if it's true about the summer

"You know what Grandpa told me?"

"What'd he tell you, Alice, what'd he..."

He says her name for the hell of it, for the routine of it and for the thrill of it, and once he's said her name, the sentence starts to wind and draw like a boat gone sailing tipsy, too much real beer mixed in with the ginger beer in the cooler.

Maybe they'd like going sailing together. Maybe she'd be a wonderful captain, and he'd be her gangly first mate falling all over himself to yell at the whales and the coral and the trash in the bay.

Some bay, in Riverside, Connecticut, not in Manhattan, New York.

Oh, right. It's lakes they've got in Connecticut, not bays, or oceans.

Whatever it is they've got, when Alice says it, well, it sounds wonderful. Just plain wonderful.

And maybe Tony doesn't anymore feel like he's got to scream, from his knees to his toes to the tips of his ears.

"He said the reason he hadn't sold that old house, for years, was because my room - Grandma's room, you know - oh, well...he said it still smelled like her. Just a little bit. Not in any odd way."

Tony swallows a grin with a sort of smudging motion around his nose. Sure, sure. Nothing in that house could be in any odd way. Nothing at all.

"And that's why I said he was walking out on her." Alice's hand swings like a pendulum in his, something orderly about the wildness of it. Strong, very strong, but so very...so very Alice.

"I wanna say that even he knows it was silly, that it was the fact that we were both wrong that was why he told me I was childish. But I think he knows we were right."

"Of course you were," Tony murmurs. His stomach feels funny.

"Always, he said the only thing that matters is that you're having fun, and you're good to your friends. That you love them, and that they love you."

"And...?" Rising.

"And that house was our friend. Still is, always will be. I hope."