She doesn’t say a thing.
Van doesn’t take her home right away. She crosses the Ross Island Bridge and then turns south, pulling up at a little house in a cute middle-class neighborhood near the river that Alice has never been to, and tells Alice to wait in the car. She disappears inside for a minute before emerging with an enormous skinny white dog on a leash. The dog is positively prancing, his narrow butt dancing around with joy at seeing Van, and he’s wriggling like a puppy. But he’s clearly not a puppy, because he’s tall as fuck. He would easily come up to Alice’s hip, and he’s all legs and elbows, with floppy ears, light brown speckles, and an enormous grin. His tongue is lolling out of his mouth as he shamelessly rubs his side against Van, and Alice is climbing out of the car before she can decide if it’s a good idea or not.
“Thanks, Sarah,” Van is saying to the woman standing in the doorway, who Alice was too distracted to notice. She’s short and pretty, with long blond hair and a thick white sweater dress. “I appreciate it.”
Alice is an expert at people watching—there’s not a lot to do, otherwise, when you’re a receptionist with no friends and no one to actually talk to. She prides herself on her ability to read people and relationships at a glance, and she wouldn’t have needed theughtip-off from Marie to clock them as exes.From the way they’re standing weirdly far apart, Sarah with her arms crossed over her chest like a shield, the tension thick in the air between them, they might as well be shouting that they used to see each other naked, but they haven’t done so recently enough to make dogsitting normal. Alice wants to ask, but it’s none of her business. Although if she’s pretending to be, like, Van’s future sister-in-law, maybe it’s exactly her business? Fuck, but this is the kind of messy confusion that makes her need to confess everything immediately.
As soon as Sarah closes the front door, Van turns and leads the prancing dog/pony toward Alice. “Alice, allow me to introduce you to Frank,” Van says, and Alice can’t help but grin at the formal introduction. She decides the name is charming.
“Hello, Frank,” she says. “Nice to meet you.” She holds out a hand and Frank wiggles himself into a sit and then offers her a paw. Alice’s heart explodes as she bends down to shake it. “Oh mygod.”
“Good boy, Franko,” Van says with a grin, patting his head. “Very nice manners.”
“Quite a gentleman,” Alice agrees, and Van laughs.
“We’ll see if you say that the next time you’re over at Mom’s and he tries to sit on your lap. He thinks he’s a lapdog but he has the boniest ass on earth.”
Alice laughs, trying to ignore the part about being over at Babs’s house. She’s really not ready for that.
Van gets Frank into the car, letting his muddy feet stomp all over the towel draped across the backseat, while Alice returns to her spot up front. Van hands over her phone, Alice types her address into the map, and Van wordlessly drives her a little north and a lot east. They pass by Alice’s favorite food truck after a few minutes, and Alice points it out to have something to say in the slightly awkward silence, even though it’snot open yet. “That truck has the best bao.” She gestures at it, and Van dutifully slows down to look.
“I’ve never been to it.”
“Oh,” Alice says, not quite sure how to keep this conversation going. “Well, add it to your list.”
“Noted,” Van says, and Alice lets it go. She tries not to think about bao. She should probably be hungry, but she’s too tired for that.
Alice sinks deeper into herself as they turn in to her neighborhood. It’s not a bad place to live—there’s nothing particularly wrong with it—but it’s certainly nothing like Sarah’s neighborhood of cute little traditional Portland Craftsman houses. It’s nothing like where Nolan must live.
“I know it’s probably not what you were expecting,” she starts as they pull up in front of Alice’s apartment building, one of many out here on Division between Eightieth and Ninetieth, but then she trails off. Her eyes skate over the peeling paint on the side of the building and the overflowing dumpsters in the wet parking lot before dropping down to her hands, clenched hard in her lap. “It’s nicer than it looks,” she says to her hands.
It’s not, really.
It’s quiet, and Alice looks over to see Van staring at her like she’s trying to see through her. Alice shrinks a little, trying not to get consumed by her dark eyes. There’s a long quiet beat, and then Van runs a hand through her hair. It looks thick and straight, and Alice wonders how much heavier it must be than her own thin frizz.
“I don’t know what Nolan told you about the family,” Van finally says, her voice so soft Alice can barely hear it. “But he’s the only one…we’re not all rich. Just…just him.”
“Oh.” Alice hadn’t considered that. There hadn’t been timeto consider anything, of course, but no, she’d definitely assumed that his whole family was top-floor-financial-firm people. Though this nineties-style station wagon certainly isn’t giving off custom-tailored-suit vibes.
“I mean, we’re all fine, but Nolan is, uh…I don’t know. Dad calls him the retirement fund.”
Alice wonders just how rich Nolan is, how recently he got that way. She wonders where he lives, what his lifestyle is like. What car he drives. If he helps his parents out with their mortgage or rent or whatever. She’s guessing, from the twist of Van’s mouth, that she might not like the answers to those questions. She wonders, for what is definitely the first time since he dropped onto the pristine floor of her lobby, and quite possibly the first time since she saw him 751 days ago and fell in love, if he’s a nice person. If she would have liked him, if they’d ever had the chance to talk to each other. If he’d like her.
He saidhow’s it goingto her twice but he never waited for her to answer.
“I think I might know less about you all than you think I do,” Alice says carefully. She’s trying really hard not to lie, even though she knows it won’t matter. Betrayal is betrayal is betrayal, and none of them are going to remember her exact words when the truth smacks them in the face, but something about knowing she hasn’t said the lie outright makes deceiving them five percent easier for Alice to live with. At this point, she’ll take what she can get.
“Okay,” Van says, her face easing again. She smiles, and Alice tries not to be captivated. “We can work on that.”
Alice gets out of the car, planning to lean down and wave goodbye, but Van is getting out too. “We’ll walk you up,” she says, opening Frank’s door.
“Oh, you don’t have to—” Alice starts, but Van is already striding toward the front door of the building.
What is it with these Altman women and walking so damned quickly? Alice has to nearly jog to keep up. “You and Frank seem well suited,” she says as she fumbles for her keys. “Long-ass legs.”
Van makes a quiet sound in her chest that Alice can’t quite parse, and then Alice is pushing the door open. She feels incredibly awkward as Van and Frank follow her up the two flights of stairs to her third-floor apartment. What exactly is the protocol for when your fake-boyfriend’s hot sister and her dog walk you to your door after you leave his hospital room? Alice obsessively reads advice columns but somehow this particular scenario has never come up.
“Um, this is me,” she says when they finally reach her door. She’s not sure what to do with her hands so she ends up weirdly tapping her knuckles against the doorframe.
