“Nope.” Today is Cold Sweat day at Gentle Giant, and I’d rather not think about it. Or about Kurt and Mom. “Are you hungry?”
“I could be.”
I swing my legs off the couch. “Good. Because your bananas are about to go bad.”
Renee’s kitchen is as eclectic as the rest of her apartment—every utensil I could ever need hangs off a pegboard beside thefridge, but none of them match. Enormous industrial tongs—the kind I’d imagine they use at a pig roast—hang beside rubber spatulas in primary colors reminiscent of an Easy-Bake Oven set. When Renee catches me inspecting her duckling-print oven mitts, she shrugs and says, “It’s all from Village Thrift.”
“Ah. Love that place. Really came in handy for my disco-cowgirl getup.”
Renee’s nose twitches. “I wouldn’t have taken you as a secondhand gal,” she admits. I have to bite my cheek to fight off a wicked grin.
“Am I allowed to contain multitudes, Renee?”
The bachelorette playlist makes great cooking music—“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is up first—and when I start to sing along, Renee joins in. Softly at first while she slices bananas no thicker than a page in a book, but by the chorus, our performance has grown loud and impassioned. We sing into rubber spatulas, whipping our hair for an invisible crowd. Around the second chorus, I drop out, and even Renee’s kitchen-karaoke voice blows me away—she has the perfect mix of grit and growl, but the sound is sweet and open, gliding butter smooth over the high notes. When she catches my eyes on her, she stops, and my cheeks sizzle alongside the pancake batter that I dollop onto the griddle.I wish Dad were here, I think. I wish he knew that I still make his pancakes. That sometimes, I’m okay.
Once I’ve flipped the last pancake and switched off the stovetop, Renee and I convene at the breakfast bar with freshly topped-off coffees and golden-brown short stacks.
“Heavenly,” she says, just from the sweet, buttery smell.
“It’s Dad’s recipe.” I slice off a bite with the side of my fork. “Heused to make me banana pancakes every time he came home from a tour.”
Renee gives me a small smile. “Was he gone a lot?”
“Kind of. A little over half of the year. We went along with him on tours when I was really little, but it was harder once I started school. I had orchestra concerts and stuff we had to be around for.”
“I didn’t know you were in the orchestra.”
“As a kid, yeah. I got started on the upright bass, actually.” I lick syrup from my lips. “Anyway. That’s why I loved summers in Galena. Everybody all in one place for three months.”
Renee hums in recognition. “The…what was it called? The Outpost?”
I bite down on a smile. “Yep. The whole band, plus me and Mom, like a big ole band summer camp. Except the one year in middle school when my parents sent me to an actual band camp, which…was awful, so I never went back. The Outpost was way better. The Handful would write and record an album every summer and tour it the following year. So I got a lot of time with Dad then.”And Kurt, I think, then swig my coffee, trying to forget.
Renee swirls her fork through the syrup pooled on her plate, tracing loops and patterns before she asks, “Do you have pictures?”
“Of Dad?”
“Yeah, and the house in Galena.”
A petty, protective part of me kicks in protest deep in my chest.NowRenee wants to see the Outpost? After she shut it down as a bachelorette party destination? I scan her eyes for signs that she’s just being polite or, worse yet, trying to tease me.Instead, a flicker of genuine curiosity catches me off balance. I dig up a few spring break photos on my phone: Chrissy, Gin, and I are skiing in one, slapping bags of wine in the snow in the next.Classic Alice, I think, and my gut twists, but my college memories in Galena are mostly good. Senior year, our spring break overlapped with the tail end of The Handful’s spring tour, and on the band’s way home, worlds collided for one glorious, drunken night. Those photos are by far my favorite.
“Here’s Dad doing shots of tequila with Gin. And here’s Chrissy doing shots of gin with Kurt.”
Renee leans in for a closer inspection. Her chin hovers over my shoulder, casually close in a way that leaves me floaty. “So Chrissy and Gin know Kurt.”
“Yeah.” I swipe the photo away, but Kurt is in the next one, too—I’m real little, sitting on Dad’s shoulders with Kurt juggling guitar pedals to get a smile out of me. I set my phone face down beside my syrupy plate and search for a fresh distraction, something to talk about that doesn’t trigger my Kurt-related acid reflux. I find it, wrapped in gold, in the center of the gallery wall. “I want to ask aboutyourpictures.”
“Oh?” Renee swivels in her seat, tracking me across the room. “Which ones?”
“Well, I know this one.” I brush my fingers over the photo from the Cubs game. “And this one.” The picture on the boat. I’m aiming for casual, like I’m only now noticing the photo in the gold frame when I trace it with my index finger. “What about this one? Who’s the guy?”
Renee breathes a laugh and crosses to join me, looking up at her own smiling face. “That’s my ex, actually.”
My gut reaction is relief, then confusion as to what I’m so relieved about. “Your ex,” I echo.
“Brian,” she says.
“Brian is such a classic ex-boyfriend name.”
