Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [60]
It starts to rain and the wind kicks up, blowing rain through the open door. She grabs her dad’s work jacket, which hangs on a peg behind the door, along with a few baseball caps, overalls, and work boots. Shrugging into his jacket she almost loses it. Listening to the rain tapping out some sort of code on the roof, she closes her eyes and tries to see him. But what she sees is either the family photo in his tool chest or an image of a soldier lying face down in blood-spattered dust. The two impossibilities flash one after the other across her inner eye.
She opens her eyes as the storm begins its crescendo. The rain on the roof has grown loud and the wind is thrashing the lilac bushes outside the south window. She shoves her hands into the pockets of the jacket and finds a stub of pencil and a folded square of paper in the right-hand pocket, a level, a receipt from the paint store, and a pair of keys in the left-hand pocket. She lays them all out on the workbench.
She unfolds the square of paper. It’s a note and a drawing from Ellie, maybe from kindergarten when she was first learning to make her letters. It’s a series of colorful squiggles. And on the bottom in block letters, some of them backward:
“ELLIE LOVES DADDY”
She smoothes out the creases with her palm and props the note up on the windowsill where he’ll be able to see it when he gets home.
Even with the jacket on she’s shivering, and she’s not really sure if it’s shivering or shaking or all the tears she’s trying not to cry; so she gets up, grabs a broom, and begins sweeping. The sweeping and the rain and the distant rumble of thunder and the wind sending sheets of rain through the door all feel like they are happening inside of her. Ellie loves Daddy, she thinks. Ellie loves Daddy. And wonders if that will make a difference. If love and caring and needing enter into the equation of what will happen to her father and her family at all.
As she sweeps, she hatches a plan. She’ll get one of the air mattresses from the basement and the old Coleman lantern. And she’ll bring out her books and her sleeping bag and some old pillows and she’ll do her homework out here. Maybe a candle and some CDs, and the rocking chair from her room, and before you know it, Alice is imagining living in the garage and getting some books out of the library so she can learn how to put the windows in that Matt always wanted. She’s pretty sure Uncle Eddie would help her. Matt already has the windows, stacked neatly against the far wall. All the windows for the workshop are castoffs he finds in the street. Old windows with lots of panes. The windows for the west wall are long and thin. There is a pair of them, and Matt wanted to install them horizontally. He just thought it would be cool. Alice wonders if there will be instructions for that in a library book; she hopes so.
She knows this is a good plan. She knows her dad would like it. She also knows that her mom won’t like it. Especially when Alice starts sleeping out here. Or maybe she’ll keep being so busy she won’t even notice.
Inside the house she grabs dust cloths, the bucket, the mop, and Mr. Clean. Half an hour later, Alice finishes mopping the workshop floor. She’s not sure this floor has ever been mopped before. She had to change the water in the bucket three times, and it was obvious the rafters had never been dusted. She tackles the windows next. Inside first. The outside will have to wait until it stops raining. The stepladder is just tall enough. She starts to imagine what it’s going to look like when they install those two long, skinny windows.
It’s growing dark by the time she finishes. She knows she should just head indoors and start dinner like her mother asked, but there’s something about the busy-ness of working out here that is keeping her going, in spite of both shirtsleeves being soaked, in spite of feeling really cold.
She sits in the lawn chair and makes a list