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Stan Pines let out a deep breath and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The Shack was closed and the kids were settled, and he’d made dinner—a real dinner, not grazing off canned goods like he usually did. Everything was fine. He could do this. Sure, it had been . . . a little harder than he’d expected, seeing the two of them. But he was fine.
Stan heard a clattering noise in the kitchen and wandered over to investigate. If it was those gnomes again, someone was going to have a very bad night. He’d thought that he’d sent enough of them flying with a well-aimed whack of the broom that they’d finally gotten the hint, but the little devils were persistent.
He paused in the doorway. No. Not gnomes. It was the girl—Mabel—standing on the table and rummaging through all his cabinets.
He crossed his arms and cleared his throat noisily. She spun around. “Grunkle Stan! Where do you keep your pasta?”
Stan grunted. “You’re hungry again? I thought I just fed you kids.”
Mabel was shaking her head, her hands waving in front of her. “No no no no no. Grunkle Stan, this pasta isn’t for eating. It’s for art!”
“For what now?”
Mabel picked up the large alarmingly pink book that was sitting on the table and held it open. She’d already taped in the picture she’d taken earlier that day, the one where Stan looked like he did in all the tourist photos and Mabel looked like she was posing for some tween magazine and Dipper was glaring at the camera like he didn’t trust it.
“I don’t know if our parents told you this when they set this up, but I’m an amazing artist,” she said, flashing him a wide metallic smile. “I focus heavily on the scrapbook, an underappreciated and much-maligned form of expression.”
Stan poked at the googly-eyed star sticker on the page. It jiggled. “Uh-huh.”
“Anyway, I brought a suitcase full of craft supplies, which is most of the things I need, but sometimes traditional media just isn’t enough to capture my artistic vision. For this page, I need the expressive power of macaroni!”
Stan decided that there was no point in trying to parse that sentence as a whole. At least the last word made sense. He pointed at one of the cabinets. “Top shelf,” he said gruffly.
Mabel flung the cabinet door open, then looked up at the shelf high above her head.
“Can I get a hand?” she asked. “I could climb it, but Mom and Dad don’t let me climb on the furniture at home.”
Stan shrugged. “Eh, climb all you want. It’s a free country.”
Mabel squealed and leapt off the table into his arms. “Grunkle Stan, you’re the greatest!”
For a moment Stan was terrified that he would drop her. He wasn’t used to kids flinging themselves at him. He wasn’t used to kids, period, unless they were tourists he was trying to fleece. But his arms moved quickly enough, instinctively reaching to catch her, while his brain tried to remember the last time anyone had actually wanted to hug him. He drew a blank.
Mabel’s braces shone as she grinned up at him. The kids were smaller than he’d thought they would be. Were all twelve-year-olds so little? It didn’t matter. He just had to keep them busy, keep them away from the nuttier aspects of the town, and everything would be fine.
“Heheh,” he chuckled. “Yep. That’s me.”
He lowered Mabel to the ground and grabbed the box of macaroni from the top shelf.
“Don’t use it all,” he instructed her sternly. “I’m not made of money. Can’t have you kids eating me outta house and home. Or . . . crafting me outta . . . I don’t know, just be careful with it!”
Mabel nodded as she gathered the noodles and her scrapbook into her arms and skipped off towards the living room. “Thanks, Grunkle Stan!”
Stan shook his head. Crazy kid. Now there was glitter on the table and the floor and, huh, on him too apparently. Where did the stuff even come from?
Mabel began singing tunelessly from the other room. When he put the kids to bed, the living room table was covered in cracked macaroni and stickers, and enough of the noodles in the box were crusted over with glitter glue that he didn’t dare try to return it to the kitchen.
Before he turned out the light, Stan chuckled at the lopsided smiley face the girl had constructed. The expressive power of macaroni, indeed.
*
“This’ll work! This has to work!”
The girl ran towards him with a pink book clasped to her chest like it was some kind of magic shield. He flinched as she leapt up onto the chair. Had Stanley, whoever he was, enjoyed this kind of thing? The kid was like a little whirlwind, always moving, always reaching to hug him or hold his hand.
She sounded desperate. They’d all sounded desperate. It was . . . weird. He didn’t know these people. He wasn’t the man they were missing. He sort of wished they’d just leave him alone to take a nap in this nice chair in the—his house, they’d said. He could live with that.
He’d be fine if it wasn’t for the way they looked at him—like they’d seen a ghost. Maybe they had. They were looking for this “Stanley” and instead they got him. Whoever he was. If he’d known this was going to happen he’d have walked off by himself. No, he wouldn’t—it had taken help from both the big guy in the punctuation shirt and the man who said he was his brother to support him through his first clumsy steps. Still, if there was a way to not be there, he would take it. The naked grief on their faces, mixed with despair from old man and desperate hope from the kids, was almost more than he could stomach.
“Here’s the first day we came to Gravity Falls, Grunkle Stan!” the girl said, jabbing her finger at a photo. The man in the picture was wearing the same clothes that he was, but he looked much more at home in them. He was standing in front of the house they’d just entered—though it was in much better shape—and grinning from ear to ear. He had a cane in one hand and the fingers of the other hand spread wide—five fingers, so that proved the man in the photo was “Stanley” and not the other man who looked just like him.
The children were in the picture, too. The boy clutched at his backpack straps, obviously uncomfortable. He could relate. The girl was posing with one hand on her hip and the wide, sparkling smile he’d seen her wear in his first few seconds of consciousness, before she’d realized that he wasn’t the man she wanted him to be.
“And here’s a macaroni interpretation of my emotions!”
It was a lopsided smiley face with a question mark in the corner, embedded in a mess of drippy hot glue and glitter.
He blinked, and for a fraction of a second an image flashed through his mind—a box of pasta covered in glitter glue. But then it was gone and when he tried to think about it it skittered away like a dream. No . . . nothing.
Almost nothing. The same way that a spark is almost nothing. Deep in the head of the man who was once Stanley Pines, something stirred.
*
Everything came back in fragments, like puzzle pieces, like glimpses through a keyhole, like a hand of cards for a game you’d never been taught how to play.
He did his best. They were all so eager to help, but nothing had the decency to come linearly, or to just come back and stay there. Memories flickered in and out of existence, or he’d remember a piece of something and know from everyone’s faces—his family’s faces. He was beginning to believe them when they said they were his family—that he was missing something important.
Out of everything they were using to jog his memory, he spent the most time with the scrapbook. Mabel took him through it page by page, over and over again, gently asking if he remembered any details of the scenes.
She settled down on his lap. He didn’t flinch anymore; he knew she belonged there. The book opened once again. “Day 1,” and the picture he’d looked at so many times that he could see it with his eyes closed, and that ridiculous page of macaroni—
Deep in the head of the man who was once again becoming Stanley Pines, something connected.
“You wanted to climb the cupboards,” he blurted out. “You wanted to climb the cupboards because I keep the pasta on the top shelf, and your parents don’t let you climb on furniture, but I told you it was okay and you said—”
“You’re the greatest!” Mabel shouted, and she flung her small arms around his neck. “Grunkle Stan, you remembered!”
“Yeah . . .” He braced himself for the memory to drain away the way they usually did. One arm was wrapped tight around Mabel—she wore the shooting star sweater they day they came. He knew that, he’d seen the pictures, but now he could remember her sitting on the table, flinging herself off it into arms that weren’t yet used to holding her—and the other traced the contours of the macaroni glued to the scrapbook page. It felt gritty under his fingers—some of the glitter glue was still wet when he went to bed, when he tried to pick the contaminated noodles out of the box, and the sparkles stayed on his hands for days.
“You ruined my box of pasta,” he said, faux-grumpy.
The tone didn’t fool Mabel for a second. “I did!” she yelled. “I totally did!”
She leaned back just enough that she could meet his eyes, giving him a smile so big and bright that for all Mabel’s talent no macaroni in the world would be able to do it justice.