Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-seven
One year ago, I got the call.
It was a Wednesday at the end of August, the kind of night for throwing open the windows to let in the last summer breezes of the year.
I was at home, curled up on the couch watching The Princess Diaries.
It was my first time watching it in at least a decade, and I remember thinking that Mia Thermopolis was out of her mind.
Who would ever second-guess inheriting the kingdom of Genovia?
Who wouldn’t want to be a princess, given the chance?
I ignored Mom’s first call, too engrossed in the movie, but then she called again.
A third time, and something hard and terrible settled over me. I knew.
One year ago, Dad was finally gone.
It’s a specific kind of pain to lose someone who is actively opting out of the fight to live. This was the ending we knew to expect, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. You can’t drink poison and be shocked when it poisons you, but that doesn’t dull the pain when it does.
Now, I wake up while the sky is still a black sheet outside my window, but I can’t fall back asleep. I just sit in bed and soak up the quiet, and when the birds sing up the sun, my heart wrings out like a sponge. The sun is up, and Dad is gone. That’s just the way it is.
I try to picture how Dad might commemorate the occasion.
Probably with a beer, or a whiskey, or both, but that’s no different from how he treated every day.
I guess it is just a day, and a year is just a bunch of days, but I have made it through my first one without Dad. There’s only the rest of my life to go.
I get my tears out in the shower, then slip on the outfit I’ve had picked out for weeks: black denim shorts and a vintage heather-gray The Handful T-shirt from the Songs for Alice tour.
I haven’t worn it all year, and when I look in the mirror, there he is—Ricky Pierce, clear as day in my smile, my eyes, the way my eyebrows don’t thin out on the ends.
I’m so proud of the ways I take after him, but I’m even prouder of the ways we’re not the same.
I have his passion. I have his vices. But I can take what he gave me and do better with it than he could.
Downstairs, Mom sits on one of the matching olive couches, bent like a question mark over a book in her lap.
She has every right to be a complete and utter ghost today, but when her attention lifts to me, she looks as good as—or better than—ever.
Her silver hair has been smoothed into submission, and her skin is warm and rosy against a stark white cotton dress.
No black for the mourning widow. Just a clean slate of a look, like a wearable fresh start.
“Morning,” I greet her, intentionally leaving off the good. “Where is everyone?”
“Rishi’s folks left to pick up his brother from the airport.”
“And everyone else?”
“Stepped out.” Mom turns a page in her book—it’s a scrapbook, I realize.
Dangerous territory on a day like this one.
I nestle beside her and rest my head on her shoulder, and she stacks her head on mine, both of us trying on a touchy-feelyness that wouldn’t ordinarily suit us.
So far, it’s the biggest difference between today and every other day of this year.
On the pages of the scrapbook, Mom and Dad are baby-faced and smoking cigarettes outside a neon-lit venue.
They’re asleep in the back of a tour bus or backstage with the band, everyone pointing to Mom’s pregnant belly.
There are dozens of pictures of Dad onstage.
Mom in the crowd. Both of them holding their new baby girl.
“You were so tiny,” Mom whispers, running her finger over baby Alice’s little bald head. “And you looked exactly like your father from the start. Isn’t that unfair? I carried you for nine months, and you came out looking like him.”
“Sorry.” I lift my head to get a better look at Mom in profile: the sharp slope of her nose, the crinkle around her eyes when she smiles. Her hair is silver now, but it doesn’t feel like so long ago we were matching shades of brunette. “I think we look more alike now, though,” I say.
She turns to me with the start of a smile, assessing my features against her memory of her own. “I guess we do,” she admits. “That feels nice.”
Mom turns the page again, taking us through our first few summers at the Outpost, the years too far back for me to remember.
The pictures are all I have, but they’re fantastic.
I’m a chubby-cheeked one-year-old wearing custom merch—a onesie that says Little Handful.
Turn the page and I’m a toddler, tracking mud onto the carpet in my light up tennis shoes.
There are a few photos of Mom deserving of a brow raise, including one where she’s straddling a motorcycle, which makes me do a double take.
Mom laughs and lays a hand over mine, linking our fingers. Filling in the gaps. “God, the stories I could tell.”
“Yeah?” I smile up at her. “We’ve got time.”
In the kitchen, Kurt has put together a very disorienting Gone Day brunch: grapes, tortilla chips, and a tofu scramble with sugar-free pudding for dessert.
A mismatched meal for a mismatched family.
I’m loading up my plate when I hear the front door click open.
Renee stands silhouetted in the doorway holding a full drink carrier from the coffee shop in town.
My heart squeezes. For a moment, she looks at me, eyes soft and hesitant, but there’s something else.
Like I’m the finish line in the distance, but she still has miles left to run.
She distributes coffees to Kurt and my mother, then to me.
Just the brush of her fingertips against mine has me reeling, but one sip and I’m flooded with warmth.
It’s not the temperature of the coffee; it’s that Renee got it exactly right.
A splash of oat milk, two packets of sweetener.
“Just like your dad, minus the bourbon,” she whispers, and this feeling—I can’t name it, but I can track it through my memory.
My first session at Gentle Giant. The first time I held a bass guitar.
I’m not even sure where in my body it sits.
Everywhere? I’m coated in the feeling, dipped like an ice cream cone into chocolate.
I don’t know what it’s called, but I know what it sounds like. It sounds like I know.
“Thank you,” I whisper, and Renee’s lips part with a breath. There’s some urgency to it, like she’s on the verge of saying something I need to hear, but it’s buried beneath the trumpet of Chrissy’s voice yelling, “Where’s our girl!?”
Our girl, it turns out, is me, and the remaining members of the I Do Crew strut in with their plus-ones.
My jaw hangs open. They’re wearing matching black shirts decorated with puffy paint, like high schoolers on their way to a homecoming game.
My eyes bounce from one shirt to the next—Rishi’s says I HEART THE HANDFUL.
Gin’s says I AM THE HANDFUL. Chrissy’s shirt says I’LL GIVE YOU A HANDFUL.
And Chris—yes, even Chris—is wearing a shirt that reads RIP ALICE’S DAD.
I laugh like I just learned how. Relentlessly.
With my entire body. I pitch over with it, slapping the table like I missed the memo that today isn’t supposed to be funny.
Maybe that isn’t true. Maybe today is supposed to be whatever we need.
Tears spring to my eyes as I go down the line hugging each of my friends, plus this one waiter I kind of know.
I can hardly believe this is my same life from a year ago, when Dad died and I had no one to call but my ex-girlfriend.
I have friends. I don’t know what will happen after the wedding, if a moment like this will ever happen again.
Right now, it doesn’t matter. Today, Dad is gone, and I am not alone.
“The shirts were Rishi’s idea.” Gin is googly eyed, both hands hanging tight to the arm of her soon-to-be husband. “Isn’t he the best?”
“Better than the best,” I say, and Rishi and I trade smiles.
“And Renee has one, too,” Gin says, “but it’s still drying, ’cause she insisted on doing the front and the back.”
Renee swigs her coffee, brows bouncing once behind her cup, and my first thought is Always doing the most. My second is that I wouldn’t want her any other way.
We spend the bulk of the day reminiscing, passing scrapbooks back and forth between the couches that just barely fit all of us, thigh to thigh.
Maybe it’s intentional that Renee sits beside me, or maybe it’s just the luck of the draw.
Either way, my concentration splits between the pictures and the few smooth inches of Renee’s thigh touching mine.
I’m certain my leg has a heart of its own, the way all the blood rushes there, spilling heat throughout my body on its way.
Gin’s voice rings clear in my memory. You can just be honest and hope for the best.
Every photo tweezes out a long-buried memory.
The summer of the notorious prank war, then the following summer of peace as a result of the prank war that we swore never to speak of again.
In fifth grade, when I insisted upon a talent show and the band made up a dance to ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” I still don’t have a clue where four grown men found tutus on such short notice.
Growing up at the Outpost was like being raised at the kids’ table, but all the kids were adults, making records and memories, and Mom carefully scrapbooked every summer but one.
The summer I spent at band camp. There’s no evidence on the page of the failed intervention.
Mom only documented the good times, but we can’t erase the rest, so she still tells the story, even though her voice shakes.
The mistakes and the missteps, the trying and failing, are all a part of what got us here.