All the Winters After (2 page)

TWO

There he was, Kachemak Winkel, on a plane of all things, finally headed home of all places. Yes, his fingernails dented the vinyl of the armrests, and the knees of his ridiculously long legs pressed into the seat in front of him, causing the seat to vibrate. A little boy turned and peered at Kache through the crack between B3 and B4. Kache motioned to his legs with a sweep of his hand and said, “Sorry, buddy. No room.” But he knew that didn't account for the annoying jittering.

“Afraid of flying?” the man next to him asked, peering above his reading glasses and his newspaper. He wore a tweed blazer and a hunting cap that made him look like a studious Elmer Fudd but with hair, which poked out around the earflaps. “Scotch helps.”

Kache nodded thanks. He had every reason to be afraid, it being the twentieth anniversary of the plane crash. But oddly, he was not afraid to fly and never had been. If God or the Universe or whoever was in charge wanted to pluck this plane from the sky and fling it into the side of a mountain in some cruel act of irony or symmetry, so be it. All the fear in the world wouldn't make a difference. No, Kache was not afraid of flying. He was afraid of flying
home
. And that fear had kept him away for two decades.

He shifted in his seat, elbow on the armrest next to the window, his finger habitually running up and down over the bump on his nose that he'd had since he was eighteen. The plane window framed the scene below, giving it that familiar, comforting, screened-in quality, and through it he watched Austin, Texas, become somewhere south, just another part of the Lower 48 to most Alaskans.

He had spent the majority of those two decades in front of a computer screen, trying to forget what he'd left behind, scrolling column after column of anesthetizing numbers and getting promotion after promotion. Too many promotions, evidently.

After the company had laid him off six months ago, he replaced the computer screen with a TV screen. Janie encouraged him to keep looking for another job, but he discovered the Discovery Channel, evidence of what he'd suspected all along: even the world beyond the balance sheets was flat. Flat screen, forty-seven inches, plasma. That plasma became his lifeblood. So many channels. A whole network devoted to food alone. He learned how to brine a turkey, bone a turkey, smoke a turkey, high-heat roast a turkey. The same could be said of a pork roast, a leg of lamb, a prime rib of beef.

Branching out, he soon knew how to whisper to a dog, how to declutter his bathroom cabinets, how to flip real estate, and what not to wear.

Then he came across the Do-It-Yourself Network, and there he stayed. “Winkels,” his father had liked to say, long before there was a DIY Network, “are do-it-yourselfers exemplified.” Thanks to all the TV, Kache finally knew how to do many things himself. That is, he could do them in his head, because, as Janie often reminded him, head knowledge and actual
capability
were two different animals. So with that disclaimer, he might say he knew how to restore an old house from the cracked foundation to the fire-hazard-shingled roof—wiring, plumbing, plastering, you name it. He knew how to build a wooden pergola, how to install a kitchen sink, how to lay a slate pathway in one easy weekend. He even knew how to raise alpacas and spin their wool into the most expensive socks on the planet. Hell, he knew how to build the spinning wheel. His father would be proud.

However.

Kache did not know how to rewind his life, how to undo the one thing that had undone him. His world was indeed flat, and he'd fallen off the edge and landed stretched out on a sofa, on pause, while the television pictures moved and the voices instructed him on everything he needed to know about everything—except how to bring his mom and his dad and Denny back from the dead.

• • •

The little boy in front of him grew bored and poked action figures through the seat crack, letting them drop to Kache's feet. Kache retrieved them a dozen times but then let their plastic bodies lie scattered on the floor beneath him. The boy soon laid his head on the armrest and fell asleep.

On Kache's first plane ride, his dad had lifted him onto his lap in the pilot's seat and explained the Cessna 180's instruments and their functions. “Here we have the vertical speed indicator, the altimeter, the turn coordinator. What's this one, Son?” He pointed to the first numbered circle, and Kache didn't remember any of the big words his father had just spoken.

“A clock, Daddy?” His dad laughed. Then he gently offered the correct names again and again until Kache got them right. It was the only memory he had of his father being so patient with him. How securely tethered to the world Kache had felt, sitting in the warm safety of his dad's lap, zooming over land and sea.

Why had it been impossible to hop on a plane and head north, even for a visit? He tried to picture it: Aunt Snag, Grandma Lettie, and him, sitting at one end of the seemingly vast table at the homestead, empty chairs lined up. Listening to one another chew and clear throats, drumming up questions to ask, missing Denny's constant joking and his father's strong opinions on just about everything. Who would have believed he'd miss those? His mother's calm voice, her break-open laughter so easy and frequent—he could not recall her without thinking of her laugh.

So instead, once he began making decent money, he'd flown Gram and Aunt Snag to Austin for visits, which provided plenty of distractions for all of them. As he drove them around, Grandma Lettie kept her eyes shut on the freeway, saying, “Holy crap!” The woman who'd helped homestead hundreds of acres in the wilderness beyond Caboose, who'd birthed twins—his dad and Aunt Snag—in a hand-hewn cabin with no running water, who'd faced down bears and moose as if they were the size of squirrels and rabbits, couldn't stand a semi passing them on the road. She loved the wildflowers though. At a rest stop, she walked out into the middle of a field of bluebonnets, undid her braid, and fluffed her white hair, which floated like a lone cloud in all that blue, and lay down and sang her old, big, persistent heart out. “Come on, Kache!” she called. “Sing with me, like in the old days.”

He kept his arms crossed, shook his head. “Do you know that crazy lady?” he asked Snag.

Gram was of sound mind and body at the time, just being herself, the Lettie he had always adored. Every few minutes, Aunt Snag and Kache saw her arm pop out of the sapphire drift, waving a bee away.

But in the past four years, Gram's health had declined, and Aunt Snag didn't want to travel without her. When he'd talked to Snag early that morning, she'd said Lettie was deteriorating fast. “And I'm not getting any younger. You better hurry and get yourself home, or the only people you'll have left will be in an urn, waiting for you to spread us with the others on the bluff.”

He'd let too much time slip by. Twenty years. He was thirty-eight, with little to show for it except a pissed off and, as of last night, officially ex-girlfriend, along with a sweet enough severance package for working his loyal ass off for sixteen years and a hell of a savings account—none of which would impress Aunt Snag or Grandma Lettie in the slightest or do them any good.

• • •

After a stop in Seattle, another three and a half hours and countless thickly frosted mountain ranges later, the plane landed in Anchorage, which Snag and Lettie grumpily called North Los Angeles. Nevertheless, it was their destination for frequent shopping trips, and they didn't hesitate to get their Costco membership when the store first opened there. The in-flight magazine said that just over six hundred thousand people lived in the state, and two-fifths of them resided in Anchorage. So even though it was Alaska's biggest city, it had over three million to go before catching up with LA.

He caught the puddle jumper to Caboose. During the short flight, he spotted a total of eight moose down through the bare birch and cottonwood trees on the Kenai Peninsula, along with gray-green spruce forests, snow-splotched brown meadows, and turquoise lakes. The plane banked where the Cook Inlet met Kachemak Bay, whose name he bore. Across it, the Kenai mountain range, home to nesting glaciers, rose mightily and stretched beyond sight.

From the other side of the inlet, Mount Iliamna, Mount Redoubt, and Mount Augustine loomed solid and strong and steady. But looks deceive—Redoubt and Augustine frequently let off steam and took turns blowing their tops every decade or so, spreading thick volcanic ash as far as Anchorage and beyond, darkening the sky with soot. Kache's mom used to say Alaska didn't forgive mistakes. As a boy, he wondered if those volcanic eruptions were symptoms of its pent-up rage.

There was the Caboose Spit, lined with fishing boats, a finger of land jutting out into the bay where the old railroad tracks ended, the rusty red caboose still there.

“See that?” his mom had shouted over the Cessna's engine that first day they'd all flown together, his dad finally realizing his dream of owning a bush plane. “The long finger with the red fingernail pointing to the mountains? I bet the earth is so proud of those mountains. Wants to make sure we don't miss seeing them.” She tucked one of Kache's curls under his cap, her smile so big. “As if we could! Aren't they amazing?”

It had always been a breathtaking view, the kind that made him inhale and forget to exhale, especially when the clouds took off, as they just had, and left the sea every shade of sparkling blue and green against the purest white of the mountains. He had to admit he'd never seen anything anywhere—even now during the spring breakup, Alaska's ugliest time of year—that came close to this height or depth of wild beauty.

But the view was doing more than taking his breath away. Maybe his mom had been wrong. Maybe that strip of land was the world's middle finger, telling him to fuck off, saying,
Who you calling flat?
Today that red spot of caboose looked more like a smear of blood on the tip of a knife than a fingernail. Either way, the view stabbed its way into his chest, as if it were trying to finish him off before he even landed.

THREE

Snag hadn't stopped maneuvering through her small house since Kache's call. Kache. Finally agreeing to come
home
. In the wee hours of that morning, she'd mistaken the ringing phone for the alarm and kept hitting the snooze button until she sat up in a panic.
It's about Mom
. But no, it was Kache, calling back from Austin. Ever since they'd hung up, she'd been bathing every surface with buckets of Zoom cleaner, suctioning up the cat hair and the spilled-over cat food with the vacuum, stuffing the fridge with a ready-to-bake casserole, moose pot roast, and rhubarb crunch, wrapping the bed in clean sheets.

Snag thought she resembled a well-made bed. Polishing every last streak off the mirror, she saw her chenille robe creased under her breasts as if it were a bedspread tucked around two down pillows. They rose and fell with her deep breaths. She moved fast despite her size, wiping the counter, putting away a pepper grinder and a bottle of salad dressing with Paul Newman's mug on it. She closed the refrigerator door.

There was the memory of Kache, sitting on the kitchen stool, dark, curly head bent over his guitar, opening that same door and standing in front of the assortment of cold food like the refrigerator was some god requiring homage. How many times had she swatted him, told him to close the damn door? “A million? A billion?”

Since the day she had to put her mom into the home, Snag had been talking to herself. Before that, sometimes all Lettie had added to the conversation was, “Is that right, Eleanor?” But it was something.

No one but her mom still called her Eleanor. Around age nine, she came home from fishing the river alone for the first time, holding up a decent-size salmon. “Look, Daddy. I caught a fish all by myself.”

Her daddy laughed and pulled the hook out of the side of the poor fish. “Eleanor,” he said, “what you did was
snagged
yourself a fish.” Glenn, jealous that he was the same age and had yet to catch or even snag anything, started calling her Snag. The name took hold and never let go. Most of the town's newcomers thought the name came from the fact that she had a gift for selling. It was true. Whether someone needed Mary Kay or Jafra cosmetics, Amway detergent, or a new house, Snag was the person to call.

Real estate had been particularly good to her. She preferred to live in her simple home, but she waxed poetic about the benefits of a sunken tub or a granite countertop. Lately, she'd stepped back from showing houses. She'd made enough money, and she wanted to give the newbies a shot. The one element in life that had come easily to Snag was money, and she didn't need to be piggy about it. She still sold products for the pyramid businesses but more as a service to the citizens of Caboose than out of her own need. The only thing she couldn't sell anyone on was the idea of getting the town mascot, the old caboose parked at the end of the spit, moving again. But she didn't have time to dwell on that.

She climbed into the car and took a deep breath. Kache. “He's going to want to kill me, and I can't blame him one bit.” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her rain jacket, surprised to see a black smear across it. She wore the mascara for the first time in years in honor of Kache's homecoming. It was the brand she'd demonstrated at kitchen tables, rubbing it on a page of paper, dropping water on it, holding the paper up so the drop ran down clear as gin. Now she smoothed her fingers under her eyes: more black. She licked her fingers, ran them over and over her face, took the balled-up tissue from under her sleeve, and wiped more. She adjusted the rearview mirror to check herself. “Way to go, woman.” It looked like someone had struck oil on her face. With all her finesse for cleaning, Snag sometimes felt that her biggest contribution to humankind was making a mess of things.