Chapter Nine
Nine
On Sunday morning, Alice takes a deep breath and knocks on Isabella’s front door.
She’s clutching a bag of bagels from the grocery store, sure she should be bringing something better but she doesn’t get paid until next week.
She’d have liked to bring something for the kids, little toys or whatever, but she’s not exactly sure how old they are and she doesn’t know if Isabella is going to be the type of Portland parent who needs everything in their house to be perfectly organic and made out of undyed recycled free-trade rainforest wood.
Alice assumes they don’t sell that hippie shit at the dollar store.
The house is cute, two stories and narrow.
It’s surprisingly close to Van’s duplex, up in North Portland near the St. Johns Bridge.
It had taken two buses and over an hour to get here from home, making Alice more grateful than ever for the way Van has been shuttling her all around the city the last few days.
The front door opens, and there she is. Isabella.
Alice’s only living family member. She doesn’t look a thing like Alice; her dad is Persian, and she has his thick black hair and warm brown skin.
She’s only a few months older than Alice, but she already has some streaks of gray in her hair and a few lines at the corners of her eyes.
Damn, Alice thinks. Having kids really does a number on you.
“Alice!” Isabella pulls Alice into her arms, and Alice is too stunned to do anything but loosely hug her back.
She’s tugged inside the house, and it smells so much like Isabella’s childhood home that Alice is instantly transported back in time as she toes her shoes off in the hallway.
Back when Alice’s mom was alive, both families would gather at Isabella’s at least once a week for a meal, Alice and Bella spending hours lying on the floor of Bella’s bedroom, playing games and watching Disney movies on VHS while Bella’s dad cooked.
Alice would come home with Bella after school whenever her mom had to work late, mainlining snacks and doing homework at the kitchen table under her aunt’s watchful eye.
Then her mom died, and the visits dried up. Right when Alice needed them the most, the invitations stopped coming, and her dad was too sad and sick to notice.
And then Isabella’s family up and moved to fucking Texas, and Alice was alone with a dad who couldn’t breathe.
Alice follows Isabella through the house, barely hearing Isabella’s idle descriptions of the rooms they’re passing through, trying to push down the pain of those first years when she lost not only a mom but an aunt, an uncle, and a cousin so close she might as well have been a sister.
She tries not to let the smells of the kitchen Isabella leads her to—cumin, turmeric, and roasted meat—remind her of her uncle’s cooking, of those long days of childhood innocence.
One of Alice’s therapists—her least favorite one, who smelled like cabbage and had an insulting framed quote on his desk that read Everything Happens for a Reason—had suggested that Isabella’s mom was grieving her sister too much to be able to see Alice, who looked so much like her mom, and that maybe her aunt resented her dad for surviving when her mom didn’t.
Alice suggested that her aunt should have fucking gotten over it and not left an eight-year-old child alone, adrift, without a real mom or a backup mom.
Her therapist suggested some yoga and crystals for her anger.
Alice fired him soon after, and it turned out his quote was right; it was for a reason.
Anyway. She never did quite get the hang of yoga, but she’s pretty good at trying to shove all of her resentment back where it belongs, and she tries to flex that muscle right now. Namaste.
The move to Texas wasn’t Isabella’s fault, Alice silently reminds herself as Bella rambles about the botched installation of her new fridge; it wasn’t her decision to abandon Alice to face middle school and a dying dad by herself.
Isabella was only a kid too. Sure, she didn’t call when she moved back—and sure, there are phones in Texas that she definitely didn’t use for the last twenty years—but she called now.
And she’s always texted on Alice’s birthday, commented on her infrequent posts.
Alice needed her back when everything was falling apart, yes, but she needs her now too. She’s willing to give it a shot.
Two small children come flying into the kitchen, both holding on to the same toy.
“Mommy,” the bigger one screeches, “Hazel took my truck!”
“No!” the little one screams. “Miiiii-iiiii-ine!”
“Okay,” Isabella says, reaching down between them and prying the truck out of their tiny but eerily strong fingers. “Now it’s my truck. Say hi to your Auntie Alice, please.”
Alice blinks. Auntie Alice? Technically she’s their cousin—first cousin once removed, Google told her earlier this morning. She never expected to be anyone’s auntie.
But then again, she never expected to be anyone’s fake-girlfriend either, so this week is full of surprises. “Hi, guys,” she says, looking down at them. “How’s it going?”
They both stare up at her, dark eyes and trembling lips. She can tell they’re each only one small indignity away from throwing a massive fit, so she submissively breaks eye contact, hoping that will feel like a win for them.
“Sebastian,” Isabella says, placing the truck up on the counter where neither can reach it. “Can you tell Auntie Alice how old you are?”
The bigger one seems to really think it through for a while. Alice isn’t sure if he’s running the math on his age or on whether or not she deserves the information. “Sree,” he finally allows, holding up three little fingers.
“Thhhhree,” Isabella says to him. “Try it.”
“Thhhhree,” he repeats, thoroughly dousing his sister in a healthy amount of spit.
“And how old is Hazel?”
“One and a half!” He holds up two fingers, but he’s got the spirit of it for sure.
“Wow,” Alice says. “You’re pretty grown up.”
“Yeah!” He turns around and runs off, shouting, “Legos!” with Hazel toddling behind him. Well, he’s grown up enough to know when he’s done with a conversation, which honestly is a skill Alice admires.
Isabella turns to Alice, a wry look on her face. “So, those are my spawn.” Alice laughs, and Isabella smiles at her. “Henry’s at work, some sort of mycological emergency, I don’t know, but he’ll be back in a bit. He can’t wait to meet you. Come, sit down. Coffee?”
Alice sits on one of the stools tucked under the kitchen island. “My…cological?” she asks, beyond confused. “And yes to coffee, please.”
“Mushrooms,” Isabella says, her back to Alice as she grabs two mugs from a high cabinet. “He’s a scientist. I don’t understand a bit of it, but the man loves a good fungus.”
“Oh,” Alice says faintly. “Sure.” She wishes a mushroom emergency were the weirdest thing to happen to her this week, but it’s barely cracking the top five.
Isabella puts a warm mug of coffee in front of her, and Alice gratefully wraps her fingers around it. It was freezing on the buses, and she’s chilled through. “Thanks. I just moved from the night shift at work to the day shift, so my sleep schedule is super fu—Um, messed up.”
Isabella laughs at her failed attempt to not curse.
She quickly puts together a few plates of bagels and scrambled eggs, pulling bacon out of the oven and strawberries out of the fridge.
She drops two small plates on a low table in the living room, but the kids don’t notice and she doesn’t seem to mind.
“They’ll find it when they’re hungry,” she says, coming to sit up next to Alice at the island. “They’re grazers.”
“Like you,” Alice says, remembering how Isabella’s dad always had food out—yellow rice or kebabs or peanut butter—and how Isabella was sort of constantly eating but never actually ate a full meal at once.
Isabella’s eyes crinkle up as she smiles at Alice.
“I’d forgotten I used to do that,” she muses, almost to herself.
“That’s…” She trails off, looking closely at Alice.
Alice wonders what marks of the years Isabella is seeing on her face, how old and haggard she looks from a lifetime of too much responsibility and not enough money.
“I’m really happy to see you,” is what Isabella finally says, her nervous, rambling energy seeming to ease a bit, and Alice lets herself smile back.
“Me too.”
“So,” Isabella says around her first mouthful of scrambled eggs. “Tell me about this guy! He, like, dropped dead in front of you and you heroically saved his life or some ships?”
Alice wonders if she heard right, or maybe if she, like Nolan, is having some sort of serious brain malfunction. “Some…ships?”
“Oh,” Isabella says with a laugh. “When Sebastian was born, Henry and I decided to pull a Good Place and say words that sound like curses. Ships, muck, hitch, grass. Whatever. Shiitake is his favorite, for obvious reasons, and it—very embarrassingly—became habit.”
Alice laughs. “I love it.”
But Isabella grimaces. “Yeah, I did too, until my boss overheard me last week saying, ‘Ships ships ships I dropped my coffee, oh muck me.’ ”
She drops her head into her hands as Alice positively cackles.
“Pretty mucking humiliating,” Alice manages to say, which makes Isabella snort, and Alice absolutely loses it.
Once they’ve both stopped wheezing, Alice asks, “You’re still in PR?” and Isabella nods.
“Communications, yeah. Same difference. Making sure everyone and their mom who hears about our company thinks about sunshine and rainbows.” Alice thinks that’s kind of like being a receptionist, but probably much better paid.
She and Isabella are both the smiling face at the doorway, the woman pretending she’s not being friendly and enthusiastic for a paycheck but instead because this is truly the best building/company in the universe!
“Okay,” Isabella says, taking a sip of her own coffee. “You and this dude. Spill.”