Alice Bliss (20 page)

“You walked out?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Go, Alice!”

“Probably not an appropriate response for a grown-up, Uncle Eddie.”

“Who cares? That takes guts.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Besides, who says I’m a grown-up?”

Alice looks away.

“It’s just . . .” She can’t continue.

Eddie waits. He’s thinking that ice cream was probably a dumb idea, but what else can you do for a kid?

“The odds aren’t good, are they?” she asks.

He looks out at the lake, considers.

“Probably not for most people. But for your dad . . .”

She tries to hold her voice steady.

“Thanks for not lying to me.”

Alice shivers as a bank of clouds obscures the sun. Uncle Eddie reaches out and puts his hand on the back of her head. Leaves it there for a moment. And finds himself thinking about his father, so much like Matt in so many ways. The way he could be quiet with you, the way it seemed like nothing frightened him, that he knew his measure as a man, as a husband, as a father, the way some men are just solid, without making a big show of it. All the things I’ve been running from, Eddie thinks, like it’s possible to take a pass on facing up to who or what you want to be, or who you are.

“What do you say we take Lakeshore Boulevard all the way to Sodus Point and then head home? You find some mellow tunes. We’ll cruise.”

She turns the radio on; there’s Van Morrison again: “Brown Eyed Girl.”

“Some smart boy is gonna woo you with that song.”

“I doubt it, Uncle Eddie.”

“You wait and see, girl. It’s
classic
.”

“The song or the tactic?” She wants to know.

“Both.”

 

Alice pushes open the door of her dad’s workshop. It used to be the garage until Matt went into business for himself. Back then the plan had been to put an addition onto the garage for Matt’s workshop, but he was always too busy to work on his own house. So her mom’s car sits outside in the driveway. A bone of contention with Angie all winter long; but it’s an old bone now so mostly nobody notices it anymore. Except Angie when she’s scraping ice off her windshield.

The garage sits directly behind the house on the skinny part of their oddly shaped lot. Beyond the garage the lot opens up to the garden, the three apple trees, two cherry trees, and Matt’s grape arbor. Matt installed windows along the back and side walls that look out on the garden. He had plans to put in more windows, too. Capture the view! The second-hand woodstove went in his first winter. A necessity. Can’t do much with mittens on, he’d say.

It’s four o’clock. Mom’s still at work. Ellie’s on a play date at Janna’s house. It took Alice an hour to decide to come out here, after Uncle Eddie dropped her off, and another ten minutes outside the door gathering the courage to open it. Now she has to walk in.

The late afternoon sun breaks through the thickening clouds to shine through the back windows; dust motes dance in the weak shafts of light. She breathes in. It smells like wood and turpentine and linseed oil. The workshop is cool and a bit damp; it feels as though the room exhales when she opens the door. She closes her eyes; she can almost picture her dad standing at his workbench, sanding the curve on a new piece of wood to make it look old; she can almost hear the rasp of the sandpaper.

She stands in the middle of the space. Her eyes adjust to the dim light. Aside from the dust, the place is as neat as a pin. Every tool has its place to hang, every kind of nail and screw and fastener has its own jar. She crosses to his big wooden tool chest and opens it. This is the chest he built for the tools that never leave the workshop. His father’s hammer, his grandfather’s awl and plane and C-clamps. The chest is full of ingenious cubbies and sliding doors and drawers opening beneath other drawers. On the inside of the lid there are five photos. Front and center is the four of them the day they brought Ellie home from the hospital. Matt is holding the baby and Mom and Alice are holding on to Matt. The grin on his face is so big it looks like it could lift him off his feet. Then there’s Ellie on her trike, Alice on horseback, a romantic picture from their wedding where Matt has lifted Angie off the ground and you can tell he is kissing her like crazy, and an old photograph of Matt’s parents.

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 of what she needs to get from the house. Of course there are sharpened pencils in an old peanut butter jar and pads of paper right on the workbench. She uses block printing just the way her dad does:

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:

 

 

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.

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 passes for a waiting area: one bench seat from some old car, a derelict coffee pot, and a mini fridge.

Alice is struggling with the socket wrench and the drain plug and hoping she’s not going to have oil pouring down on her head. But Uncle Eddie is right there with a bucket to catch the oil. She pulls out the old gasket with her fingers and watches as Uncle Eddie removes the old filter with the oil filter wrench. Alice installs a new oil filter under Eddie’s watchful eye, and replaces the drain plug gasket. All of this is so messy and absorbing that neither of them notice when Ellie leaves the garage.

“Tighten the new filter hand tight. Just use your fingers. That’s it. You don’t want to overtighten it.”

He hands her a rag to wipe up any spilled oil, she puts their tools away, and he returns the car to earth so she can pour in four fresh quarts of oil.

“That was easy.” Alice is grinning from ear to ear.

“It’s not rocket science.”

“Thanks, Uncle Eddie.”

“You feel okay doing this on your own at home?”

“Sure.”

“Jacking the car up? Sliding under there?”

“Piece of cake.”

“Be careful with the jacks. You ever done that before?”

“Dad taught me how to change a tire when I was twelve.”

“Figures. I could come by on Saturday if you want. Just to make sure the jacks are safe and everything.”

“Sounds good.”

“Next time I’ll show you how to rotate your tires and check the brake systems.”