After Alice by Karen Hofmann Read Free Book Online Page B

things?”
    Cynthia has asked this of her, now, a few times. An ingenious answer is needed, to buy time: all of her alarm bells are going off. Sidonie says, “I’ve been busy. . . .”
    What is there, besides Alice’s little boxes of keepsakes, of schoolwork and party invitations, that Cynthia might be interested in? There are, in fact, two dozen or more large boxes and trunks from Beauvoir, and they have been in storage for four decades. She does not know what is in them, precisely. Or rather, in part of her brain there is a precise index of those boxes, but she is not, at present, willing to access it.
    Cynthia says, “You said once that you had kept her personal things, and you would give them to me when I was grown up and had a place of my own.”
    Had she said that? But she must have. And now, certainly, Cynthia is grown up. Grown up, with a nearly grown child of her own. She is not likely to carelessly leave something behind in a move, or to let small children spoil things. Sidonie has been procrastinating, avoiding, locking her mind against it. Though she hasn’t succeeded in forgetting about it.
    â€œYes, you should have them,” Sidonie says. Why is she so reluctant to admit this? A relief, surely, to have them taken off her hands. “They’re mostly things from her childhood, you understand. You might not find them that interesting. Our mother, your grandmother, kept everything Alice ever. . .” She had been about to say ‘touched’, but that sounded off, in her own head. “. . . everything Alice ever wrote, and all of her little ornaments and bits of jewelry. Nothing of value, of course.”
    â€œExcept to you and I,” Cynthia says.
    She can’t resist deflecting the point with a correction. “You and me ,” she says. “To you and me . They’re all in a muddle, the boxes from the old house. It will take me some time to get them out for you. They should all be sorted.”
    This is true. She had retrieved the boxes from the storage facility, when she moved back. They need to be sorted; most of what is in them needs, likely, to be thrown away. She has been procrastinating. She has had some idea about sorting the papers — she knows that there are invoices, letters, ledgers from the orchards — with a view to donating them to a local archive. That sort of thing is, apparently, useful. There are even university courses in the history of orcharding. And she ought to go through the photographs, too.
    â€œWhere are the boxes?” Cynthia asks. “Are they here, in town? I think you said they were in a storage unit?”
    She had not meant to admit it, but she is powerless against direct questions.
    â€œIn my basement now.”
    â€œOh,” Cynthia says, in her slightly guttural speech. Then: “I wonder if you would be willing to let Justin or I help you sort the things out.”
    Justin or me , not Justin or I. But she does not correct her niece this time.
    â€œI’ll think about it,” she says.
    What Alice has left behind. Well, it’s out of her control, except for those boxes in her basement, the little odds and ends of a life. Those she can deal with. She will take them on. It is her duty. She sees, too, that what is required of her is something more than sorting through the boxes that half-fill her basement. What Cynthia wants is a history, a background, a past. Understandably, perhaps. Sidonie has always been taciturn on the subject of Cynthia’s parents. With good reason, of course.
    But now more is required. Sidonie can understand that, though she herself is suspicious of this kind of investigation. What one is likely to turn up is rarely useful, and usually only what one already knows. It is the nature of human beings, as well as other sentient things, to try to fit anything new into the patterns they already know.
    Yes, a dubious exercise, this knitting up of narratives. Very few have