All the Winters After (12 page)

“Stop this,” Kache whispered to no one. “Please. Just stop.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

After another frustrating chamber meeting, Snag stopped by the Spit Tune to meet Gilly. Snag ordered a beer, and Gilly ordered a pink drink called a cosmo, which Snag had never heard of. “You know,” Gilly explained, “like on
Sex and the City
.”

“Both of those words are so far removed from my lifestyle, I'd feel like a complete fraud ordering one.”

Gilly laughed, pushed her drink over for Snag to try. It was sweet and tasty, and when Snag said so, Gilly went to the bar. Snag watched as she ordered a drink from the owner, Rex. A broad-shouldered man who had been sitting a few stools down rose and leaned over to say something in Gilly's ear, and though Snag couldn't hear the conversation, she saw Gilly shake her head and smile. The man was good-looking, at least in the dim light of the bar. Snag felt a small, hot kernel of jealousy sprouting in her chest, and she knew she had to put it out immediately. Gilly? No way. She hadn't let herself feel anything for anyone for twenty years because she'd felt nothing
but
jealousy for the twenty years prior. Twenty years of consuming jealousy, followed by twenty years of remorse. Not much of a life. And she knew that little burning coal—it had already blossomed from a kernel into a coal in minutes—could ruin all the years remaining. At sixty-five, she was lucky if she had twenty years or so left. She did not want them filled with envy and unrequited, impossible love. Gilly was a decade younger than Snag and straight as an ice pick. Enough said.

Gilly returned with a pink drink for Snag, and Snag closed her eyes and downed enough of it to put out that hot coal for good.

When she opened her eyes, she saw the beer sitting to the side, sweating, and beyond it, good ol' kindhearted Gilly, her new friend and nothing more, so help her God. Snag let out a sigh of relief.

Gilly must have thought it was a sigh of appreciation for the drink, because she said, “So I see you like it.”

Snag nodded and tilted her head toward the man at the bar. “An admirer?”

Gilly shrugged. “Not my type.”

Snag raised her eyebrows, but Gilly didn't elaborate, so Snag started filling her in on the chamber meeting, how everyone else seemed desperate to keep the old Herring Town caboose stuck at the end of the track. “That poor old caboose has been sitting there for decades, a pitiful museum to its former life. Why wouldn't they want to see it useful and moving again?”

“Excuse me for asking this, Snag, but why not just let the old caboose stay put and let there be a new version—a reproduction of the old one? Then everyone will be happy.”

“I won't be. It's the principle of the matter. That caboose makes me sad.”

“Sad?”

“Yep. Sad. Doesn't it make you sad? A bygone era, a town built on an industry, and then the whole thing up and dies because of greed, and the town almost died too.”

“But it didn't. It kept going. It reinvented itself.”

“Exactly! Which is why I'd like to see that caboose moving again.”

“I guess I'm not quite following you. Some might say the caboose has reinvented itself—as a museum.”

“Museums are about the past, not the future.”

“Ah.” Snag took a sip of the City Sexy drink without looking at Gilly, who continued, “Okay, I'll give you that much. But I don't think that's what's been eating you up lately.”

Rex came by and set a bowl of peanuts on their table. “Your boyfriend wanted to buy you another round, but I told him you were married so he'd lay off. Strange dude, even by Alaska standards.”

“Oh yeah?” Snag asked. “How's that?”

“He's a drifter. Says he has a cabin off the grid by the lake. Russian.”

“Old Believer?”

“Heh. Not even close. He had a job up at Prudhoe Bay, married a Native woman a while back, didn't work out, so now he's here again. Says he's a hermit except when he comes in to watch TV or listen to the band. Just want you to know I'm watching out for you two fair maidens.”

“Thanks, Rex,” Gilly said. “Does that mean
you're
buying the next round?”

“Hell no. Man's gotta make a living.” He grinned, flipped his towel over his shoulder, and headed back to the bar.

“Rex,” Snag said. “Always the gossip. I'm guessing he's scaring the guy off because Rex fancies you too.”

Gilly shook her head. “Naw, not Rex. He's been in love with Tilde Miller since the mastodons walked these parts. So. Here we are, despite the fact that you've managed to cancel on me three Thursdays in a row.”

“I can't even remember what I was so upset about that day you offered to talk.”

Gilly popped a peanut in her mouth and smiled. “I imagine you do remember.” Gilly was nice even when she was pinning you into a corner. She
gently
refused any bullshit.

Snag felt her face redden and was glad for the dim light of the bar. “I guess you're right. But it doesn't feel so urgent anymore.”

“Snag, you surely don't have to tell me one iota of anything, but I do find it helps me to talk this stuff out. Life can tie a person up in knots. Talking can loosen those knots, sometimes even set us free.”

“That's a nice idea, but it's not really true when you're talking about the past. Talking can't undo past mistakes. Nothing can. Especially when those mistakes set the people you love on a course bound for tragedy.”

The bar was practically empty now, Gilly's admirer gone and just old Johnny Mathis-Yes-That's-My-Real-Name and his son, Bobby, sitting down at the end of the bar, eyes locked on the TV. It was early yet, and the band wasn't due to start for another forty minutes.

Snag needed to move. Now. She started to get up, but Gilly reached for her arm, pulling her back down, and Snag landed with a plop. She stared at her hands. She liked her hands, with their nicely shaped nail beds, with her father's gold wedding band settled on her middle finger. They were capable hands. Gilly rested her hand on Snag's and waited.

Ever since Kache had come back, Snag had felt ready to burst at the seams with her secrets. And here was Gilly, all concerned eyes and ears—her earrings even dangled like carrots, beckoning Snag to finally speak. And so she did. “Are you ready for this one, Gilly? You've been a friend to me, and it's been nice knowing you, but all that's about to end. And that's okay. I'll understand. Because here it is: I was in love with my own sister-in-law. For twenty-two years, I was like a puppy following her around. Pathetic. I even fantasized about my brother kicking the bucket and her declaring her love for me. And then he went and did exactly that. And so did beautiful Bets and my sweet teddy bear of a nephew, Denny. And I'm to blame.”

It took all Snag had not to bolt out of there. Moments came and went. Empty glasses clinked behind the bar, and a commercial came on for a cruise line, causing Snag to wish she were in the tropics, alone on a ship of strangers rather than in the town bar confessing her sins to Gilly, who still hadn't pulled her hand away. She squeezed Snag's and said, “That is a tragic story. And I'm so sorry. But the biggest tragedy is that you've been blaming yourself for bad weather one day twenty years ago. You are a sensitive, caring, strong woman, Snag. But I'm sorry—your thoughts don't have that kind of power.”

“You don't understand.”

“I do understand. More than you think. And I understand that loving your sister-in-law did not make that plane crash into that mountain. I guarantee it.”

“But you weren't even there. There's even more to it. I—”

“I don't need to know specifics. I don't care. I know that you weren't in that plane when it crashed. Planes crash everywhere, but they especially like to crash in Alaska. You need to knock off this excuse for not living your life. Right this second.”

Snag exhaled. The breath kept coming. She had never told a soul, and now she'd just spilled her secret to a woman she didn't know all that well. True, she hadn't spilled
everything
, but she'd let go of enough to unplug the dam. Snag was making a scene, but nobody except Johnny and Bobby and Rex were there to witness it, and they were enthralled with golf up on the television. Gilly went to the bar for more drinks and brought back a stack of napkins, which Snag used to mop the tears on her face.

A crowd started gathering as the band set up. Snag waved at Marion Tilloko, Kache's old girlfriend and singing partner, whose grandfather's room was three doors down from Lettie's. Gilly waved too.

Snag leaned across her fresh drink and said, “I still have never, not once, gone out to the homestead since right after the crash. I lied to my mom and Kache about that too.”

“Are they mad about it?”

Snag shook her head. “Miraculously, no.”

“So there's only one thing left to do then.”

“What's that?”

“Let yourself off that hook you set back in the dark ages of 1985.”

TWENTY-NINE

Snag had left a note for Kache—
Down at the Spit Tune listening to the band. Come join us!
—which only further intensified his anguish. Not
a
band.
The
band, still playing at the same old bar, where in the early years, Rex had ignored the fact that the band was comprised of teenagers under the legal drinking age. They were going to be
huge
. That's what they said, and that's what everyone in town said, and that's what the newspaper reporter from Anchorage said. But this was all before Kache bailed.

How was it that he'd neglected his passion? How was it that he'd left behind the most important thing in the world to him, besides his family? It had been a strange relief to head down to Austin without his guitar. Head down to the exact place he'd planned to dive into nothing but music, music, music—accepted to UT on a music scholarship. The University of Texas wasn't so quick to offer the scholarship in accounting, but when Kache pointed out his perfect grades, not just in music, but in math, science, and English, as well as his volunteer work at the native village and his SAT scores, they pulled something they referred to as a hush-hush redistribution of funds and got him into the business department on a full ride. So there had been that hurdle. And then the daily hurdles of being in a town known for its abundance of music in most every bar, on most every street corner, not to mention all the festivals the whole city embraced—South by Southwest and Austin City Limits, to name a couple—and the way he'd practically bump into people like Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle and John Prine, his heroes sitting in a restaurant having lunch with a friend or hunched down in an aisle in a used bookstore or walking out of the pharmacy as he was walking in.

But he preferred dealing with all that to dealing with what hit him when he played. He'd tried at first, still at home, in the weeks after they died. But the music always took him back to that last awful night.

• • •

That last awful night, Kache had retreated to his bedroom, locked the door, and strummed as loud as possible over his dad's yelling and banging, his threatening to kick down the door, until he finally did. He pushed his face into Kache's, but Kache kept on playing as loud as possible. He smelled scotch and the onions from the casserole Aunt Snag had brought. He'd seen his dad drunk before, but not often and not like this. All three of the adults were cutting loose that night, and his dad was getting ugly. After the complaints about Kache's inability, his laziness around the homestead, it always came down to his music, as if it were a personal affront and the cause of all the evil in the world. It didn't matter that Kache worked so hard at school and his music; it only mattered that he didn't work hard enough at home.

“You goddamn lazy ass! You pompous little shit. Don't you ever lock your goddamn door on me again, you understand?” Kache didn't answer. “You understand me?”

Kache had been silently shaking, but he tried for boldness. “No. I don't understand you. I never will.”

His dad pulled him up by his hair and then did what he'd never done. He punched him, hard, and blood spurted like a surprise from Kache's nose. Despite himself, tears filled his eyes while the blood filled his hand.

Kache said what he'd never said before. “I hate you. Why don't you just go fucking kill something? Go shoot your animals and leave me alone.”

Snag stepped over the door, calling, “Bets, bring ice!” and chewed out Glenn, who stumbled away. “What are you, some kind of monster?” she yelled after him. But even Aunt Snag, who Kache had never seen drunk, slurred her words. She grabbed a T-shirt off the floor, not knowing it was his favorite, a Blaze Foley T-shirt that Marion had bought him at a concert in the Lower 48 and brought back last summer. Snag held Blaze Foley up to Kache's nose and let the blood soak in. Kache closed his eyes and wished for Denny, but he was out on a date. None of this would have happened if Denny had been home. His dad wouldn't dare touch Kache in Denny's presence. Kache couldn't believe he'd done it at all.

Then it was his mom crouching over him, smoothing back his hair, saying, “I'm sorry, honey, I'm so sorry. That's not your dad. It's the drink,” but he smelled the scotch on her too. What the hell was everyone getting so drunk for? What had started as a nice enough meal with Aunt Snag and a game of Scrabble (planned for later but never played) had turned into a drunken brawl of an evening. Even later, as he lay on his bunk bed, pumped up with some painkillers leftover from his mom's knee surgery, he heard more yelling and crying. He rehung the door as best he could, given his drugged state and lack of carpentry skills. Then he nailed it shut and refused to come out. Maybe if Denny had come home, he might have worked himself into Kache's room and talked him into joining them. But Denny had spent the night at his girlfriend's.

The next morning, Kache wouldn't acknowledge his father's pleas for forgiveness. Instead, he played his guitar over his dad's words. “I'm sorry as a man can be, Son. It was wrong of me. Kachemak? Please forgive me.”

The front door slammed. He stopped playing. His parents' footsteps on the front porch, the gravel. He quietly opened his window, straining to hear. The hunting and fishing gear thrown in the truck bed. Doors creaking open.

His dad said, “He'll be all right.”

“Maybe I should stay with him.” These were the last words he'd ever hear her speak.

“Sometimes, Bets, a man needs his space. Let's give him that. Come on, hon. I told Den we'd pick him up by now.”

One door slammed, the engine growled into a roar, and then Kache peeked out and saw his mother look up to his window. He wanted to step forward, wave, tell her to wait, but he stayed to the side and watched her climb in and pull her door shut. It would have been so easy to stop them. The time it would have taken him to pack up his stuff would have delayed them, might have changed everything. But he didn't stop them. He watched the truck churn gravel as it turned and made its way up the road until they were gone.

This is what Kache had heard whenever he'd tried to play the guitar again all those years before:
His dad screaming, his dad threatening, Kache saying those words I hate you I hate you, go fucking kill something, his mom consoling, his dad apologizing, and then the doors shutting, the truck starting and leaving without Kache on their way to pick up Denny. Denny. The big brother who always stuck up for him.

• • •

He ran his fingers down along his nose and back up. He needed to pick up new strings. The thought taunted him as he sat on the bed in Snag's guest room, holding his old guitar. He didn't know if the background noise of that night would still be there when he played.

If he hurried, he could get to Jeff's Music to buy those strings before it closed.

Or he could turn on Snag's TV, lie back on the couch, catch
The House That Jack and Jack Jr. Built
, and call it a day. It wasn't like he hadn't been working his ass off.