’s and have breakfast or something?”
“I can’t, Henry. I have to get to the post office before it closes.”
“After the post office, then.”
“I have to ask my mom.”
“I’ll meet you at the post office.