Alice laughed, and I joined in, and my heart journeyed down to my stomach and back again.
My grandmother did have grilled cheese sandwiches waiting for me, and when she saw Alice, she acted surprised for a moment and then became the hostess she prides herself on being.
“Would you like some milk? Some juice?” she asked, poking around the refrigerator.
“Water’s fine, thank you,” Alice answered, and after my grandmother got her a glass of ice water she disappeared, leaving Alice and me sitting in what grandmother calls the breakfast nook.
“This is good,” Alice said, taking a bite.
“Yeah, it is,” I said. “My grandmother’s a really good cook.”
“You’ve lived with her almost all your life?” Alice asked. “Ever since your parents died?”
“Yes,” I answered, and I admired the way she just asked me directly about my mother and father. Not like grandmother’s church friends who refer to my parents’ “passing on” in some vague, strange way as if they just disappeared one day while out and about.
“Why were you guys living in Chicago, anyway?”
“My mother was a professor of history at Northwestern. My father worked in the education department at the Art Institute.”
“Wow,” Alice said. “Smart. But that makes sense, I guess. Where’d they meet?”
“In college. At Rice. Did you know my father was the first and only student from Healy High ever to go there?” I said it not to brag, but just because it’s always amazed me that one of the best schools in the country is a little over an hour away and not more students from Healy attend or even apply.
“Maybe you’ll go,” Alice told me. “I’m sure someone as smart as you could get in, too.”
I shrugged. I haven’t thought much about where I’ll go to school after my senior year. I’m sure my grandmother would love it if I went to Rice and stayed close by. Still, there’s a part of me that would love to go to school in Chicago. When I told this to Alice, she asked if it was because I miss it.
“I don’t remember it well enough to miss it,” I said. “But I guess I feel on some level like I should go back there. Like it was my destiny to live there, and I need to let my destiny play out.” I cringed inside for using the word destiny. I was afraid it made me look strange or like I was the type of nerd who plays Dungeons and Dragons.
But Alice just nodded like she understood. “You would have had such a different life if you’d stayed there, wouldn’t you? I mean, you know. Educated parents. A big city. Lots of opportunities.”
“That’s true,” I said. I’d only considered how different things would have been for me millions of times, even as I tried to make peace with my existence in Healy and the circumstances that brought me here. “Then again, I’m sure there would have been aspects of living in Chicago that I wouldn’t have enjoyed. And I would have missed out on certain aspects of living here.”
Alice snorted. “Like what?”
Like you. Of course I didn’t dare say it.
“The way it’s quiet in the evenings,” I told her. “The way you can buy something at Seller Brothers and if you’ve forgotten your wallet they let you take what you need because they know you’ll return and pay later. I don’t know.”
“You mean the way everyone knows your business,” Alice said, and I realized this was the closest we’d ever come to really talking about what happened to her.
“Well, there’s that. That’s not pleasant. I know you know.”
“No,” Alice answered, her eyes not looking at me, her fingers carefully ripping the leftover crust of her sandwich into a small pile of crumbs. “It’s not pleasant at all.” Alice was quiet for a moment and then continued. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if my dad hadn’t left. I mean, the way you must try and picture your life if your parents hadn’t died.”
“When did your father leave?” I asked. I didn’t know anything about Alice’s father.
“I guess he didn’t really leave if he was never really here, right?” she said, shrugging her shoulders like that was meant as a familiar, funny punch line. “He was this guy my mom was dating over in Dove Lake. He worked as an auto mechanic. It was after she graduated from high school and she was working at become a dental hygienist. He was a friend of a friend or something from what my mom says. After she got pregnant, they moved in together and tried to make it work. But my mom says I cried so much as a baby. I had colic like crazy bad or something, and I would just scream and scream for hours. And I guess my father, his name was Hank, he couldn’t take it anymore and told my mom he was sorry, but he wasn’t ready to be a father.”
“He sounds like a jerk,” I said.
“I guess,” Alice answered. The plate in front of her was nothing but crumbs, and I watched as she carefully flattened them with her right index finger. “But I still always wonder what life would have been like if things had gone differently. Like, what if I hadn’t had colic? What if I had been the easiest baby in the world? I think my mom must think that sometimes.”
“If he couldn’t have handled colic, he couldn’t have handled other things that would have come up,” I told her, but I stopped because I could see in her expression that Alice didn’t like to hear me criticize her father. She liked to imagine that things might have been better had he stayed. That her life would have been happier somehow.
“I’m such a cliché, aren’t I?” Alice said, and she gave me a wry smirk. “Single mother. Absent father. Too many boyfriends, searching for love in all the wrong places and blah blah blah.”
Sitting there with Alice and talking with her made me so content. So satisfied. So I gathered the guts and said, “Alice, you could never be a cliché. Not in a trillion years.”
Alice looked at me with her gorgeous brown eyes and smiled. “A trillion years? Is that a scientifically proven number?”
I shrugged and smiled.
“Yes,” I said. “And I’m serious.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But I have my doubts.”
I wondered if this lunch, this conversation, would be the right time to bring up what Brandon had told me, but just as I was trying to figure out how to begin my story, she stretched her arms above her head and said, “Okay, this is getting too heavy duty for me. I should probably go.”