“I’ll come visit. How about that?”
Alice had already decided that she was going to take classes at the southern campus of the Maine Community College System. She had told Gina that she was worried about leaving her mom alone, but, in truth, she didn’t want to stop living with Jake.
“You promise?” Gina stubbed out the skinny cigarette in the ashtray. The filter was imprinted with her lipstick color, a dark plum.
“I do,” Alice said, but didn’t really mean it, and didn’t really think that Gina would remember the promise once she arrived in New York.
Jake shouted, “Girls,” from downstairs, and they joined Jake and Edith for appetizers and drinks in the living room. Edith had calmed down, and was her usual slow-motion self, smiling beatifically at both Alice and Gina as though they had done something a lot more impressive than graduate from Kennewick High. Jake kept the conversation going, asking Gina lots of questions about her plans. Alice was slightly jealous again, and actually glad that Gina would be leaving Maine and probably never returning. After appetizers they moved to the dining room table, where every plate was adorned with a Cornish game hen stuffed with wild rice, and a pile of honey-glazed carrots. They looked nice but they’d gone cold. Alice and Gina were allowed to keep drinking wine, and Edith had switched to what looked like vodka on the rocks, her speech getting more incomprehensible by the minute. Edith kept pushing the tiny hen around her plate, occasionally taking a small bite. Gina ate ravenously as she always did, concentrating on her food until all that was left on her plate was a small pile of bones. Alice knew that growing up with four siblings had left her with the constant feeling that there would never be enough to go around.
“You girls should get going to your party. Ed and I will clean up,” Jake said. He’d eaten only about half his food, and Alice thought that was strange. He looked embarrassed, probably because there was a new witness to his wife’s behavior. He didn’t know that Gina had been prepped for the spectacle.
“It was delicious,” Gina said, refolding her napkin and placing it on her plate.
“Sorry about . . . My wife sometimes drinks too much.”
Edith perked up, and blew a raspberry in the direction of her husband. “I’ve had three drinks tonight, a lot less than some people around here. But don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ll clean up.” She stood up suddenly, went to steady herself by grabbing hold of the chair, missed it, and sat down hard on the floor. Everyone around the table jumped up, but Jake got to her first, helping her stand and bringing her to the couch in the living room. While he got her settled, Alice and Gina brought dishes into the kitchen. Alice whispered: “I wasn’t exaggerating, was I?”
“No,” Gina said, smiling, but her eyes looked concerned.
At the door, Jake said, “Be extra-careful tonight, you two. Look after Alice, okay, Gina?”
“I’m only staying half an hour, tops,” Alice said, as Gina took her by the shoulders and pushed her out the door.
“Thank you so much for dinner, Mr. Richter,” Gina said, “and please thank Mrs. Richter for me.”
“I will,” Jake said, and he swiped at a damp eye. Alice had never seen her stepfather cry. She opened her mouth to tell Gina that she was staying home, but she was already being led down the hall.
Chapter 7
Then
Justin Lashaway lived in a deck house in the woods on the outskirts of Kennewick Village. The long driveway was jammed with cars, kids milling around drinking cans of beer. Justin’s parents were home, but they’d offered up the entire bottom floor, a large rec room, for the party. They’d put out tons of food, and buckets filled with soft drinks, but the majority of the kids at the party—almost the entire graduating class—had spilled out into the surrounding pine forest, where most of the drinking and pot smoking was taking place. After checking out the rec room, Gina eating two cookies and a piece of cake, they headed out to the edge of the woods and found Justin manning a keg. Alice knew that Justin had a crush on her, had had a crush on her for at least two years now. He’d asked her to the senior prom, and she’d let him down easy by telling him that if she had any interest in that sort of thing, he’d be the guy she’d want to go with.
“Alice! No way,” he said. He was filling plastic cups for the swarm of students.
“You got a keg?” Gina asked.
“My brother’s home and got it for me. My parents are pretending they don’t know.”
Justin got them both a cup of beer that seemed to Alice to be mainly foam. She drank it while Gina went to find her boyfriend. When she was finished with the beer she told Justin that she was heading home, that she really just came by to say hello.
“Aw, man. Don’t go,” Justin said. “Besides, how’re you getting home?”
“I’ll call my stepdad from inside. He’ll come pick me up.”
“I can drive you. At least let me drive you.”
Alice agreed, and Justin took off to try and borrow a car: “My car’s buried, but Brad’s around here somewhere.” Alice thought about trying to find Gina and saying good-bye, but knew that Gina would give her a hard time for leaving so soon. Justin returned, breathless, holding up keys. “Brad’s Mustang. I had to fight him for these.”
Justin drove slowly, cutting over to Kennewick Harbor, then driving along the shore. At first Alice thought Justin was driving slow because he’d been drinking and was worried about being pulled over, but then she figured out that he just wanted to spend more time with her. He was asking constant questions, wanting to know how she felt about graduating, what classes she was going to take at MCC, why he never saw her at high school parties. She answered as best she could, and laughed when he drove right past her condo. “I thought you might want to go out to the lighthouse, take a little walk,” he said, shrugging.
“Sure. Why not?” she said. Part of her just wanted to see what it felt like, spending more time with a boy who seemed to like her. And he was harmless, that much she knew.
There were no other cars parked out at Buxton Point. They walked down the short jetty and sat on a flat slab of granite close enough to the water so that the spray from the crashing waves occasionally reached them. She let Justin kiss her, and unhook her bra, but stopped him when his hand plucked at the top button of her jeans.
“I like you so much, Alice. You have no idea.”
“I have a boyfriend,” Alice said. It was a lie, but as she said it, she pictured Jake.
“You do?”
“He’s older. You don’t know him.”
“How much older?”
“Just a little bit. I’m sorry, Justin.”
“So why are you here with me?” He had leaned back, and in the bright moonlight looked genuinely upset. He’s a nice guy, Alice thought, but just a boy. He was halfway cute but his eyes were too close together, making him seem a little inbred, and his dark hair was already beginning to thin at the front. He’d probably be completely bald by the time he was twenty-five.