‘Well, it’s got lovely bones,’ she said. It was true, but it was also the most charitable comment she could have made. Lovely bones beget rotten wood.
‘It’s a shithole,’ Briar grumbled. ‘I tried to convince her not to move out here. Almost all of our fights were about the house in some way. But you can imagine how those arguments went.’
‘Like talking to a wall?’ Alice guessed, trying to remember if she’d ever successfully changed Susan’s mind about anything.
‘Yup,’ Briar said, narrowing her eyes critically at a crack in the wall to their left. ‘I need to fix it up before I sell it, but I’m behind on repairs and I thought I could do some catching up today.’
‘You want me to help you?’ It felt like a turning point. ‘What do you need to do?’
‘Clean out the gutters, take down the Christmas lights – I refused to let her go onto the roof and do that herself when she wanted to in January – and fix a leaky faucet. The banister is unstable, so that’s a hazard.’ Briar ticked the items off on her fingers as she went. ‘That’s just off the top of my head, I’m sure there’s more.’
‘Maybe we could write them down?’ Alice suggested, pulling out her phone and taking notes. ‘What about the crack in the wall?’
Briar eyed it with a grim expression. ‘Just another symbol of my fractured world.’
‘Then let’s tackle that one first, shall we?’ Alice said. ‘Where’s the paint?’
Briar led her into the dining room, where she opened the loose door to a closet and gestured inside.
Alice pulled out her phone, adding the door to the list, and then grabbed a can of paint, brushes, spackle, and a scraper.
‘Good thing you know an artist,’ she teased.
‘You still draw?’ Briar asked, taking one of the brushes and heading back into the living room.
‘Never,’ Alice admitted, following her. ‘Sometimes I doodle mushrooms in the margins of my to-do lists, if that counts.’
‘Are they as good as mine?’ Briar asked. Her eyes flitted to the spot behind Alice’s right ear where a tattoo artist had etched in her illustration of aCortinarius violaceus, in honor of Alice’s camp name. Alice felt the skin there tingle.
‘Better,’ she said, wrinkling her nose at Briar. The drawing had come out looking more like an ear than a mushroom – Alice had been asked on more than one occasion if it was meant to be ironic.
‘Snob.’ Briar layered spackle on the wall and practically attacked it with the scraper.
‘When did this crack appear?’ Alice asked, gently prying the scraper from Briar and employing it with a steadier hand.
‘Oh, you know, around the time my mom’s cancer came back and she neglected to tell me anything was wrong.’ Alice turned to look at her, but her eyes were fixed on the wall. ‘She got really frail and she couldn’t keep up with things around the house. I begged her to come back to DC.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said, dropping her hand from the wall for a moment. ‘The cancer came back in February, didn’t it? I heard from her around then, but I didn’t get the impression that anything was wrong. She sounded in good spirits. It wasn’t until her last note that I realized how things had progressed…’
Briar’s lips twitched and Alice realized that her emails with Susan were still a sensitive subject.
‘Yeah, well, I’d already given up everything for her once, and I would’ve done it again. Maybe she finally figured that out. I’ll never be sure.’ She paused, frowning. ‘But then again, she went and foisted the camp on me after all of that, so maybe she didn’t care about derailing my life.’
Alice knew that defending Susan wouldn’t go over well, but it was instinctual for her. She had loved and admired Susan so much, had thought of her as something like a mother. And she also sensed that being angry with Susan, while it might help in the short-term, wasn’t going to help Briar get through this. But she didn’t know how much she could push Briar, with their tentative friendship being what it was.
‘She must have thought that running the camp would be good for you, in some way,’ she tried, finishing with the crack and putting down the scraper.
Briar sighed, and Alice was glad that she at least didn’t look angry.
‘It hasn’t beenallbad,’ she said, glancing in Alice’s direction.
Alice felt a smile grow on her face. The words were simple, but the rush of them made her lightheaded. It was pathetic that none of her recent accomplishments gave her the same floating feeling as one sentence from Briar.
‘But I can’t do it again. I’m not cut out for it. I mean, you’ve seen how it is, the level of organization that’s required to keep things running. I’ve never had that. Always needed you to keep me on track.’
Alice remembered the days after school where she’d go through Briar’s calendar and write in when each of her assignments was due and which ones she would have to work on when. She would text reminders if they weren’t at Briar’s house working on the homework together, which they usually were.
‘I’m not going to tell you what to do when it comes to selling the camp,’ she said carefully. ‘I understand why you’re doing it, I just don’t want to talk about it.’
