A/N: Thank you, as always, for your reviews. I'm quite a deadpan guy but seeing your feedback pop up in my inbox makes me RADIATE WITH WARMTH. Well, it makes me smile, at least. That's enough.
Unfortunately I won't be able to post next Saturday – you can expect the next update on Tuesday the 31st of October (ooOOoooOh). It isn't a Halloween-themed chapter, though, which sucks.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy this episode of "Gravity Falls But In Text Form And It Has Lesbians In It", which is what I'm thinking of renaming the story to. Let me know if you prefer that over the current title.
You know, I used to like Hall & Oates. But there's something about hearing You Make My Dreams for the fifty-seventh time in about two weeks that really grinds my gears, and then tears out my gears and stomps all over them with an iron-plated boot.
The iconic drumbeat kicks in and Mabel slides across the squeaky-clean floor of the empty diner.
What I want, you've got and it might be hard to handle.
She points over the counter at me, past the glass I'm polishing, swaying from side to side, and then without warning my eardrums she wails, "the candle feeds the flame!"
"Turn it off," I tell her.
I think she was about to say "make me," but both of our heads turn to the door of the back office as Lindsay emerges, snapping her fingers and stepping towards us to the beat of the music.
"Haven't heard this one in a while," she calls out, and if I could scream at my boss I would, because Lindsay doesn't have a sarcastic bone in her body, and I don't know how she has missed this song playing itself on repeat on her own jukebox for the last however-many years.
So this is my Monday night now, apparently. Watching my boss and my (insert degree of relationship to Mabel here) belt out a duet that literally forces my face to contort in embarrassment for them.
"Come on, Pacifica," Lindsay says. "You have permission to let loose and dance for a while."
"And it's ten o'clock," I say, walking to the coat rack to grab my hoodie. "So I have written permission to abandon this train wreck. Are you coming, Mabel, or am I doing this on my own?"
Mabel scurries over to the jukebox and switches off the music.
"Now what are you two up to?" Lindsay asks, folding her arms and assuming her motherly mode.
"Treasure hunt," Mabel says excitedly.
"More like... dredging up an old man's memories," I add.
"Again?" Lindsay says. "How long is your treasure hunt supposed to take?"
We shrug in unison.
"Alright, well, you girls have fun. Don't stay out too late."
"I'm not sure 'fun' is the right word," I mumble, and Mabel pushes me out the door, bobbing up and down with impatience.
The mansion I used to live in sits on a tall hill overlooking the town. Though mostly obscured by the forest, the very tip of the roof is visible from the door of the diner - during the day, at least. I could explain why we're headed there now, but it's easier if I show you the second half of Ford's letter that Mabel read out to me on Scuttlebutt Island:
For this next one, you're going to have to take a page out of my brother's book. We're breaking in.
Mabel, it is a true testament to your character that you were once able to expose a very powerful, elitist married couple as categorical liars, undermine their notoriety, and then not a year later, befriend their daughter. You possess the useful superpower of making everybody fall in love with you. Perhaps I can put you in contact with the Grim Reaper? Sit down with him, have some tea. Within the hour you could convince him to spare me.
I'm writing this from what I presume was once the Northwest family's living room. Or, one of many living rooms. I'm rather proud of what I've created here. I think you'll enjoy it, if you can bear the trek up here to the manor. I have to cross my fingers that, by the time you're reading this, the building is not better secured against trespassers, or worse, under new ownership. I'd like to see a realtor explain what I've built here to prospective buyers.
It dawns on me now that during our phone conversations over the years, you haven't once mentioned Pacifica. I do hope the two of you remained in touch. I don't know, my memory could well be failing me. I might even be in the wrong house!
Until next time,
Ford
It was strange, hearing Ford mention me. I had seen him around town since the summer that Mabel left for good, and I had always sunk into a trance at the sight of him, my heartbeat picking up as I waited for one of the twins to appear at his side, but they never did. And Ford never looked my way. It had been easy to think that the man had forgotten about my existence.
To be honest, I'm glad that this third step in Mabel's quest at least somewhat involves me. As much as I love sticking my nose in other people's business, tagging along with a girl while she discovers her dead uncle's trail of letters is far from my more conventional pastimes. I don't think I would have come with her if the destination wasn't my old doorstep.
I can see the mansion fully, now. Mabel and I have just emerged from the woods bordering the hill, and now we have to walk the winding trail from here to the back yard that zig-zags up the hill, dotted with pine trees, the hill itself being too steep to climb. We decided earlier, over coffee in the diner, that this was a stealthier plan than walking up the road around the front, which was once rigged with security cameras that may still be monitored from somewhere.
I stop at the beginning of the serpentine trail and look up. The sky is cloudless and the moon paints our route up the hill with dim light. The manor itself looms over us menacingly, the once constant yellow glow from its windows a thing of the past. A few steps ahead, I sense Mabel pause and turn to look at me.
"You okay?" she says, her voice soft against the backdrop of the breeze and the occasional cricket.
"My dad used this trail to get down to the woods when he went hunting," I tell her, disjointed memories flashing through my head that I want to vomit out in words. "He took me with him once. I shot a fox. I hated it."
"You've told me that before," Mabel says, now at my side. "You said it looked at you right before you pulled the trigger. Before you had time to react. And you couldn't forget its eyes."
"Yeah." And my dad patted me on the shoulder and said nice shot, Pacifica. I frown. "Come on. Let's see what other awful memories we can bring back to life."
We don't say anything else until we're halfway up the hill. I can clearly see the iron gate in the stone wall that surrounds the house from here. It's possible to climb over it - I've done it before - but I can't imagine that would have been Ford's method of entry.
"It's cold out here tonight," Mabel says, cutting through my train of thought.
I glance over at her, in her Greasy's blue shirt and gray skirt, her bare arms folded. "You should have brought a jacket."
"It was so warm earlier. Didn't think I'd need one."
"Well then, you're stupid. Not my problem."
"I'm stupid because I can't predict the weather?"
"Among other reasons."
"If you were polite," she says, "you would offer me your hoodie."
"Then I would be cold," I deadpan.
Mabel smirks and bumps her shoulder into mine. "I was only teasing."
I'm really not sure what compels me to do it, for old time's sake, maybe, but I wrap my arm around her shoulders and say, "here. Better?"
For a second she looks up at me like I've terrified her, but then a broad smile takes over her face and, shit, that's the kind of smile that girls give me when they're inviting me to kiss them. I almost laugh at the thought, which plants a smile on my face, too, and Mabel puts her arms around my midriff and we walk the rest of the trail wrapped up together, sharing body warmth. All I can smell is her perfume, which is incredible considering she has been serving deep-fried heart attacks on a plate for the last seven hours. I don't think I've ever been lucky enough to smell so great even after being in the diner for five minutes. I'll have to ask her what her secret is, one day. Not right now. Pointing out how delightful she smells right now would take me one step closer to flirting. That is, if I'm not there already. Am I there already? I glance at the hand resting on her opposite arm. Fuck.
We separate naturally at the tall iron gate. After a moment of pointless deliberation, I step forward and rattle the gate, but as I imagined, it is locked.
"This is creepy," Mabel says, her arms hugging her chest again.
"If you think it's creepy for you, imagine how I feel." I look up at the conical spikes lining the top of the gate and sigh. "Should have changed out of these freaking heels." I kick off my shoes and post them through the slits in the gate. There are two horizontal bars in the gate, evenly spaced, so I plant one bare foot on the lower bar, push my other foot to the second bar, and then boost myself over the top of the gate, carefully, so my clothes don't catch on the spikes. Mabel takes off her heels and follows suit.
The mansion lacks a back yard entirely - there's a ten-foot wide gap between the stone wall and the house, a gravel path running along it, lined with flowerbeds on either side. The flowers are dead, and the lamps jutting out of the ground are all switched off. Mabel follows me through the dark, around to the side-entrance of the building. My heart races when I see that one half of the wooden double doors is ajar. It hadn't occurred to me that a secluded mansion might be a squatter's paradise.
"Well," Mabel says, stepping past me. "If the door's open, we're not breaking in, right?" She turns on the flashlight on her phone and pushes the door open, stepping back while it creaks loudly. I peer over her shoulder as she casts a beam of light into my old kitchen. She calls out "hello?" once in the kitchen, then again when we walk out into the hallway that connects to the main lobby, and the only voice that comes back is her own, reverberant.
The walls are still adorned with hunting trophies - deer heads, mostly. My dad never took them down because they wouldn't have all fit in our new house. And my mom hated them.
"This is way creepier than I thought it was going to be," I say, while Mabel steams fearlessly ahead into the lobby. I peer into one of the old studies, and very dimly lit by the moon, I can see a felted chair and a dark curved desk. That's all that's in the room. And then I remember sitting at that desk, as a child, absorbed in one of my Where's Waldo? books, the smell of dinner drifting in from the kitchen. Why is it so easy to feel nostalgic for memories you wish you hadn't lived through in the first place?
Something crawls up the back of my neck and I yelp like a wounded dog. I spin around and Mabel's there, of course, poorly suppressing a grin.
"Well that isn't funny at all," I tell her, pinching at her ribs until she swipes my hand away.
We climb up the grand staircase in the lobby and my legs carry me to the door of my old bedroom. It takes my brain a while to instruct my hand to turn the doorknob, and when the door swings open a gust of cold air blasts us in the face. There always was a draft in here. I hear Mabel follow me into the room but I don't say anything for a minute; I turn on the spot slowly in the center of the room, like one of those display tables on the shopping network, and I mentally piece together everything that made up the room.
"I learned to play piano in here," I murmur without really thinking about it.
Mabel steps up close to me and says, "do you still play?"
"No."
"How come?"
I shrug. "Grew out of it."
"You should grow back into it. You were incredible."
"I wasn't that good."
"You were. I remember coming to see you at the bar, you literally glowed when you were on stage. And when you started singing, oh my god. It was beautiful."
"I've just... lost all interest. There's this moron at the diner who plays the same Hall & Oates song on the jukebox twenty-four seven. It's really ruined music for me."
Mabel prods my chest and says, "you will dance with me by the end of summer."
"I will not."
"You will," she says, moving to the door and leaning on the frame. "I have my ways." She either winks at me or blinks - it's hard to tell in the dark, but it makes me blush anyway, because apparently my body will settle for any amount of attention from any woman whatsoever.
We find the 'creation' that Ford was talking about on the second floor, in what I once knew as the upstairs lounge. Mabel waltzes into the room without any light and trips over it. I grab her arm and steady her before she slams into the floor, and when I shine my flashlight at her feet we both gasp quietly, a long-lost part of our childhood personalities coming back to life.
There's green felt, bordered either side by wooden planks. It's a miniature golf course. A miniature miniature golf course, five holes in the room in total.
Mabel laughs to herself. "This is cool."
The felt ramps up and down in places, and more wooden planks and sawed-up logs act as obstacles. There's even a red metal loop on the fifth hole, which looks like it's merely been stolen from an existing putt-putt golf course. Ford was an imaginative felon in his final days, it would seem.
"Check this out," Mabel says from behind me, and when I shine my light on her she's holding up two clubs and two balls. I notice an electric lantern on the shelf behind her, clearly left here for us along with the clubs, and when I switch it on it's far brighter than I expected, casting the whole room in an orange glow. I plant it on the floor in the center.
"Did Ford know I would be here with you?" I say, my eyebrows knitted together.
Mabel glances between me and the clubs, and then her eyes go wide when I reiterate that she's holding two of them. "Maybe," she says. "That'd be weird."
"Well then, Pines." I strut over to her and take one of the putters. "Ready to embarrass yourself?"
She smiles at me coyly and says, "there's only one girl here who's going to embarrass herself, and it isn't you."
"What?"
"I mean it isn't me. It is you. Darn it! I messed that up."
I watch Mabel drop her ball on the felt for the first hole, and proceed to stretch her limbs in several totally unnecessary ways like she's on a starting block at the Olympics. I roll my eyes and lean back on the empty bookshelf behind me, then stand up straight for fear of it collapsing and taking me down with it. When her warm-up ritual is over, Mabel taps the ball effortlessly and it sails forward into the hole.
"That's how it's done," she says, sauntering over to take my place by the bookshelf.
"Please. It's a straight line to the hole, a blind man could make that shot."
"It's a good thing you have the skill level of a blind man, then."
While I'm lining up my shot, I make the mistake of glancing over at her. She's sitting on the bookshelf, one smooth, bare leg folded over the other, her high-heeled foot twirling in circles, her hair hanging low, her body aglow in orange light. I wonder to myself if she ever realizes how alluring she can be, then curse at myself, and despite the ongoing hormonal battle in my mind, I score a hole-in-one just as Mabel did.
We each take two shots on the second hole, she takes four shots to my two on the third hole, I take three shots to her one on the fourth hole, and now she has scored a hole-in-one on the final hole, and I'm waiting for her to finish making a monumentally big deal over it through song and dance.
If I can make this in one shot, it will be a tie. If I don't, I'll curl up in a ball and flood the house with my tears. I'm professionally trained in mini golf, for god's sake. Mabel is crouched down at the end of the felt, like she's guarding the hole, so her smug face is all I can see while I'm lining up my shot. I have to aim dead straight, with enough power to make it through the loop.
"Can you move?" I say, trying to sound stern but only managing more of a giggly teenager.
"I'm not doing anything!"
"Just you being there is annoying. It's distracting me."
"There are no rules about me sitting here, Pacifica."
"You'd just better hope you don't get a golf ball to the teeth."
I miss. I'm too far to the left and the ball bounces off the metal rim of the loop, with a ding so loud that it's almost like the course itself is laughing at me, and not just Mabel, who is now up on her feet and lifting her club as her trophy.
"God dammit," I shout, throwing my club at the floor, no longer concerned about the flimsy foundations of the room.
"They said she couldn't do it," Mabel announces to the room. "They said she couldn't beat the prissy Pacifica Northwest, but she has done it, and with grace!"
"Grace? Is that what you call this?" I say, advancing on her, while hopelessly unable to suppress my laughter. "Is that what you call taunting me from behind the hole?"
"There is nothing against the rules about standing behind the hole, my friend."
"Oh, it's not against the rules? Is it against the rules if I throw you down the stairs?" Mabel's a petite woman, but it's still surprising how easy it is to pick her up and sling her over my shoulder.
"What are you doing?" she squeals, through her own giggling. "Put me down!"
"Nope, you're going on a trip. To the floor."
"Pacifica, put me down," she says, laughter betraying her, while she hammers on my butt with her golf club. I make it halfway across the landing to the stairs, and it's only when she lands a particularly tough blow that I let her down.
"Ow. I think you just bruised my butt cheek."
"Serves you right," she says, shoving my chest.
"God, you're heavy. You should eat less."
Mabel smirks and folds her arms. "Maybe you should be less aggressive with your flirting."
"Flirting? Trust me, sweetie, I would never flirt with the likes of you."
Only when I turn back and walk toward the golf-course-slash-lounge do I let the smile slide off of my face. I'm not flirting with her, am I? I would be stupid to flirt with her, knowing what I know about her. And about us. Anyway, she started it. I think? It's suddenly very uncomfortable to look at her. The thought of it all happening over again, falling head over heels, that's much scarier than the thought of murderers lurking in the shadows of my old house.
While I lay my club and ball on the bookshelf we found them on, which feels somewhat pointless, I hear Mabel let out a soft "oh" from behind me. I turn around and she's unfolding a piece of paper - it must have been hidden inside the final hole. I keep my distance as she reads aloud, "You'll find me in the theater, right beneath your socks." Her eyebrows knit together and she turns the paper over, then turns it back around. "That's all it says. Is there a theater in here?"
I shake my head. "There's a theater on the other side of town. It's near Yumberjacks."
"Right beneath your socks..."
"Maybe under the floorboards?"
Mabel stands there in thought for a moment, and with the adrenaline of competition and my supposed flirting having worn off, my body remembers that we're approaching midnight, and I yawn. She looks up at me. "When are you next free?"
I shrug. It's always humiliating admitting out loud that my evening plans consist of nothing at all. "Tomorrow."
Tomorrow night, we agree, we will scope out the theater for a possible entry point, like the true criminals we have become. The alternative to breaking in would be to actually watch a play, and I've seen the Gravity Falls amateur theatrics ensemble once in my life, and once is enough.
We leave Ford's golf course how we found it, which I'm sure will be an irritating surprise for whoever the mansion's next owners turn out to be. Maybe it will never be lived in again, maybe I'll walk by one day and a demolitions crew will be up on the hill, knocking it to the ground. I don't think I'll miss it.
Mabel and I hop over the back gate and start walking down the hill. I'm lost in thought when she wraps her hands around my arm and falls into step beside me, my nose welcoming the scent of her perfume again. She smiles, almost shyly, and tells me that it's still cold. And although a week ago I would have shaken her off, I seem to have accepted this new reality where we can cuddle up to each other like we're best friends again.
But these sweet, innocent moments between us can never last. We're about halfway down the hill when Mabel cuts into the night's silence with, "would now be a good time to talk?"
My throat constricts. "About?"
She takes a breath and then talks fast, like the words will make her queasy. "About what I did to you."
They certainly make me sick. "I already told you I don't want to talk about that."
Mabel stops walking while I carry on. Our arms separate naturally. "That was weeks ago. That was before... tonight."
I halt and turn to look back at her, barely able to make out her features in the dark. "And what do you think happened tonight?"
"It was like we stepped back in time. Like the last few years didn't matter. They do matter, of course, that's not what I mean... but tonight felt like we were friends again."
She says the last part wistfully, like she expects me to feel sorry for her. I feel my face harden. Suddenly I'm not looking at the Mabel that I hugged on the beach, or the Mabel that I invited into my apartment, or the Mabel that I wrapped up in my arms on our way up this hill. Now she's the one that drove away, the one that made me feel sick to my stomach with shame and regret and dread for months, the one who had a boyfriend, the one who now has a fiancé. "It did," I admit. "And of course you can't let that happen on its own, can you? You can't just... let something be. You won't rest until everything is one-hundred percent perfect between us."
"That's not true," she pleads. "I just want a chance to apologize, to explain-"
"I know that's what you want," I snap. I hear the echo flurry through the woods at the base of the hill. "Why should I give you that chance? I know what you want. You want closure. You want to come up here and stroll back into my life, make amends, and then fuck off back home with your head held high because you're no longer hated by some girl from your past who lives hundreds of miles away. Fuck that." My vision turns blurry from an onslaught of tears, reliving all the moments after she left that I needed her and she wasn't there. "I want you to remember what you did to me. I want the image of me in your rear-view mirror pounding the road with my fist, I want that burned into your eyelids, so that every time you try to sleep you relive it all over again."
"I already do," she says, taking two steps toward me while I step backwards. Tears stream from her eyes. "I think about it all the time. If you would just listen, I want to make amends for you, not for me."
"Well you can't," I tell her, blinking away my own tears. "You can't make up for it, ever. I cried over you for weeks, Mabel. I spent days, in bed, thinking about you, in agony, because you were never coming back. If you had stayed in my life, I-" what? Wouldn't have started drinking? I couldn't know that. "You can't make up for that."
She stares at her feet and grinds her heel into the dirt, her mouth twisting like there are a thousand things she can't decide whether to say.
I wipe the tears from my eyes and say, "We should have known this would happen. Working at the diner together, going out on these weird, emotional adventures. It's too much."
"I'll quit my job at the diner," she murmurs.
"No, don't- it's fine. I don't want you to do that. I just need you to know that I'm never gonna forgive you."
Her eyes meet mine for a sliver of a second, enough for the hurt to register. My teenage self would have reveled in the sight, but I'm too tired. My emotions have dried up for the day. Nothing like a heavy, years-in-the-making argument to round off an evening.
Neither of us put forward a plan for how to avoid each other on the way back to town, so I walk through the woods with her flashlight beam bouncing in and out of my vision as she trails along behind me, taking soft steps as if she doesn't want me to know she's there. We pass the diner, take the path into town, and where it meets a street corner I say, "see you tomorrow," and she mumbles out a response.
And the next thing I know, I'm standing under a streetlamp, gazing at the neon blue and red OPEN sign in the window of the bar. Welcome, a separate sign underneath tells me. Welcome. Always welcome here. Come here and forget, it may as well say. I tell myself I've earned it and I push open the door.
I don't remember my old street being so... wavy. I laugh at myself. That's a bad joke. I've walked this road, this path up my old front lawn, far more wasted than I am right now.
Why am I here? I came here for something. It's pretty late. Mom will be asleep. Maybe I should be considerate, and leave... nope. Already knocking on the door. She'll be freaking out right now, actually. She almost had a heart attack when she came home one night and saw the light on in her living room - she ducked behind a hedge in the front yard and called me in panic, and when I turned up there was a police car outside and my mother explained calmly that I didn't need to worry, she had left the light on by mistake.
She answers the door in a fluffy pink robe, and even through the tiny slit that the door chain allows, I can see her holding a fire iron. She rolls her eyes at the sight of me. "Pacifica," she hisses. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Surprise," I exclaim, a little too loudly.
Mom shuts the door, and I frown and say, "rude," before I realize that she is unlocking the door chain and opening it fully. As soon as she does, the kitten darts into the yard towards the road - FREEDOM! - and Mom scurries after him and chases him around the yard in her robe, which is just about the funniest thing I could ever witness at three o'clock in the morning. She catches him and stands beside me on the porch, looking at me expectantly. "Go inside, for god's sake."
"Oh, sorry," I slur, stepping over the threshold. "Didn't realize I was invited in. You don't look too happy to see me."
"It's 3 A.M. Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," I sing. "I'm good. Look at Toby's little paws, he's growing up so fast!"
"You're drunk. I'll get you some water." She sets Toby down and walks sleepily into the kitchen, switching the lights on for the kitchen and the living room simultaneously.
Jesus, those bulbs are bright. I shield my eyes from the ceiling lamp and make my way to the couch, attempting to sit down gracefully but collapsing instead. "I'm an alcoholic, Mom," I tell her, as she hands me a glass of water. I gulp it down in one.
"No you're not, don't be silly," she says, sitting a safe distance away from me on the couch, as if my delinquent behavior is contagious.
"I am. It's a real thing," I yawn.
"Shush. Lie down and get some sleep. Do you need a bucket?"
I lie back on the couch even though I don't want to, because my mom hypnotized me at a young age to do whatever she says, and apparently that still works from time to time. "You're not listening," I say. "I'm not gonna be sick. I'm gonna be depressed for a week because I've relapsed again," but Mom isn't in the room anymore.
And the light is so bright. I shut my eyes and I'm assaulted by my freshest memory of Mabel, tears shielding her beautiful brown eyes, looking up at me like I'm breaking her heart as much as she broke mine. Maybe I should be nicer to her.
"How do I forgive people, Mom?" I ask her when she comes back in and drapes a comforter over the couch.
She looks at me regretfully, then brushes hair out of my face and kisses my forehead. "I can only hope that one day you do," she says, and when the light goes out my fleeting thought before sleep is that my mom is stupid and ignorant; she wasn't even listening to me.
I awake to the smell of freshly brewed coffee, though I'm soon forced by the morning light to shut my eyes again. I don't know if it's possible to tell how expensive coffee is from its smell, but I think I can anyway, and I therefore deduce that whatever hell I brought upon myself last night led me to my mother's living room.
Before I can decide whether I need to escape, she's standing over me, her hair hanging loose and dazzling in the sun. She pulls up a little wooden table and sets down a glass of water and a cup of coffee beside the couch.
"Water first, then coffee," she instructs me, and when I've worked up the energy to sit up, I comply.
The coffee fast-forwards me through my memories to the moment I lay down on the couch. I violently throw the comforter off of me and stuff it at the end of the couch, because it doesn't feel right, that my mother would successfully pull off an act of motherhood. She watches me curiously, hands on hips, and when I offer no explanation for my spasmodic behavior she sighs and sits beside me on the couch, while I stare into the swirling black liquid in my cup and pray that it will open up and suck me in. The last thing I'm in the mood for on this far-too-early morning is explanation.
"I just got off the phone with Nina," Mom says, which surprises me so much I almost spew coffee all over pristine carpet. "She was worried about you. She said she tried calling you several times last night, and you never ignore her."
"I was busy," I croak. Busy feeling sorry for myself. That counts.
"I told her what you said to me last night. About your... addiction."
My eyes dance over every inanimate object in the room. Anything to avoid her ice-queen glare.
"She sounded surprised that you'd told me. I wanted her to tell me that you were just being dramatic... Pacifica, how could you keep something like this from me?"
I grit my teeth, and come out with the most generic angsty-teenager response possible: "Since when do you care about my life?"
She's quiet for a moment. I listen to the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. My eyes drift to its pendulum, swinging back and forth, lazily, all day, and I'm irrationally envious. Clocks live such simple lives.
"I know we don't have the closest relationship," she says.
"That's an understatement."
"But for goodness' sake, I'm your mother. You're supposed to tell me these things so that I can help you."
I let out a dry chuckle. "Alcoholism isn't like other problems, Mom, you can't throw money at it to make it go away."
"Why are you being so abrupt with me right now? I want to help you, Pacifica, and that starts with you listening to me."
"No, Mom," I say, standing and rubbing my eyes, already exhausted from this conversation. "It starts with you staying out of it. I don't know why I came here last night, really, I don't. I think maybe, deep down, I want to be able to love you, but the truth is, there are a handful of other people who would have welcomed me inside last night, and those people have been helping me since the day they met me. They know all about my problem, and they're far more useful to me than you would be."
"Really?" She follows me into the hall while I search for my shoes - they're lined up neatly among my mother's many pairs in the corner, of course. "And what's Nina going to do from two-hundred miles away?"
"I have other friends, Mom."
"Then where were they last night? They can't be that much help to you if you're still out getting drunk at stupid o'clock in the morning."
I fumble with my heels and glare up at her. "Don't talk about my friends like that."
"Pacifica, there is proper help out there that I can arrange for you. They have programs for alcoholics, support groups-"
"Oh my god, you don't get it," I shout, my limited patience boiling. "I've been through all of that already, of course I have. You have no fucking idea how long this has been going on, do you? None at all!"
Her arms are dead still at her sides. She looks like she might cry, but I've finally shut her up, at least.
"Three years, Mom," I say, and I'm surprised to hear my own voice break. "I was getting drunk right under your nose, while I still lived here, three years ago. And you didn't even notice. So what help do you think you're gonna be now? You had a chance to help me, your precious daughter, and you didn't."
"I can change," she pleads. "I have changed. I can be there for you, Pacifica, I promise."
I open the front door, breathe in the calming fresh air, and against my better judgment turn to look at her. "You weren't there for me when I actually needed you. You weren't there for me when Dad died."
The sound of the door closing behind me ignites my self-confidence and lets it burn for all of five minutes, before I'm holding back my sobs, and my tears stain the sun-soaked sidewalk. I don't know whether to turn back and run to my mother's open arms, or continue the battle the way I've always fought it, solo.
Three years ago, I didn't have that choice.