When I follow the distraught, hunched Alice inside, I see that wallpaper has been torn off the walls, molding has been ripped from its rightful place, and food has been toppled from the cabinets. An entire box of brown rice is spilled everywhere I swept, mopped, and waxed only a few weeks ago.
Even the living room, where we coated the walls in a soothing shade fit for a new buyer, has been desecrated. Alice used the brown touch-up paint from the bathroom to streak wavy lines across the drywall.
This act of rebellion only hurt herself. Can’t she see that?
“Are you ready to tell me what happened?” I ask, leaning in the kitchen doorframe. The excess gravity of it all is pressing down on me, too much so to stand up straight. I keep a watchful eye trained on her as she puts the teakettle on the burner. The last thing I need is her snapping off the knob and starting a gas leak.
She clears her throat for a long time. Ultimately, she says, “The real estate agent said there would be no prospective buyers willing to put in the money to gut the place completely. I told her I didn’t have that kind of cash lying around. She said there was nothing more that she could do.” Alice laughs from a wicked place in her stomach. “That woman drank the last of my decaf before telling me too!” She flings the empty tea canister across the kitchen. It hits the lid of the garbage can with a clang. I swoop in to pick it up, knowing I’m going to be the one to sort through the wreckage she’s made.
“Can’t you get a second opinion? Aren’t there other real estate agencies you can contact?”
“No. I’ve been in contact with them all multiple times. Pamela Marks at Yardling Real Estate was the only one even remotely interested in representing the place a few years back, saying it hadpotential, and now even she’s dismissed it as a rotting monstrosity, a death trap.”
It must be difficult to view your childhood home that way. Young Alice must have bounded through these hallways with her siblings, playing tag and getting ready for school. They must’ve sat around a table in the dining room eating a breakfast feast of eggs from their very own chickens. This is where she cared for her mom when she was sick. Where Annie lived before she passed away.
Alice gives me a haunted look, eyes sunken and hair wild.
Ghosts linger here.
No wonder she stripped the walls of their paintings and photos except the chosen few she’d stuck on the mantel. Even those selections stayed behind her on display. She positioned the craggy chairs to face away, placed the TV on the opposite wall—that way she didn’t have to spend time staring at them. Only when she entered the room, prepared, would she have to face the memories she couldn’t part with.
That must be why she keeps Tammy, Annie, and her old life in a tin box with an air-tight lid. Some pasts are too painful to keep out in the open.
If I were her, I’d want to feel less alone right now. She may seem like she wants me gone, but there’s a need underneath it all. I’m here to look out for her. My tattered world can wait.
“Do you want to go get a drink?” I ask.
The way she looks at me, you’d think horns had sprung out of my head. “I can’t just leave!” It dawns on me that she doesn’t even do basic errands. The only time she goes out is when Candice takes her to doctors’ appointments. Clinically lit waiting rooms and sterile offices don’t necessitate the kind of interaction a bar would. “What if someone breaks in? Who’s going to look after my dogs?”
I don’t mean to give away that I’ve caught on to the lie. It happens naturally. She’s steadfast at first, but then she sighs. “When did you realize?”
“Does it matter?”
She relents, kicking at a nearby box. “I’m allergic to the darned animals anyway.” She sneezes twice, defeated, as if to prove her point.
“Even the imaginary ones, it seems.” My joke makes her facade crack.
She agrees to the drink on one condition: “You’re buying.”
***
It’s pouring when we arrive at our destination. Of course today is the day I would forget an umbrella and a raincoat, two items I always keep in the trunk for occasions like this. I drop Alice off at the door to stand under the awning while I scour for street parking.
The Cat’s Pajamas is open late afternoons for lunchtime drinkers and pricey fried foods. I’ve never been before 11:00 p.m., so the sight that greets me is startling. You don’t notice the peeling paint, the chipped floors, or rickety bar stools when you’re drunk, dancing, and unscrupulous. Now, every wall looks like a Pollock painting of questionable stains.
“Great. Take me out of one dump and bring me to another,” Alice mumbles. I shush her as we approach the bar. There are only a few other patrons seated around. The normal lights, yellow and buzzing, are unflattering at best and headache-inducing at worst.
From the slow-moving overhead fans, the circulating air sends a shiver straight through me. I’m freezing from the cold rain, my hair matted and my shirt soggy.
I help Alice onto her stool. Her short legs don’t even reach the runner.
“What can I get you?” the bartender, a curvaceous, going-bald white man with striking eyes asks. Then: “Ugh, it’s you.”
“Wren, you didn’t tell me you had enemies,” Alice says with far too much merriment in her voice.
I swear I’ve never laid eyes on this person in my life. “I–I don’t? Have we meet?” I know that’s sort of a rude question, but I can’t place him. Maybe we bumped into each other here once before, or maybe he scolded me sophomore year when I tried to buy drinks without having my over-21 token yet.
He glares at me and then motions to the sign on the opposite wall. The faded poster reads:Saturday Night Drag Show:Overboardstarring Goldie Prawn. In the photo, she’s dressed like Goldie Hawn as Joanna Stayton—red, pointy sunglasses and a skimpy zebra-print, French-cut bathing suit—from the 1987 movie of the same name.
