“She . . . didn’t want you to?”
“She wanted me to remember them,” I explain. “And she wanted me to hear them.”
One dark eyebrow arches over one of Alice’s green eyes, demanding more of an explanation. This is the exact sort of thing I dread talking about—or, rather, I guess I dread the rolling eyes, the uninterested shrugs, the blank looks that might follow. Despite how much I used to tease and hassle Grandmother, I’ve always held the things she’s taught me close to my heart. They are a part of me I keep, and nothing makes you more vulnerable than sharing something you care about. “Most of them are stories from the First Nations. They’ve been shared orally for generations and generations. She wanted me to experience them like that, how they always have been. “
Grandmother wanted me to love the stories, to take them into my heart through my ears and let them become a part of me, connecting me to all the people who told them before. It feels disrespectful just to give them away on a sheet of notebook paper. It feels wrong not to be able to include or incorporate the way she said certain words, and where she paused, in her retellings.
My retellings should be wrapped in my voice, cradled as carefully as water so that no word spills. “If you want Grandmother’s stories, they should be told how she told them. They’re sort of hers, you know?”
They’re yours too, Natalie, Grandmother used to tell me.
Alice considers me for a long moment before her head does that wobbling thing again. “Well, what if I send a voice recorder with you? You could tell the stories and record them.”
I think it over. “Yeah, I think I could do that,” I say. “But don’t write them down. Just listen. That’s how you’re supposed to experience them.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal—we don’t want to piss off the person we’re trying to find. Will Tuesdays and Thursdays at nine work for you?”
“Yes.” I’ll be dropping Jack off for early morning conditioning every day of the week anyway. That’s the deal with Mom and Dad paying for my car insurance and gas—while they’re at work, I’m the twins’ chauffeur.
“In the meantime, try to get as stressed as possible. Reeeeally get your trauma to the surface—know what I mean?”
“Oh, I think so,” I tell her.
Maybe that’s why I agree to go to Matt’s birthday-slash-graduation party with Megan the next night. Or maybe I’m a masochist when it comes to Matt Kincaid. Maybe, even though it doesn’t feel right to be with him, I’m too scared to let him stop loving me, lest cutting that last tether sends me floating away.
8
“Remember: You were going to have to talk to him eventually,” Megan says gently. With the Jeep in its geriatric state, we decided to take her Civic instead, and it’s rumbling from the little Presbyterian church’s parking lot to the Kincaids’ connected gravel driveway, the one they open to visitors every fall for their corn maze, and when they host weddings. “It’s not like you and Matt have never fought before.”
“We’ve argued before,” I correct her. “And even that was mostly just us sighing back and forth until someone gave up. This was different. More like he verbally poked me in the rib cage a couple of times and then I verbally beheaded him.”
Megan rolls her eyes. “You could’ve nonverbally castrated him, and he’d still want you here.”
“The point of breaking up was to not have to fight anymore.”
“You mean argue,” she teases. “And I thought the point of breaking up was so you guys didn’t drag things out until you ended up hating each other. The point was saving your friendship.”
I shrug. “Maybe it would’ve been better to let him hate me.”
“Then you should’ve tried getting a worse personality and an uglier face.” She reaches over and squeezes my hand in the dark. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
The lot beside the barn is already full, so we park just off to the side of the gravel drive instead, where we can hear music blaring from the house. Matt’s parents are out of town this weekend, ensuring 1) this party will get out of control and 2) I won’t have to hear the phrase I’m so heartbroken my grandbabies won’t have your coloring from Joyce Who Only Eats Beige.
“This will be fun,” Megan insists. We get out of the car, climb the last few yards of the upward sloping drive, cross the lot, and are met by a cheer rising up from the people perched along the edge of Derek’s truck bed. Even Rachel seems genuinely happy to see us, like old times.
“Happy birthday, Matt. We come bearing Heaven Hill,” Megan says, holding up a bottle of bourbon.