“I got stuck with mine,” Leah replies. “Horrible. I burn to a crisp if I’m in the sun for five minutes.”
“Guys like freckles,” he says. “True story.”
A slow smile crosses Leah’s face. “I know.” Soon she’s laughing, in pleasant conversation with a tattooed Electric Boy. Enola chimes in now and again. Alice stays quiet but keeps brushing my hand. She hasn’t brought us up. That should feel good; it doesn’t.
“Did Pelewski come by?” Frank asks around a forkful of pot roast. “He said he would.”
Enola’s eyes flick in my direction. I set my silverware down. “Yes. He gave things a good once-over.”
Alice looks at me.
“Contractor friend of mine,” Frank says to Alice. To me, “He’s a good guy. Did the roof last year. What did he tell you?”
There is no easy way to say it. Pulling the Band-Aid slowly is just as bad as tearing it off. “A hundred and fifty thousand. To start. Probably closer to two hundred fifty for everything.”
Alice stiffens. There’s a blue flower on the wallpaper just to the left of Frank’s ear. I look at its petals. Talk to them.
“What?”
I repeat the figure. Leah and Doyle’s conversation stops.
“That’s not a repair; that’s a goddamned mortgage,” he says.
“I know.”
“You don’t have it.”
“I called the historical society.” Now is where I’m supposed to ask, but I can’t. Not with Alice next to me. Her hand pulls away.
Frank drinks some water, chews a few more bites, and looks down at his plate. “Well, we can’t just let it fall in.” He puts his palms flat on the table, as if the decision is made. “I’ll float you some money, enough to get started. Give me a day or two to get things in order.”
From Leah comes a quiet, “Frank.”
“Dad.” I’ve never heard Alice hiss before.
“It’s not right to just let it go. Paulina and Dan loved that house.”
He wants to save the house for my parents, dead people. I should refuse, but I’m in no position. “I’ll pay you back.”
Alice pushes her chair out, smashing the leg into my foot. My knee hits the table and the gravy boat spills.
“I’ll go make the coffee,” she says, and disappears into the kitchen. Enola and Leah look at their napkins.
“I’ll see if she needs help,” I say.
I walk to the kitchen as Doyle tells Frank, “That’s a huge thing, man. Huge. You’re a real good guy.”
Alice grinds coffee by the sink with a large hand grinder, a relic of a machine. Her fist moves in hard circles. The counter light flickers over the gentle curve of her arm as she cranks the handle. If it’s possible to grind coffee sadly, this is what she’s doing. Her shoulders slope and her movements have a weight that makes everything deliberate and painful. Her yellow blouse is stained with dampness under her arms and the hair at her nape curls with sweat. I know she tastes like sweet salt. I have an old memory of her in her green field hockey skirt, freckles peeking over shin guards and knee socks. I have a fresh memory of her in her bed, feet twisted in pink sheets, dimples at the base of her spine.
“Hey, are we okay?”
“You didn’t tell me about the contractor. You didn’t tell me anything. You talked to my dad, but not me.” She continues grinding. “Were you planning on asking him for money?”
“No,” but then I know I’m lying. “Not unless I had to.”
“They don’t have much. And I don’t want you taking it.”
“I know.”
“I can’t make him not offer, just like I can’t stop him from doing any other stupid thing he wants to, but I can ask you not to take it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry.” Alice measures out spoonfuls of coarse black grounds and heaps them into her mother’s percolator.
“I didn’t think he would offer.” The counter is cold when I put my hands against it and lean next to her. I promise to pay it back, but know the words are empty when the amount dwarfs everything. If Frank pays, if he helps at all, he’ll own me.
She says, “That isn’t the point.”
“You’ve seen the house. I don’t have anything.” With each word she feels further away.
“You know,” she says, “you could leave here. Find a job somewhere else. Colleges have rare book rooms, D.C. has archives all over, museums.” Her voice softens. “I could help.”
“I’ve been looking,” I say. “There’s a manuscript curator position in Savannah. It’s an interesting place, a specialty library with museum and historical society ties and everything. They’ve got a canoe trip diary from 1654 that describes the entire coast almost untouched. It’s far, but—”
“Georgia,” she says, establishing the miles in two syllables.
I can’t ask if she would go, though I can see her bent over a book, curled up in the rumpled sheets in an apartment — ours. I can imagine waking up, her back pressed to me, without fear of a collapsing ceiling.
In the dining room Enola swears. A quick look shows her mopping up water. Too thin. Pale. Jumpy.
“It’s my parents’ house.”
I can see Alice’s spine stiffen. “I could say things, you know. I could say things so he wouldn’t give you anything. I could tell him that you fucked me and nearly got me fired. He wouldn’t give you a cent.” She tamps down the grounds with a small weight. It makes a soft thudding sound. Threatening.
“You could.”
“I won’t,” she says. She fills the percolator and plugs it in, and then she’s beside me, her back to the window. “Because I’ve known you my whole life, and there are things you don’t do to people you’ve known your whole life. Keep that in mind.” The sides of our hands touch, the little fingers lining up in a row. “If you take his money, it’s because I let you.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. I really am sorry.”
“I’m not hurt,” she says. “And I wish you wouldn’t say that.”
Her presence is like a heartbeat. I feel her skin on mine, electrons and molecules glance each other until pieces of her become me. I wish I could do dinner at La Mer again and not have picked up Enola’s call. I wish I hadn’t taken the books, that we’d never left her apartment, that I’d said something years ago. “You sat behind me in French class,” I say. “Whenever I try to remember French I can hear you conjugating verbs. I hear you all the time.” Her accent had been good. Madame Fournier used to make her recite in front of the class. “Je suis. Tu es. Il est. Elle est. Nous sommes.”
“Stop,” she says, shaking her head. “I like you, Simon, but I’d rather not look at you right now.”
I pull my hand back from the counter. “Sorry. I just—”
“You’re taking advantage of my father. He’s never gotten over your parents. You have no idea of the years of stories I’ve listened to about Paulie and Dan, Dan and Paulie. You think about how they haunt your life; it never occurred to you that they haunt mine.”
For the first time since we began talking, Alice looks at me. She’s calm, matter of fact. “So when you take his money — because you will — just know that you’re taking it from an old man who’s fixated on his dead friends. You’re asking a lot from me.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“You do. You can leave.” She takes a deep breath. “I think maybe you should leave. Maybe I should. I thought — forget it.”
The bubbling of the percolator fills the silence. I stare at the column of her neck; she holds herself so straight that she makes me feel warped.
“I’d like you to leave me alone now.” She says it sweetly and that makes it worse.