Epilogue #2
Alice has Van, the luminous, solid, shockingly handsome woman next to her, who loves her and takes care of her and falls asleep holding her every night.
Alice has Van, and Frank, and Isabella’s family, and weird experimental theater, and a spot on Van’s couch that is perfectly contoured to Alice’s butt, and her job at the PT clinic.
She’s good. When the rest of the Altmans come around she’ll be even better, but yeah. She’s good.
Seventy minutes and several questionable theatrical decisions later, the play mercifully ends.
They meet up at a restaurant for a very late dinner after Marie has had a chance to shower off her seahorse makeup, Alice and Van arriving a few minutes late due to a poorly timed but essential make-out session in the parking lot.
What can Alice say—high culture turns her on.
Inside the restaurant, the host, who can’t be over twelve years old, with enormous pimples and an adorably cracking voice, leads them to a big table in the back. Marie jumps up, throwing herself into first Van’s and then Alice’s arms. “Hi,” she squeals. “You guys! What did you think?”
She’s bouncing on her toes, looking as young as the barely pubescent host, and Alice grins even as she searches for something to say. “It was…wow!”
“Yeah,” Van echoes quickly, one hand on the small of Alice’s back now. “Seriously. Wow.”
Marie beams, and Alice bites her tongue. Sometimes evading the truth is a real kindness, right?
Alice is glad for her years of perfecting her receptionist fake smile, because the next few minutes require the Fake Smile World Series.
The next person to walk into the restaurant is Nolan, and he has a girl on his arm.
And by girl, Alice means girl. She’s heavily contoured, wearing heels so high Alice wants to refer her to Van to get her ankles checked out, and it looks like her phone has been permanently grafted onto her palm.
She introduces herself as Tansilyn, and giggles with Marie about their old freshman dorm, which Tansilyn lived in only a few years before Marie did.
She’s twenty-four, and Babs looks ready to murder her.
“Do you want to have children, Tansilyn?” Babs asks through gritted teeth, and Alice quickly turns her laugh into a cough, which sets off Marie so loudly that Van has to flag down a waiter and ask for water.
She also asks for a tranquilizer for her mother, which the server seems confused by, but has Aunt Sheila digging in her enormous purse, muttering something about “must have some benzos in here somewhere.”
Alice loves them.
After dinner ends—five inane stories from Tansilyn, eight selfies, both boomer men giving up and starting to do the crossword on their phones—everyone seems like they’re in a great hurry to go their separate ways.
The goodbye hug Babs gives Alice is much tighter this time, and when she pulls away she cups Alice’s face in her hands and looks at her for a long beat. “You’re a good egg,” Babs says, and Alice feels tears welling at the corners of her eyes.
Aunt Sheila breaks the moment, as she so often does, hugging Alice from behind while Babs is still touching her cheeks. “At least one of my nibblets has good taste in women,” Aunt Sheila yells, way too close to Alice’s eardrum. “Have a good night, Rue Rue.”
Alice feels, like she has so often for the past eighteen months, like her heart doesn’t fit in her chest anymore, like she needs to find it a new, bigger enclosure, something expansive enough to fit all of the ways she loves her families.
The boomers trundle off to Babs’s cousin’s house, where they’re spending the night, while Nolan and “follow me on socials, at TansiTot!” get back on the road to Portland.
Van and Alice kidnap Marie and take her to a bar, cosplaying as young, cool people who stay out past ten at night.
Van pointedly ignores Marie’s fake ID, and Marie spends the next two hours gushing to them about all the people she’s dating.
Apparently the polyamory thing isn’t just a political philosophy for her, and while it all sounds profoundly exhausting to Alice, power to her.
Live your dreams, girl. Create a color-coded Google calendar for dating.
As Raisin would say, Fuck the patriarchy by fucking anyone who wants you to!
After drinks, they drop Marie off at the grungy rental house she shares with six other sophomores, Van advising her to get an IUD and make an appointment with her local Planned Parenthood to get screened.
“Okay, Mom,” Marie says, rolling her eyes, and Van mimes being stabbed in the heart.
Fuck, Alice loves them.
They get back in the station wagon, Alice driving this time.
Van puts on a quiet Taylor Swift playlist, and Alice follows her directions to a cute little bed-and-breakfast across town.
The old woman at the counter blinks at their joined hands for only a second before her face breaks into an enormous smile, and she talks a mile a minute about her lesbian niece until they shoo her out of their lovely little room.
“It’s like if Aunt Sheila were an innkeeper,” Alice says dryly, and Van laughs.
Although, instead of continuing to talk about her family—her chaotic aunt, her baby sister’s sex life, or Nolan’s latest child-bride—Van simply collides her body into Alice’s and keeps moving until Alice falls backward onto the bed.
The comforter is a pure, snowy white, fluffier than any Alice has seen outside of a movie or a cartoon.
Alice wants to burrow under it like a hibernating chipmunk, but, before that, she wants Van to do everything to her.
She wraps a hand around the back of Van’s neck, pulling her down, and kissing her until her chest feels like it’s going to explode from a combination of oxygen deprivation and love overload.
“I love you,” Alice mumbles into Van’s lips. Van says it back—strong and solid and true—into the skin of Alice’s chest.
“I love you,” Van says again, even when Alice kicks her in the stomach after Van teases, “Do you need it harder, baby” as Alice is writhing under her.
She says it again after Alice has come for the third time.
And again, much later, when her fingers are tugging Alice’s hair and she’s grinding herself into Alice’s mouth.
When she tucks Alice into bed, the fluffy comforter perfectly wrapped around them, she says it a fifth time, her tone more serious this time. “I really love you, babe,” she says, pulling Alice onto her chest.
Alice nuzzles into her flushed, warm skin, and tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. “Love you too, Minivan.”