When her father was still alive, Alice’s memories of her parents were of them dancing in the living room when they thought she was asleep, their bodies nestled together, their faces buried in each other’s hair. Of the look on her father’s face when her mother walked across the stage to accept her diploma and at the dinner table when she would tell them about the children who came into her clinic, the ones she coaxed into shots with lollipops, the ones with bruises she could not ignore, the ones with tonsils that needed to be removed and crooked spines that couldn’t be straightened. His eyes would spark as he said, “We are all so lucky to have you.”
When her father was still alive, these were Alice’s memories of love too, all the ways her parents were lucky to have found each other. All the ways she was lucky to be raised by them. That’s the thing about luck, though. It’s a streak, a roll, a spell destined to be broken.
Alice had always wondered whether her father would have had a heart attack at age forty-seven if they hadn’t been quite so lucky. As the daughter of a physician, Alice understood that the heart, medically speaking, did not run on love, but she could not shake the suspicion that he had loved too much, driving that essential organ into overtime until it could not keep up anymore.
After her father died, her memories of love were her mother in black, handfuls of dirt on an open grave. The weight of her mother’s body as it slipped into bed beside hers each night, the cold indentation it left in the morning when Alice woke and found herself alone. Love and loss became inextricable. She didn’t know how to unweave them. She didn’t know how to want one without courting the other.
A month after Alice turned sixteen and her father had been dead for two years, Bobby met Mark. He was widowed, like Bobby. A doctor too. An anesthesiologist. They had an easy comfort, a gentle admiration that gave Alice hope that love could take different forms, that the end of your great love story didn’t have to mean the end of love itself.
A year later it was over.
“I thought I was ready,” Bobby explained to her daughter. “Mark was ready. It just made us both realize that I wasn’t.”
Alice watched her mother’s eyes well, uncertain if she was crying for Mark and the love that could have been, or for her husband and the love she wasn’t ready to discard.
“I’m sorry,” Alice said.
“I’m not.” Bobby wiped a tear that had escaped. “I had my great love.”
“Don’t you think Dad would want you to—” She almost saidto move on. There was no moving on, not from that kind of love. Still, her father wouldn’t want Bobby to be alone, so Alice searched for the right words. “To be happy?”
“Of course. And he would like Mark. It isn’t that. It’s just, my heart is full. Every time I looked at Mark, every time he laughed or he hugged me, he just wasn’t your father.” Alice must have grimaced because Bobby added, “Please don’t look at me like that. I’ve had all the love I want. Really. My memories are everything I need.”
For Bobby, Paul had been part of the memories before he was there and after he was gone. She didn’t know how to make memories with someone new.
This was what Alice had learned from her parents about love—that it would end. Even great love. Especially great love. Something that perfect couldn’t last forever. It would leave you worse off than you were before. It wasn’t the lesson her mother had intended to instill in her. It wasn’t even, it turned out, what Bobby believed herself.
As a result, she became the eleventh person who hired Alice, the one who, as always, made Alice realize she had a gift.
“What’s this I hear about you writing poetry?” Bobby asked as she and Alice were attempting to cook dinner one Sunday in May. It had been three months since Alice had penned her hummingbird tale, and as far as she knew, all the couples that had met in response to her stories were going strong.
Bobby still lived in the house where Alice had grown up, a four-bedroom Spanish Revival in Carpinteria, down the coast from Santa Barbara. They’d purchased the home when Bobby added MD to her résumé. The house was too big for just Bobby, but Alice had not wanted her mother to put it on the market any more than Bobby herself did. “Renata told me something about a sonnet involving a dove that you wrote for Gabby before she met Oliver. Apparently, he’s very funny.”
In elementary school when Alice and Gabby became inseparable, their mothers had followed them into friendship, a fate both girls quickly learned was less than ideal. It eroded the separation between friends and parents, led to a lifetime of distorted gossip as the mothers swapped half stories they knew of their daughters’ lives. The things Alice learned about herself from Renata Diaz, Gabby’s mother, who always managed to get the details wrong.
“It was a short story, not a sonnet. About a hummingbird,” Alice said as though that explained anything.
Bobby had recently signed up for a mail-order cooking service that delivered everything you needed—and not a pinch of oregano more—to cook a healthy gourmet meal. It was supposed to be easy, paint by numbers cooking that anyone could follow. Bobby’s eyes widened as she surveyed the numerous plastic containers of spices, herbs, bread crumbs, and ground meat she’d laid on the counter.
“This was listed as simple,” she said to her equally overwhelmed daughter.
As Bobby began to read the instructions, separating the basil and parmesan cheese to be added at the end, Alice’s shoulders relaxed, assuming she’d successfully avoided a conversation about her stories.
Bobby dropped a spoonful of meat into Alice’s palm for her to roll into the unnatural shape of a golf ball and casually said, “I didn’t know you were a writer.”
“I’m not.” Alice worked the meat until it was only slightly lopsided and plopped it beside another asymmetrical meatball.
“That’s not what Renata says.” She dropped more cold meat into Alice’s palm.
“Renata says a lot of things.” In high school, Renata had told Bobby that Alice was trying out for cheerleading when the real story was that the head cheerleader had encouraged Alice to try out as a joke, knowing she wouldn’t make the team. In college, Alice had learned from her mother via Renata that she’d gotten a tattoo of an eight ball on her lower back when it had really been Gabby who got the regrettable ink.
“But you wrote Gabby a story.”
“That doesn’t make me a writer.”
“What would make you a writer then, two stories? Three?”
Alice averted her eyes, not wanting to admit that she’d already written six.
