Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [61]
Air mattress
Sleeping bag
Pillow
Fleece jacket
Milk crate
Bedside lamp
Extension cord
Flashlight
Books
Rocking chair
Maybe she can pop Jiffy Pop on the woodstove. And heat water for instant hot chocolate.
As soon as the rain lets up she will start moving stuff in. She’ll fill the wood box next to the woodstove, and the kindling box, and she’ll ask Uncle Eddie to find her a wooden pallet or two, so she can keep her air mattress off the floor.
She looks around at Matt’s power tools, shrouded in canvas tarps, arranged carefully along the east wall. The way he cleaned up and organized, it’s almost like he knew she was going to want to be out here. There’s all this space in the middle of the workshop that is usually cluttered with lathes and power saws and sawhorses.
There’s something nagging at her, she’s not sure what, until she looks up in the rafters she’s just dusted and sees a shoebox stuck up there. She gets the stepladder out again, climbs up, and pulls out the box. It has her name on it.
She steps off the ladder and sets the box on the workbench in the watery light coming through the rain slick windows.
What has he left for her? Sand dollars? Shells? Seed packets?
She lifts off the top and looks inside:
Dear Alice,
I wrote you a few letters. They’re not really for right now. They’re for just in case I have to miss anything important.
I love you, sweetheart. Never forget it.
Dad
Inside, there’s a stack of envelopes, each with his precise writing, each with a date or an event: Graduation from high school, from college, the first time she falls in love, the first time she gets her heart broken, her wedding day, the birth of her first child, the death of her mother.
There’s a series of letters with the heading “the little moments that make up the big moments, that might get forgotten.” The subheadings in this group are: “the moment you realize you want this boy to kiss you,” “the moment you realize you don’t love this boy anymore,” “the moment you realize you’re going to leave home and never really live there again,” “the moment you realize you’re more like your mother than you want to be.”
Alice puts the lid back on the shoebox and centers the box in her lap and puts her hands on top of it. Then she carefully climbs the ladder again and stows the box in the rafters.
There, on the top rung of the ladder, she hears his voice: Don’t look down. Look up, Alice. Look up. And hope—where does it come from, she wonders, just the sound of his voice?—stirs to life inside of her.
Maybe, she thinks, maybe he’ll be home in time for cucumbers, and if not cucumbers, then for tomatoes, and if not tomatoes, then surely in time for corn. Maybe they could go camping in Maine in August, like they always do; maybe, maybe, maybe . . .
She’ll take care of the workshop; everything will be ready for him when he gets home. And if he needs help, or needs more time to recover, Alice can be his assistant, she can be his right-hand man, she can be his girl Friday; she can be anything he needs her to be.
April 25th
Taking advantage of her suspension, Alice sleeps in, tries to catch up on some homework, and then shows up at Uncle Eddie’s garage for her first lesson in basic car maintenance. Today: the oil change. She has plans to surprise Angie by changing the oil and filters in their Camry.
Uncle Eddie already has somebody else’s Camry up on the hydraulic jack.
“Okay, here’s what you need for this job,” Uncle Eddie says as he gathers the necessary tools. “Socket wrench, oil filter wrench, drain pan, four quarts of oil, car filter, and a drain plug gasket. Your dad will have the wrenches, and I can give you the drain pan, filter, gasket, and oil.”
Just as he starts to walk Alice through the job, Janna’s mom drops Ellie off. Ellie, who has no interest in cars or car maintenance, waves hi and heads straight to what