by Sally Collins

Alice Murphy chews on her tongue to stave off the tears, wipes liquor bottles to busy her hands while this guy, lumpy and loud, goes on and on about South Dakota like his face is right alongside George Washington’s.

“You gotta go,” he says after wrapping up a lecture on Wild Bill Hickock, stroking his wiry beard like he’s teaching a history class for cowboy enthusiasts, which Alice is not. And she is not usually this upset. She usually swallows down the dull chatter while behind the oak bar, chimes in on the weather, Green Bay Packers, or price of milk and corn while stocking pickled mushrooms and maraschino cherries.

“Keep it light. Keep everyone comfortable,” Dad instructed when he trained her in barkeep. She’s no longer allowed the easy distraction of her phone after spending a shift scrolling through Ryan Jorgeson’s Instagram instead of listening to Marge Woldt whine about her fifty-year-old son’s latest DUI.

Marge complained to Dad. Hence, wiping liquor bottles, Alice willing her brain to flit off to some kind of happy place.

Who makes their daughter work the same week her grandparents die?

“What you gonna do?” Dad said, racking his gnawed cuticles through his thinning hair. “I’ll be back when I’m back.”

The man goes on about the Crazy Horse memorial that will probably never be finished, while Alice nods and considers what else she could wipe clean–the mounted fish and ducks staring dumbly at nothing, the plush frogs peeking out from every corner in various shades of green.

“You gotta go,” he says for the second time and Alice wipes the boxy bottle of Beefeaters for the second time, wishing it wasn’t just her and this guy at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday at The Southwood’s Swamp Tavern. She labors to exhale, like there’s a jagged block of ice behind her sternum, frosty pinpricks of pain stabbing her lungs, like she’s on a frozen lake in the middle of a January cold snap instead of inside an old tavern with shoddy air conditioning on an August afternoon.

Alice recalls her grandparents’ single visit, on their way to some retirement party across the state. Grandpa Carl pulled on his suspenders, surveying the joint Dad called “his baby” while Alice pointed out a stuffed Kermit with noodle arms and legs wrapped around a bottle of Maker’s Mark. “Isn’t that funny?” No one laughed.

Dad offered them a drink. “Anything. Take a load off. Beer? Coke?”

“Strange to have a swamp-themed bar next to a crop field,” said Grandpa Carl.

“Coffee?” asked Grandma Bev, holding her purse with two hands like someone might materialize and snatch it.

“Uh, no coffee, Ma,” said Dad. Grandma Bev responded with a tut, shook her head, her tight beige curls sprayed too stiff to bounce. Disappointment hovered in the air like cigar smoke–pungent, thick, and gray. Disappointment all around.

Alice pulls out her phone–Dad isn’t here, and Mr. South Dakota has taken a breath after describing the Badlands like Alice can’t imagine rocks. A text from Ryan. The ice in her chest shrinks. “Comin’ tonite?”

“You know, you’re not very friendly,” says Mr. South Dakota. Alice glances up from the warm glow of her phone. The man’s bushy eyebrows upturn like berating exclamation marks. “Just smile. That’s all you gotta do.” So Alice does and it pains the corners of her mouth to do so, but the man nods with approval and orders another Miller Lite.

Doug finally arrives for the night shift. His oversized, brown-framed glasses magnify the soft concern in the wrinkles around his eyes.

“How ya’ doing, hon?” he asks in a tone she could wallow in, like damp sunshine. “Your dad make it to Nekoosa okay? I’m sure there’s lots to sift through, huh?”

“I think the neighbors will help with the cows and chickens,” Alice says. The logistics. So many logistics–giant udders swollen with milk; a lush garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots to harvest; a three-story century-old farmhouse, behemoth faded red barn, and ramshackle outbuildings to sort through; stacks of forms and certificates to glance over and sign; and the broken bodies awaiting burial.

“Who pays the tow truck driver?” Dad wondered aloud while packing his duffle bag. “Will that Amish kid need some kind of therapy? Are the Amish allowed therapy?”

“Old people aren’t supposed to die like that,” Alice says to Doug, not answering his question.

“They weren’t that old, hon. What, sixty-something?” Doug takes the bar rag from her hand.

“I guess,” Alice mutters, feeling lost and dizzy. She forgot to eat lunch.

Doug kneels and peers into the cooler. “You get together with some friends tonight, okay.” He retrieves a bottle of Goldschläger, half-full, clinking against the chardonnay no one orders, nearly tipping the old-fashioned mix on its way out. She thinks of Ryan. She thinks of the bustling distraction of half her classmates celebrating the start of their senior year in Emily Ludwig’s refinished shed.

Alice grips the liquor in one hand, a small of bag of recycling in the other–a few empties from the meager lunch rush and Mr. South Dakota’s four Miller Lites. She winds up like a Brewer’s pitcher and hurls them one by one in the over-sized dumpster behind the bar–a little firework of satisfaction.

She was with them a few weeks ago, solo as usual, stayed a couple days. Grandma Bev, smelling of chicken broth and rose perfume as usual, complained about her ragweed allergies while Grandpa Carl, wafting the slightly sweet scent of cow manure, went on about the next generation of church ladies serving vegan dessert bars after mass. “Do they know what we do for a living? Hobby-farm hippies.”

As a young child, during summer school breaks, Alice stayed weeks at a time while Dad pulled day shifts at Fleet Farm and night shifts at The Buckshot Tavern, saving up for a bar of his own. She liked the farm, the quiet routines–sewing and baking with Jean Shepard’s twang sounding from the cassette player in the house, feeding cows and playing with the downy kittens in the barn. There were clean sheets and homemade casseroles. She’d search for frogs in the nearby swamp.

“My favorite spot,” Dad told her one Easter visit when he needed to get some air and strolled with Alice, his white-knuckle grip around the neck of a Leinenkugel’s. They stood at the edge of a weather-worn wooden platform. Tiny lily pads, still submerged, seemed to be the only thing alive in the muck, reaching and straining for the sunshine.

“I thought they could support my weight,” he confessed, pointing to the small heart of a lily pad beneath the surface. He chuckled. Told Alice that Grandpa Carl built the tiny dock so Dad wouldn’t try to skip across the surface. Grandma Bev folded paper boats so he’d leave the frogs and water lilies be. But Dad would take off his shoes and enter the muck anyway.

There was talk of Alice living with Grandpa Carl and Grandma Bev when she was six or seven, a couple years after Mom left for a class reunion in North Dakota and never came back. Alice heard the exchange through the vent in that drafty old farmhouse.

“Just six months, year tops,” pleaded Dad. “While I get this bar open, get on my feet.”

After a lengthy pause: “We already raised our kids,” said Grandma Bev.

“You gotta live with your mistakes,” said Grandpa Carl.

Alice’s brain lopped off the “s,” chopping that word into a singular. Mistake. She was a mistake.

“Don’t you help around the house when you’re there?” asked Dad as they drove home.

She helped mend Grandpa Carl’s shirts and mash the potatoes. She went uncomplaining to church and bowling league and brat fries. She dried the dishes and sang “You are my Sunshine” to the cows. She let those barn kittens crawl all over her, for hours, scratching vivid red lines along her forearms and biting the tips of her fingers, purring all the while.

What’s gonna happen to the kitties? Alice wonders, chucking another bottle into the massive bin reeking of stale beer, swarming with flies. So I’ll just never see them again? The thought threatens tears, but she doesn’t want smudged mascara for Ryan. She uncaps the liquor and takes a cool cinnamoned swig.

Karley Pulaski hugs her immediately, breathlessly. A string of Christmas lights blink in Alice’s peripheral. Someone cranks Eric Church from an old set of speakers on a paint-spattered folding table, the bass reverberating in Alice’s body. A few classmates slap a ping-pong back and forth, others gather around a foosball table. Cracked plastic lawn chairs and dirty, dusty bean bag chairs are occupied by some passing a joint. She can smell the weed, the hay and manure, hears a moaning moo from the attached barn.

“Oh my, God. How are you?” The concern feels as fake as Karley’s eyelashes, the hug comfortless.

“I’m sad,” Alice says.

“Yeah.” Karley releases Alice and twists a plait of highlighted hair around her pointer finger. “At least they were old, right? Grandparents die.”

But they were meant to go as grandparents do, Alice wants to say. Slightly inclined on an adjustable bed. A bowl of steaming broth nearby. A Bible.

That’s not how they went. Swerving to avoid a doe and fawn passing between the tall August cornstalks. That’s what the Amish teenager biking along reported to the police, described the Buick rolling and tumbling, how it wrapped around the trunk of an oak like a sheet of tinfoil, the hailstorm of acorns.

“What are you gonna wear to the funeral?” Karley asks, her brow knotted up like that’s the real dilemma here, that’s why Alice must appear so lost and stricken.

Ryan’s splayed on the futon, a joint in hand. He’s wearing leather bracelets and that t-shirt their principal made him turn inside out last spring–a bearded man holding a sign that reads, “Pot is Fun.” He’s so alluringly different than the football-playing, weight-lifting farm boys that make up most of their class, who all donned the exact pair of cowboy boots for junior homecoming.

Even the English teacher couldn’t hide her admiration of Ryan, and Alice understood why when they were paired in class to analyze a poem. He spotted the symbolism, decoded the message this post-modern beat poet something or other was trying to say. “Life is pointless.”

“I didn’t get that at all,” she said. He tickled her ribs, called her “pragmatic.” She felt her chest expand in a frightening and delicious way. They made out behind the ticket booth at a track meet, in the bathroom at Erika Theobald’s graduation party, in the bed of Joe Bronson’s truck at the drive-in.

Alice sits close beside him, a deep inhale when he asks, “Grandma and Grandpa died?” His face a soft plane of sympathy.

She describes the accident, the Amish boy, the acorns. Acorns everywhere.

“In their pockets and shoes. They found one in the back of Grandpa’s throat.”

“Fuck, that’s cool,” Ryan says. He holds her hand, intertwining his fingers with hers. “Can I use that for a poem? I’m writing something about climate change.”

“Sure.” Alice says, confused, hesitant. “They weren’t real political or anything.”

“But like, I want to write about how older generations just don’t care about us, you know?”

The words sink heavy into her belly where they roil and rumble and she realizes aloud, “I don’t know if they really loved me. They never said it, you know.”

“Yeah.” Ryan coughs and hands her the joint. “They look at us like, ‘What can I get out of them?’”

A gigantic wave of sadness seems to hurl her brain across her skull. She feels her face crumble, tears springing.

“Oh, no sorrow,” he says. “No sorrow.” And the word sorrow echoes so poetic and comforting in her ears. He kisses her and she kisses him back. This is what she needs, who she needs, she decides. This man against her, melting the hard block of ice in her torso.

“You’re such a good kisser,” he says as they part for air. A revelation springs inside Alice, she doesn’t want to die with people questioning whether she loved them. The words tumble from her mouth before she can catch or consider them. “I love you.”

“Whoa,” Ryan leans back. “Whoa.”

Alice’s body ripples with tremors, the ice sharper than before. She might vomit up the flakes of faux gold.

“I don’t want any drama,” he says, taking the joint she forgot she was holding. He shrugs his shoulders, shakes he head. “Sorry.”

Alice wanders toward her car, off-center, shrinking under the crushing emptiness of a night sky with no moon and stars. Self-loathing writhes around her body. She slaps herself across a cheek–a strange, awkward reflex. Then again. “Stupid. Stupid,” she says. “Stupid.” A sharp sting radiates from her cheek, more tears, skidding hot down her face.

Weeping, teetering on drunk, she makes her way home, slides under the patchwork quilt Grandma Bev pieced together from scraps, all wonky and mismatching. She wrestles with sleep, trying to pin it down and gain the reprieve of unconsciousness. Until, finally, the crunch of gravel signals Dad’s return.

He appears gaunt and heavy all at once, carrying a small cardboard box like it might tip over.

“Oh, good. You’re awake,” he says, a half-smile. A squeak from the box. A meow. “The neighbors insisted.” A huff of a laugh escapes his lips as he opens the lid. “Mom and Dad always kept them tame for you cause you loved ‘em so much.”

Alice tries to envision her grandparents with the cats, affectionate and playful. For her?

She pulls a gray kitten from the box. The little body goes stiff, claws bared, meowing manically. “Did they use the word ‘love’?” she asks, petting the puffball, kissing the downy fur that absorbs a wayward tear.

“Yeah.” Dad exhales. Approaches with a gentle smile, an outstretched hand. He pets the kitten as well. “Something along those lines.”

An Interview with Sally Collins