Read Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) for Free Online Page A

know.
    Am I making any sense?
    And I answered:
    It sounds a little like burnout to me. You’ve been going 90 miles an hour all your life, Patrick. No wonder you’d like a break. . . .
    The perfect time for me to suggest a visit, so I did:
    Speaking of which, spring break begins here on March 20, and I can buy my own ticket. I’d love to see Barcelona with you. Should I come?
    There. No beating around the bush. I was free, I was flush, I could come.
    It was another week before he answered:
    Great idea, but our projects are due around then, and I’ll have to give mine my whole attention. Also, as I told you, I’ve been feeling pretty unsettled. Not depressed, just like I want to try something different. I’m even thinking about joining the Peace Corps.
    I talked to a professor here, and he thinks there may be a way I can get at least a little credit for the Peace Corps toward my degree when I go back to Chicago. But the beauty of the PC is you don’t know where they’ll send you, and that sort of appeals. . . .
    I couldn’t swallow for a minute after I read it. My throat was dry, like all the moisture in my body had been sucked out with a giant vacuum. It was what he didn’t tell me that felt like ice in my gut. He wasn’t coming home. And then it got worse: Patrick had mentioned a girl in his class who wanted to join the Peace Corps.
    *  *  *
    I squeezed as much as I could into spring break, and I had the funds to do it—from having saved part of my weekly allowance all through grade and high school, and the monetary gifts from relatives, to investing the money I’d earned working part-time at the Melody Inn and, for the last summer, on the cruise ship. I could afford to cut loose now and then, I decided.
    I spent the first three days in New York with Pamela, meeting her new friends and going to shows; an evening in Georgetown with Valerie, Abby, and Claire, then an overnight back in Silver Spring; a visit to Valerie’s family in Frederick; a wild last-minute trip to Philly to meet Abby’s cousin on leave from the navy, just because she thought we’d hit it off (but we hardly had a decent conversation the whole evening); a Saturday helping out at the Melody Inn; and finally, the last rainy Sunday at home, helping Sylvia go through boxes of stuff in our attic that had been there for years—things that had been moved twice: once from Chicago to Takoma Park, then to our home in Silver Spring.
    There were things that my mom must have received as gifts that she didn’t want—a silver-plated butter server, a decorative bread box. I found old Christmas decorations, framed prints that had hung in the hallway back in Chicago, an ancient potty chair. . . .
    “Everything that’s going to Goodwill, I’ll put on my left,” Sylvia said, the sleeves of her blue shirt rolled up to the elbow. “If there’s anything in this batch that you really want to keep, Alice, just say so.”
    I was perched on top of our “keepsake trunk,” because everything in there was a keeper. My little brown monkey that wore diapers, Lester’s childhood drawings, a tracing of Mom’s hand with my little hand traced inside of it. . . . I used to come up here on rainy days—just like this one—and go through them.
    I surveyed the assortment of stuff in front of us. “Well, thatpotty chair can go,” I said. “Les and Stacy may need it long before I will.”
    “Hmm. Hadn’t thought about that,” she said, reconsidering it. She brushed one hand over the pink and blue bunnies painted on the lid. “But aren’t we being a little premature?”
    “I don’t know. I just have the feeling Stacy’s ‘the one,’ don’t you?” I said.
    “Lester’s had a lot of girlfriends.”
    “True. And he almost married one. But . . .”
    Sylvia slid the potty chair to the right. “What the heck. If I don’t have grandchildren, I’ll put it out in the yard and plant flowers in it.”
    We laughed. “I’d still put my money on