Saving Alice Read Online Free Page B

the whole story.
    We lived in a short, single-wide trailer on the good side of the tracks—if only by a few yards. Sometimes, after church, we’d eat out, which was the high point of my mother’s week, and then take the back way home. Just before reaching the railroad tracks, my dad would point toward the right—to a small row of dilapidated homes—and mutter, “Things could be worse, Maggie. We could be living in Uglyville.”
    I came to believe that so-called Uglyville was the lowest rung on the ladder, much worse than a trailer, and yet it seemed so close to the rung we were already clinging to we seemed only inches away from its dismal destiny.
    Although our financial situation was precarious, my mother did a pretty good job of pretending otherwise. She had a habit of finding the silver lining to every cloud, and if she struggled, she’d quote some Bible verse to make up the difference.
    “There is no limit to God’s miraculous power,” she often said. “He’ll supply all our needs. He will never forsake us.” Even our living room pillows were stitched with biblical phrases: Miracles happen to those who believe, and so on.
    The issue of whether or not to believe never even occurred to me, not then anyway, and there were times when I talked to God for hours, out in the ditch behind our trailer beneath the starry night. Usually I spent the time complaining, or asking for something, but in spite of my poor spiritual manners, the sense of God’s closeness sometimes took my breath away. There were moments when I thought I could have reached out and shook His hand, but I never tried because the feel of God’s hand in mine would have terrified me.
    Raised in the same church, Mom and Dad had grown up in mutual poverty in Bowdle, about forty-five minutes to the west of Aberdeen. They’d married just out of high school, after which my father passed his brokerage test and hung a shingle in the “big city” of Aberdeen. My mother, positioned by my father’s loud personality, existed in the mere background of our lives. Most people described her in terms of what she wasn’t: She wasn’t like my father—loud, boisterous, and opinionated, who had no end of compliments … for strangers.
    I always wondered why people took him at face value, but later I realized they hadn’t. Sure, there was a group of people who trusted him—the ever-present P. T. Barnum constituency, my father’s bread and butter. But on the whole, most people had figured him out pretty quickly. Those who hadn’t lost their savings, as I had first learned when I met Jim.
    Larry Marshall and Paul Thompson were my best friends in elementary school. They were, and still are, the yin and yang of my life. After school, Larry, my “action” friend, would prevail upon me to race miniature gas cars and sometimes, on the weekends, fire model rockets.
    For years Paul, my “thinking” friend, and I discussed stories from various editions of Ripley’s Believe It or Not: stories such as the bearded lady, the man who’d been shot in the head and lived to tell about it, or the man who suddenly appeared out of the blue on the streets of London, confused and speaking a long-dead language.
    Even then, Paul was interested in fringe physics—quantum mechanics, wormholes, super strings, multiple dimensions—the kind of extreme science that satisfied his attraction to the unexplainable.
    As for me, the idea that the universe was not as it appeared held great appeal as well, and our discussions only increased my fascination with the idea of miracles—that on behalf of His creation, God sometimes exercised the power to act outside of time and space, and that sometimes He acted mysteriously.
    In spite of Paul’s interest in the unusual, he wearied of what he called my “increasing and disturbing religiosity.”
    “It’s like oil and water,” he told me, sounding like a pint-sized MIT professor. “Physics and religion don’t mix.”
    I shouldn’t have