Keeper of Keys (5 page)

He always kissed me and unlike Sherry, he does not wipe away my kisses when my back is turned.

"Tell me when it changed, when you started loving Alice up close again." He asks as he examines the new windows he installed a few weeks ago. The rain is coming down now. We love the rain and each other and so he curls up with me in my bed and pulls me close to him.

"It changed when you came." I tell him as he slides his face against mine.

This story is like a fairytale to him. Something he will tell our children at bedtime, the children we plan to adopt after the wedding, children that Alice will call brother and sister and help them with their homework and surely take them to the ice cream shop where I began loving her up close again.

She had begged and pleaded for me to go with her to the mother and daughter ice cream party. I didn't want to, since I hardly ever left the house.

"Can't Meredith take you?"

"No, it's a mother and daughter thing."

"I can't. I'm too sick."

She began to cry then. It was something she hardly did. Her tears broke my heart. I conceded and took her to the ice cream shop, where fifteen pairs of mothers and daughters stood around sipping egg creams and coke floats. Very few faces were familiar to me, although they all knew Alice.

"Mom, it's four-fifty a piece," Alice said as she hooked her arm through mine and waved at someone across the parlor. I looked down at her and she beamed up at me. She looked so proud.

I handed the man a ten and he gave me back a dollar, which I crumpled and stuffed into my purse.

"It was nice wasn't it?" Journey asked.

"Yes," I said. "It was very nice."

Alice never let go of my arm, not once and she never stopped smiling. She introduced me to everyone. All of the teachers and all of her friends who called the house on a daily basis. Everyone.

"Get to the good part." He teased and pulled me into him, holding me tight around my waist.

Alice and I were seated on the bench outside of the ice cream shop. We were waiting on Meredith to come and pick us up. Alice had a little ice cream stuck to her chin and she looked so much like my mother at that moment. I mean my mother was always happy and smiling and there she was all over again in my child and for the first time in a long time I felt very lucky to have her.

I reached into my purse for a piece of tissue so I could wipe the ice cream off of Alice's chin and pulled out the crumpled dollar instead.

Journey would start smiling at this part of the story and I could feel his heart thump against my chest.

"Mom, that's money not a tissue," Alice laughed, pulling her face away.

"Oh," I thought it was funny too and had laughed along with her, but then I smelled coconut and I think Alice smelled it too, because she made a face and kind of wiggled her nose at the air.

I looked down at the dollar for a long time before I began to open it up and smooth it out.

"There was writing there?" Journey asks like he hasn't heard this story three hundred times.

"There was writing there," I say like I haven't told it three hundred times.

"What did it say?" Journey just wants to hear me say it, because he likes the way my voice shakes when I do, even though I'm now able to control the tears.

I love you always,

Mom

I see those words on that dollar and I know for sure it's the same dollar my mother gave to me before she died because no one writes like my mother, Alice.

In between my tears, I tell Alice the story about the Banyon trees, the ceiling clouds and the Alice she was named after. I tell her the story of the Hawaiian Islands and the disease that lives inside of my body.

I apologize for pushing her away for so many years and promise that things will change from that moment on and I let her know that she does not ever have to go out looking for love, love will find her and besides, she will always be well loved by me.

"Both of us." Journey adds to the end of my story.

The dollar is framed and hanging on the wall of Alice's bedroom. She says she will give it to her child and even at the young age of eleven, she is sure that she will have a girl which she will name, Kaialice. She says she will cover her daughter's nursery walls with Banyan trees, smiling tigers and juggling bears and she will paint the ceiling sky blue with clouds and the sun that rises over Hawaii.