Free The Evolution of Alice by David Alexander Robertson

‘em out back for a bit? Play around and all that.”
    “No, thanks.”
    “We won’t go anywhere, Al, we’ll just stick around the field.”
    “No!” she said, and that was the first time she ever snapped at me.
    Right about then I dropped any talk about her smoking. I thought about the paper airplanes I saw on the ground outside the girls’ room, and remembered how their bedroom window was open, so that made me feel a bit better about it anyway. The smoke’d just find its way out into the air and maybe wouldn’t bother the girls too much. That was about all I could take of sitting there with Alice, though, and it sounded like she had about enough of me, too. It was a different kind of talk than we usually had, but it wasn’t better either. It was weird for me because I always loved being around her, even if we was sitting there together all quiet, but what I really wanted to do was see the girls. So I let out a big sigh and pulled myself up from the couch.
    “I’m gonna go check on the girls,” I said, and started to walk out of the living room when she stopped me for a second.
    “Hey, Gideon,” she said.
    “What’s that?” I said.
    “You ever think about getting out of this place?”
    “Like outta the rez?”
    “Yeah, like out of the rez, out of
here …
”
    “Well, I don’t know, I guess so, sometimes,” I said, and the truth was I did think of it from time to time, but not seriously. I wasn’t about to leave Alice and the girls, or my grandpa neither, especially since he hadn’t been feeling too good lately. I didn’t think I could stand living away from any of them.
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said, and she wasn’t dragging on her cigarette then. She wasn’t staring at the TV set neither. She was looking out the window, out into the sky hovering over the big field her girls used to always play in. “I’ve been thinking about maybe heading out to the city.”
    “Alice, what would you ever do in the city? Your home’s here and all your family … and me, too, you know.”
    “That’s just it, everything I know is here, and I don’t want to know all that anymore,” she said, and that’s when it started to make sense to me, because if the memories in the house were crushing the girls, they were crushing Alice too.
    “You know,” I said, “my grandpa always says you can’t run away from memories and emotions and shit. They’re faster than you could ever be.”
    “Fuck what your
grandpa
says,” she said.
    That was like a punch in the stomach to me. I just stood there like I was frozen or something, until she finally took another drag of her cigarette.
    “Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking,” she said, like she hadn’t just swore at me.
    “Okay, Al,” I said.
    I turned away and went off to the girls’ bedroom, not really knowing what else I could say to her, or if I wanted to say anything at all.
    When I walked into Kathy and Jayne’s room, I found the two of them going about their own business, almost oblivious to each other. That wasn’t a natural thing, to me, because they usually did almost everything together. It wasn’t like playing in the field, of course, but it was still together, you know. Jayne had a box of crayons spread out on the floor in front of her, along with a stack of paper, same kind of paper I saw outside the bedroom window on the ground. She was in the middle of scribbling letters on one of those pieces of paper in red crayon, and she was real into it. I could see her little pink tongue sticking out of her mouth she was concentrating so hard, like Michael Jordan when he was driving to the hoop. I smiled at that. That was real cute to me.
    Kathy, she was sitting by the bookshelf with her legs curled right up into her chest, her eyes stuck into a novel that looked kinda big for a little girl to be reading. She was holding it up to catch some light coming in from the bedroom window. The girls didn’t notice me when I came in. They