Page 21 of Alice Rue Evades the Truth
“Yeah!” He turns around and runs off, shouting, “Legos!” with Hazel toddling behind him. Well, he’s grown up enough to know when he’s done with a conversation, which honestly is a skill Alice admires.
Isabella turns to Alice, a wry look on her face. “So, those are my spawn.” Alice laughs, and Isabella smiles at her. “Henry’s at work, some sort of mycological emergency, I don’t know, but he’ll be back in a bit. He can’t wait to meet you. Come, sitdown. Coffee?”
Alice sits on one of the stools tucked under the kitchen island. “My…cological?” she asks, beyond confused. “And yes to coffee, please.”
“Mushrooms,” Isabella says, her back to Alice as she grabs two mugs from a high cabinet. “He’s a scientist. I don’t understand a bit of it, but the man loves a good fungus.”
“Oh,” Alice says faintly. “Sure.” She wishes a mushroom emergency were the weirdest thing to happen to her this week, but it’s barely cracking the top five.
Isabella puts a warm mug of coffee in front of her, and Alice gratefully wraps her fingers around it. It was freezing on the buses, and she’s chilled through. “Thanks. I just moved from the night shift at work to the day shift, so my sleep schedule is super fu—Um, messed up.”
Isabella laughs at her failed attempt to not curse. She quickly puts together a few plates of bagels and scrambled eggs, pulling bacon out of the oven and strawberries out of the fridge. She drops two small plates on a low table in the living room, but the kids don’t notice and she doesn’t seem to mind. “They’ll find it when they’re hungry,” she says, coming to sit up next to Alice at the island. “They’re grazers.”
“Like you,” Alice says, remembering how Isabella’s dad always had food out—yellow rice or kebabs or peanut butter—and how Isabella was sort of constantly eating but never actually ate a full meal at once.
Isabella’s eyes crinkle up as she smiles at Alice. “I’d forgotten I used to do that,” she muses, almost to herself. “That’s…” She trails off, looking closely at Alice. Alice wonders what marks of the years Isabella is seeing on her face, how old and haggard she looks from a lifetime of too much responsibilityand not enough money.
“I’m really happy to see you,” is what Isabella finally says, her nervous, rambling energy seeming to ease a bit, and Alice lets herself smile back.
“Me too.”
“So,” Isabella says around her first mouthful of scrambled eggs. “Tell me about this guy! He, like, dropped dead in front of you and you heroically saved his life or some ships?”
Alice wonders if she heard right, or maybe if she, like Nolan, is having some sort of serious brain malfunction. “Some…ships?”
“Oh,” Isabella says with a laugh. “When Sebastian was born, Henry and I decided to pull aGood Placeand say words that sound like curses. Ships, muck, hitch, grass. Whatever. Shiitake is his favorite, for obvious reasons, and it—very embarrassingly—became habit.”
Alice laughs. “I love it.”
But Isabella grimaces. “Yeah, I did too, until my boss overheard me last week saying, ‘Ships ships ships I dropped my coffee, oh muck me.’ ”
She drops her head into her hands as Alice positively cackles.
“Pretty mucking humiliating,” Alice manages to say, which makes Isabella snort, and Alice absolutely loses it.
Once they’ve both stopped wheezing, Alice asks, “You’re still in PR?” and Isabella nods.
“Communications, yeah. Same difference. Making sure everyone and their mom who hears about our company thinks about sunshine and rainbows.” Alice thinks that’s kind of like being a receptionist, but probably much better paid. She and Isabella are both the smiling face at the doorway, the woman pretending she’s not being friendly and enthusiastic for a paycheck but instead because this is truly the best building/company in the universe!
“Okay,” Isabella says, taking a sip of her own coffee. “You and this dude. Spill.”
“Uh…” Alice picks at her bagel. “I mean, there’s not much to tell. He collapsed, I did CPR and called 911, then the EMTs came.”
“Wow, way to make something so badgrass sound boring.”
Alice snickers atbadgrass,but shrugs at the rest of it.
“So wait. You guys were dating?”
Alice takes a questionably large bite of bagel to buy herself some time. This is a direct question. Either yes, they were dating, or no, they were not dating. There’s really no way to slide past this one like she’s slid past all the others.
And also…wait.
She has to lie—or, well, whatever she’s doing. Omit, maybe. She has to omit to Nolan’s family because she decided not to hurt them while he’s dying, and she has to omit to her boss so she’ll stay on the day shift. But Isabella isn’t an Altman, and she isn’t Mr. Brown. She doesn’t know any of them.
Isabella is the one person in the world Alice could tell the truth to.
Before she can chicken out too much, before she can seize onto the fear that what she’s doing is so terrible that Isabella will kick her out of the house, this sweet family reunion over before it truly began, Alice painfully swallows a lump of dough and shakes her head.
