Chapter Six
Six
Alice’s phone rings during her first lunch break.
She actually gets a lunch break on the day shift, which is wild to her.
She and Delilah each get half an hour to themselves, to go anywhere and do anything.
Delilah, who is tall, Black, young, and infinitely cooler and happier than Alice, says she usually goes to the coffee shop down the street, so Alice does that today too, positively bouncing through the freezing rain to get there.
It’s called Fresh Grounds, and Alice definitely can’t afford anything there except black coffee, but the thrill of being out in the daytime, on a lunch break, means that the six-dollar lattes next to bumper stickers that read Keep Portland Weird don’t even piss her off like they usually would.
Or, well, not as much as they usually would anyway.
She’s sitting in the corner of the shop, eating the sandwich she packed this morning and sipping her fresh black coffee, when her phone rings. She pulls it out of her pocket and frowns at it. The name flashing across the screen is Isabella, and Alice hasn’t actually talked to her in…jeez. Years.
“Hello?”
“Alice! Hi! It’s Isabella.”
Alice blinks. She knew that, but she guesses hello is kind of an impersonal greeting for your one and only cousin, even if the last time you talked on the phone to her was probably right around puberty.
They stay in touch well enough, thanks to social media and the occasional text, but a phone call? It might as well be 1999.
Alice decides to fake it. “Oh my god,” she says, her voice weirdly high. “Wow, Isabella! Hi!”
“Oh my god is right! That’s exactly what I said twenty minutes ago when I saw your face on my flipping TV! On the news for saving some guy’s life?”
“Oh,” Alice says, her face coloring. She’s glad Isabella can’t see her right now.
The interview had been heinously awkward, with Alice trying very hard not to actually say or confirm that Nolan is her boyfriend.
The reporter had clearly thought she was nuts, and just as clearly hadn’t wanted to be there.
The camera guy had been leering at her, and the whole thing had made her skin itchy.
“Yeah,” she mumbles, “it’s been an intense week, I guess. ”
But, wait. Isabella lives in Texas. The bored reporter was from a local Portland news station.
How the hell did Isabella see it? There’s a pause as Alice’s mind whirs, and she takes in the sounds of a cartoon in the background and the high-pitched voices of Isabella’s two little kids squabbling.
She’s never met the kids, but she’s seen approximately a billion pictures of them on social media. They seem cute, or whatever. Normal.
“Listen,” Isabella finally says, and her voice sounds a little different now.
Maybe concerned? “I’m sorry I didn’t reach out before, I’m literally the worst person alive and I freely admit that, but Henry and I moved back to Portland a couple months ago for his work—the mushrooms are better here, I guess—and I want to see you.
I meant to text you before, I swear I did, but seeing you on TV this morning felt like a signal from Portland Jesus that I can’t wait another minute. Can you come over for dinner tonight?”
Alice’s brain short-circuits. Isabella lives here? Has for months? With her husband and her kids? Alice has had family here for months, and they didn’t even bother to reach out, to send a text or DM to say hi?
And what the heck do mushrooms have to do with anything?
Alice squeezes her eyes shut. She will not cry in this fucking overpriced hipster coffee shop that is doing anything but keeping Portland weird.
She will not let this bother her. Isabella never called from Texas, so why should Alice have expected her to do so from a few minutes away?
Isabella has a ton of family on her dad’s side; she never needed Alice like Alice needed her.
“Um, things are pretty up in the air with Nolan and everything,” Alice manages to say into the phone, hoping her voice doesn’t shake. “I think I’m going back to the hospital after work today.”
Isabella says something but her voice is muffled, like she’s holding a hand over the phone. Alice thinks it might be, “Sebastian, stop hitting your sister.”
“What hospital is he at?” Isabella asks, her voice clearer now even as the kids get louder. Alice suspects Sebastian may not, in fact, have stopped hitting his sister.
Alice lets out a puff of air. “Portland Grace.”
“Fu—fudgsicle,” Isabella says, and Alice can’t help but laugh.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Al, how are you doing? Really?”
Alice lets out a long, shuddering breath.
Isabella and her family moved away when Alice was eleven, but when they were little they’d been inseparable.
Isabella is one of the only people in the world who knows what Alice’s life has been like.
Who could make a decent guess of what walking into that hospital is doing to her.
“How about Sunday?” Alice hears herself saying. Today is Friday, she’s pretty sure. “I could come over Sunday.”
“Good,” Isabella says, the sound of a toddler wailing now blaring in Alice’s ear like a siren.
“Sebastian, I said stop hitting—Okay, I gotta go because my child might be a sociopath, but I’ll text you the address, okay?
Come whenever. Prepare yourself for some light chaos.
Sebastian! That’s it, you lost a sticker! ”
“Okay, I’ll—” The wailing cuts abruptly off, and Alice is left holding her phone in her hand, her elitist coffee slowly cooling in front of her.