Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [71]
I miss fresh milk. The stuff here is in little squeezable plastic containers and it always tastes sour to me.
Gram’s coffee.
A movie. In a theater. With popcorn!
Libraries. Book stores.
Your laugh.
Walking down a quiet street at dusk with the lights on in the houses and kids doing homework or playing on the lawns. That happy noise. Spring nights when nobody wants to come inside.
Baseball. Playing with my team, playing catch with Alice and Henry, pitching for Henry, trying to get you to play with us.
Trees. Grass. I miss green. I miss mountains and birch trees and evergreens. Let’s go for a hike in the Adirondacks when I get home.
My truck. To get in, turn the key, turn on the radio, find some tunes, roll down the windows and just drive. No more body armor. No more Kevlar helmet!
Home cooked food. Hamburgers on the grill. Making sundaes with you and Alice.
A real bathroom. A bathtub. Lots of hot water. A “combat shower” is so fast you blink and you could miss it.
Breakfast at The Bird Sisters, lunch on a roofing job, dinner at home with my three girls.
You. I’ll begin and end with you. I miss you, Ellie.
Love,
Daddy
Ellie, of course, begins to cry as she reads the letter, and when she finishes, she curls into Angie’s arms, as though she could burrow inside of her mother, and sobs. Alice can see Angie start to lose it and then pull herself back from the edge so she can take care of Ellie.
“Ellie,” Angie says, “Daddy’s gonna be okay. He’s missing you and loving you—and all of us—right now.”
“You promise?” Ellie asks.
Angie meets Alice’s glance over Ellie’s head.
“I promise.”
April 28th
After practice, a long run at Mendon Pond Park, where Alice actually kept up with Ginger for the 3.5 mile course and almost caught her as she made her move up the last hill, Alice helps Uncle Eddie unload the rototiller from the really cool old Ford truck he’s driving with wooden running boards and side panels. Red, of course. Eddie muscles the rototiller through the yard, out past her dad’s workshop and up the small rise to the garden.
“You sure you want to do all of it?”
“Yup.”
“It’s pretty big, Alice.”
“That’s okay. We do corn, remember?”
“What’s that smell?”
“Bailey’s delivered a load of horse manure.”
“Glad I wore my boots.”
Uncle Eddie fires up the rototiller and takes off along the outer perimeter of the garden, chewing up and turning the soil. Alice walks behind him picking up and tossing aside any stones that get uncovered. The soil is still pretty heavy and wet, but Eddie and his machine are slicing through it like butter. Every now and then Alice misreads the angle or direction of the rototiller and bends down to grab a stone and gets a faceful or shirtful of dirt for her trouble. Even wearing boots she and Eddie are both getting soaked with water and caked with mud. Halfway through the job Alice is dirtier than she’s ever been in her life.
Uncle Eddie’s approach is a lot faster and definitely more slapdash than her dad’s. He’s driving the rototiller, rather than carefully guiding it. He’s finding out just what this machine can do, how fast it can turn, what happens when you give it maximum gas. These experiments keep plastering both of them with dirt. Alice has to jog sometimes to keep up. Uncle Eddie’s got this thing going top speed and he’s whooping and hollering as he slides through the corners, using all his body weight to turn the rototiller, skidding on his heels, and laughing.
This job, which Alice usually hates for its careful, dull, noisy slowness has been transformed into a road race and a mud-pie session all rolled into one. She had dreaded every plodding step as some sort of penitential slog through missing her dad. Instead, Uncle Eddie has turned this task into a game and released her by changing the unwritten rules.
He stops before their last pass around the perimeter and hollers at her over the engine noise:
“You want to drive it?”
“No.”
“You scared?”
“No!”
“Yes, you are!”
“I am not!”
“Then come on up here. We’ll do it together.