Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [37]
When Angie and Uncle Eddie get home, the girls are both sound asleep on the couch. Uncle Eddie picks Ellie up in his arms and carries her upstairs. Angie wakes Alice. Alice was dreaming, she was dreaming about Small Point; she was dreaming about a sliver of moon hanging low over the water; she was dreaming that she and Dad were walking the beach in the moonlight; she’s following in his footsteps, and he was just beginning to turn around to say something to her when her mom wakes her up.
“Alice . . . honey . . .”
When she bends over like that, Alice can smell her perfume and the faint scent of her lipstick, and maybe that other smell is a martini or two.
“Time for bed.”
“Okay.”
Alice sits up and her mom surprises her by sitting down beside her. Close beside her.
“You folded the laundry.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“Ellie helped.”
“You guys make out okay?”
“Yeah.”
“No fighting?”
“Nope. We had backwards dinner.”
“Perfect.”
“Did you have a good time, Mom?”
“I had a really nice time.”
Uncle Eddie clatters downstairs and sticks his head in the doorway.
“We danced,” he says.
“You did not!”
“Yeah, we did.”
“Where were you?”
“That little roadhouse out by the lake. They’ve got a dance floor the size of a postage stamp.”
“And a piano and this old lady with dyed red frizzy hair who does jazz standards,” Angie says.
“How do you dance to that?” Alice wants to know.
“Your Uncle Eddie’s a good dancer.”
“Sure he is,” Alice teases.
“He taught me everything I know.”
“I thought Dad taught you how to dance.”
“That was more like refining what Eddie had already laid down.”
“Alice, I’ll pick you up tomorrow for your first driving lesson,” Uncle Eddie says.
“What?!” Angie can’t keep the shock out of her voice.
“Really?” Alice asks.
“She’s fifteen! She doesn’t have a permit!”
“Relax, Angie. We’re gonna drive around in circles in an empty parking lot.”
“You’re not going to put that child behind the wheel of that Mercedes.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem for Alice.”
“Eddie!”
“Gotta go, kids.”
Uncle Eddie heads out the door.
“Thanks, Eddie,” her mom shouts, as the door slams. “He’s too much sometimes.”
“He’s great.”
“He put the top down.”
“Cool.”
“We drove out to the park—where the kids go to neck.”
“To what, Mom?”
“Make out?”
“I’ll never understand how you can be so fifties when you grew up in the seventies.”
“He put the top down so we could hear the water and look at the stars.”
“Nice.”
“He had a blanket in the trunk.”
“Pretty smooth.”
“You need to watch out for boys like your Uncle Eddie.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I mean it.”
“Mom—!”
Angie puts her head back against the couch cushions and reaches for Alice’s hand.
“It was so beautiful. We had the radio on . . . And that dumb-ass cigar of his smelled really good outside.”
“I love cigars outside.”
“He’s always surprising me, y’know? Now if he’d just lose twenty-five pounds and find a nice girl—”
“Don’t ruin it, Mom.”
“It would be good for his health. I worry—”
“Don’t you like anybody just the way they already are?”
There’s a long pause while Alice disentangles her hand.
“We didn’t hear from Dad this weekend.”
“He’s probably out on patrol or something.”
“You think he’s okay?”
“I’m sure he’s fine.”
“How can you be sure?”
“You know Dad; he knows how to take care of himself.”
“But what if—”
“Alice, let’s not get into this right before bed, okay?”
“I was just wondering.”
“I know, honey.”
No, you don’t, Alice thinks as she heads up the stairs. You have no idea.
Angie walks through the house turning out the lights before she heads upstairs to her bedroom. She reaches under her pillow and pulls out Matt’s latest letter:
You’ve never seen the moon like it is here. Because the base is blacked out for security reasons and there’s so little electricity anywhere else, it’s truly dark. I don’t know if