Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-six
After a long day of manual labor, there are no words more beautiful to me than homemade chicken biryani.
The Bhats are certainly showing off; the chicken tikka falls right off the skewers, and the saffron rice is fluffy and divine.
We’re ravenous, all of us gathered around the dining room table, shoveling up heaping bites at the speed of a time-lapse video.
“Hershel is the chef between us,” Asha brags on her husband’s behalf, although Mr. Bhat insists the opposite, giving his wife all the credit for the meal. Asha tuts and gives Gin a small, knowing smile. “You know our Bhat men. So humble.”
Maybe it’s the Chrissy-fication of Asha, or else all the time they spent together getting the backyard in wedding shape brought them closer together.
Whatever the explanation, Gin seems fully herself around the Bhats.
She swipes a napkin over her lips and asks, “Have you thought about teaching your son to cook like this?”
Mr. Bhat lifts his brows along with a forkful of biryani. “Perhaps we can arrange cooking lessons after the move.”
It’s a passing comment, one I might’ve missed if not for Mr. Bhat’s reaction—it’s the most expressive I’ve ever seen him, the face of a man who doesn’t often misspeak.
Naturally, Chrissy’s the one to say something. “Did you say…the move?”
The exchange that follows between Gin, Rishi, and Rishi’s parents consists only of blinks and head tilts. Finally, Gin sighs and swipes open her phone.
“We were going to save it till after the wedding,” she says, “but I guess it’s about time we shared the news.”
The move. The news.
My phone rumbles in my pocket, and Chrissy and Renee reach for theirs, too. Gin has texted a link to the group chat. A listing. A house.
My stomach free-falls, but Gin and Rishi are smiling, so I try to stay calm.
“We weren’t really looking for a house,” Gin admits, “but after all the time we spent in the northern suburbs working on the yard for the wedding…it started to make sense.”
I hold my breath and press my thumb to the link.
A redbrick ranch with deep-green shutters and a wraparound porch.
I swipe through the gallery, touring the living room, the kitchen, all three beds, and two baths.
It’s bright and inviting, full of natural light and dark hardwood floors. The listing is marked in red: pending.
“It’ll be closer to family—and to Rishi’s work,” Gin goes on. Rishi’s holding her hand now, their smiles the same amount of proud. “We drove past this for sale sign so many times, so we swung by the open house just for fun. And then…well…but it wasn’t just for fun after all!”
And there’s that old familiar feeling. Joy and grief, all at once.
I’m happy for Gin and Rishi, but I also feel like I’m halfway through a board game, and just when I’m finally starting to understand the rules, someone has flipped the board.
The pieces have gone flying, and I’m frozen in fear at the thought of starting again.
It’s all happening so fast. This is now. This is pending.
After dinner, I slip out to the porch for a breath.
This week has been madness, one curveball after another, and tomorrow will bring a new brand of chaos, a fresh blend of all the best and worst feelings when The Handful takes the stage without Dad.
I watch the sun tuck itself beneath the horizon knowing that, the next time it rises, Dad will have been gone one full year.
Will I make it to midnight? I’m barely awake now.
The slow back and forth of the porch swing rocks me to the verge of sleep; then the chains jangle with the weight of someone sitting down beside me. Gin.
What she says is “Mind if I sit with you for a sec?” But her tone says This is your wellness check. I must not have kept the poker face I thought before slipping away.
“I’m okay. Just a lot happening at once.”
“I know. That’s why I came to check in.”
Gin Bennett, as always, is a better friend than I could dream of being.
I hum a sigh in the back of my throat, and somewhere in the dark, a bullfrog croaks back.
We laugh—a sound that plays on the soundtrack to all my best memories.
So many are set here at this house. My house, although I’m not sure it’ll stay that way.
I could buy a house anyplace if I sold this one. Even…
“So the suburbs, huh?”
“The suburbs,” Gin echoes. “Cue the minivan and the two-point-five kids. Isn’t that crazy?”
“It feels crazy,” I admit, “but I know it’s not. It makes sense.” But it still feels like the end of something I’m not ready to leave behind.
“And we don’t want kids right away,” Gin clarifies. “Rishi’s dad is planning to retire in the next two to three years, so…we’ll probably start trying around then.”
Her words stick like pushpins into the spongy cork of my brain.
Trying. Two or three years. There’s a plan.
It sounds so impossible—hypothetical, at best—but I remember what Gin said at the start of summer, how excited she was to be a Bhat instead of a Bennett, to start a new chapter with a new last name. A new family all her own.
“You’re gonna have…the coolest kids,” I decide, “and I am going to buy them a drum set and ruin your life.”
Gin winces. “All the more reason to wait a few years.”
“And then someday, they’ll come here to ski over spring break, and they’ll be all bummed that their cool lesbian aunt won’t buy them booze.”
At this, she laughs. “Aw, I want to go skiing here again.” She leans back and lifts her feet, gripping her imaginary ski poles as the porch swing transforms into a chairlift.
We’re nineteen years old again, riding to the top of the only ski hill in Galena; then there’s no stopping till we hit the bottom.
One good run of a life blurring by. Even the bumps don’t slow us down much.
Gin breathes out a long, nostalgic sigh. “We’ve had some good times here, huh?”
“Some bad ones, too,” I joke. “Back when I sucked.”
I wait for her laugh, but instead, it’s crickets. Literally. Their scratchy chirping underscores the rattle of the wind in the catalpa trees.
“You didn’t suck,” Gin finally says. “Be nice to my friend Alice.”
“She wasn’t very nice to you.”
“That’s not true.” Her voice is sharp, and I jolt.
It’s as though Gin has smacked my words right out of the air.
“Sometimes you act like our whole relationship was bad. And our friendship before it. I know you don’t remember very much, but…
” Three cricket chirps, then she looks at me sideways. “It wasn’t, you know. Bad.”
I give a weak smile. “I’m not sure I believe that.”
“Well, I know it,” she says. “I loved having you in my life, Alice. It got hard at the end, yeah. You were mean when you were drunk, and you were drunk a lot the last couple of years, but you weren’t a bad person. You were just…young.”
“And an alcoholic.” I don’t use the word often, and even now my throat closes around it, trying to trap the truth. The running joke around Dunlap College was that you weren’t an alcoholic until after you graduated, but it wasn’t so funny once I became the punch line.
“You had some issues to work out,” Gin agrees, “and I didn’t really understand that back then. But you’re not defined by your worst moments, Alice. None of us are. Being drunk and unreliable…I think a lot of people go through that on some level in their twenties.”
“You didn’t.”
Her laugh is one long pfffft. “That is not true. Remember? Chrissy told you in Palm Springs. I had quite the ho phase after we broke up.”
I bite back a smile. “I wasn’t sure how much you remembered from that night.”
“Oh, you mean this night?” Gin tugs her bangs, and I snort a laugh.
“This haircut won’t let me forget.” Carefully, she kicks off from the porch, setting the swing into gentle motion.
When she speaks again, her voice is just as gentle.
“There were bad times, Alice. But there were good times, too.” Then her tone shifts, like the soft protective barrier has been stripped away.
Beneath it, her voice is almost breakable.
“What hurt the most was how you disappeared after we broke up.”
My chest feels tender, like pressing on a bruise. Am I remembering this wrong?
“You threw me out, Gin,” I remind her.
“Of the apartment.” Her tone sharpens—not angry but direct.
“I didn’t throw you out of my life, Alice.
You were my best friend before we started dating, and I needed space when we broke up, but I didn’t want you gone forever.
But you never reached out, and when I tried, you had already blocked me on everything.
Then I heard you quit Cold Sweat, and I kept waiting to hear from you, but it really took your dad dying for you to finally call.
” Her voice fractures, but she threads it back together, not quite finished.
“Then I read that Rolling Stone article and found out he’d been dying for a full two years…
that broke my heart, Alice. I could’ve been there for you.
I felt like such an asshole that this was happening and I didn’t even know. ”
“No one knew,” I choke out. I’m beginning to think that’s the problem, the way I can only exist in extremes.
I’m sober or blacked out. I say everything or nothing at all.
Maybe I should have told someone about Dad’s health instead of gritting my teeth and carrying it alone, but it was so much, and I didn’t think anyone gave a shit.
After the way I’d been, I didn’t see why anyone would.
“You can talk to me about anything, you know,” Gin says. “Anything, anytime.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Her eyes slit, two slivers of mossy tree bark. “I feel like everyone’s been keeping secrets from me this summer.”
“You literally just revealed that you bought a house without telling anyone,” I point out, and Gin’s mouth twists to the side.
“Okay, valid. But still. The memorial concert, Renee’s job…I mean, Kurt and your mom? Why didn’t you tell me about that?”
I swallow a few too-honest versions of the truth before landing on “You’ve been pretty wrapped up in the wedding.”
“Fair.” Gin blows a sigh up into her bangs. “But you’re allowed to make me listen, you know. You’re allowed to tell me you need me. How else am I supposed to know? This is all so…big.”
Bigger than she knows. I need time to sort through the story well enough to tell it—how I tried to surprise Mom and Kurt surprised me instead, how I wound up outside Tweedy’s, where Renee saved me from myself.
“It is big,” I agree. “And…complicated. And with the wedding and everything, I just kind of…I don’t know, set it on the back burner. Like I could ignore it for a while and work through it on my own time without having to talk about it.”
“Has anyone ever worked through something without talking about it?” Gin challenges.
I bite my cheek. She has a point. “Maybe I could’ve been the first?”
“I’m serious, Alice. You can talk about something without having it all figured out. That’s the point of talking it through.”
“I just never want to say too much,” I admit. “Or the wrong thing.”
“But what if there is no wrong thing?” Gin presses.
“There’s never an exact right thing to say or the perfect time to say it.
And don’t get me wrong. It’s impressive, the way you’ve slowed down and…
I don’t know, installed a filter between your brain and your mouth?
But you don’t have to filter everything out.
It’s not all or nothing. You can just be honest and hope for the best.”
Something like a tectonic plate shifts inside me. Maybe I’m reading too much into the glint in Gin’s eyes, but I’m not so sure we’re talking about Mom and Kurt anymore.
“I don’t know. I’m just…bad at this kind of stuff.” I look down at my feet, and Gin nudges my leg.
“You’re not as bad at it as you think you are,” she says. “Give yourself a little grace.”
“I’ve already gotten more grace than I deserve.”
“It wouldn’t be grace if you deserved it.
It’s not something you earn. You just give it out to the people you love and hope you get a little bit back.
” Gin clears her throat, eyes bouncing away into the dark.
“Like…when your in-laws’ backyard floods and your bridesmaids have to rescue your entire wedding in a week? ”
A laugh fires out of me like a shot from a cannon.
It is a little ludicrous—not just the mayhem of this past week but all the wild left turns along the way.
The stain on the engagement-party dress.
The smell of Gin’s hair as it went up in flames.
The slithery wet snake pit of rain-soaked feather boas.
What a gift, to have topped off all our old memories with some fresh new ones—some good, some bad, most a swirling blend of both.
Tomorrow, I think, will be the worst and best of all.
But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, it’s just Gin and me, together on the same porch swing like so many times before.
Chrissy’s not around to capture the moment, so I squeeze my eyes shut, snapping a mental picture I’m sure to revisit again and again, year after year.
No matter where we live or how things change.
Only after the Bhats have gone to bed do we remember that the bedroom situation remains unresolved. There are five of them, and we have four couples, plus me, and of course—
“Renee and Alice, would you mind sharing a room?”
I don’t know who asks, but before I can even catch my breath—
“I’ll take the couch,” Renee says.
Dad,
’Twas the night before Gone Day, and all through the Outpost, not a creature was awake enough to finish this joke.
I’m not going to make it to midnight tonight. I’m fading just writing this while brushing my teeth, but I don’t think I need to stay up. I don’t need to prove to myself that I can face a hard day. I’ve done 364 hard days, and this is just one more.
Anyway. I’m going to bed. I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say I love you, Dad.
Love,
Your Dallas Alice