All the Winters After (3 page)

FOUR

At the small Caboose airport, Kache recognized Snag before she turned around to face him. You couldn't miss her height, a half inch shy of six feet. Long-limbed like he was, hair cropped short, with much more salt than pepper now. She was his father's twin, and they bore a strong resemblance—the deep dimples, the large gray eyes. Maybe that's why Kache had always thought of her as a handsome woman. Her back expanded. Her shoulders hung limp in her hooded jacket. She fidgeted with her sleeves, touched her face. Many times that sad spring before he'd left, Kache had seen her cry with her back to him, as if she might protect him from all the grief.

He sighed and kept standing there, observing her broad back. How was it that you could leave a place for twenty years, stay away for
twenty years
, and walk right smack into the very center of what you left behind, like it was some bull's-eye for which you were trained to aim?

“Aunt Snag?” He touched her arm and she jumped.

“Kache! Of course it's you.” As tall as she was, she still had to stand on her tiptoes to swing her chubby arms around him. “Oh, hon, look at you. Your mom and dad would be so proud.”

He held her soft face, wrinkled a bit more, though not as much as he'd expected, but a little…dirty? Streaked with something. With Snag, it was more likely mud than makeup. He smiled. Their eyes stayed on each other for a long minute. There was a lot to say, but all he got out was, “Let's go see Gram.”

Snag blew her nose, blew some more. “She's not herself. And I tried and tried, but I couldn't keep up. It's a decent place though. It is. We can stop on the way home.” She pulled his head down, ruffled his hair, like he was eight years old instead of thirty-eight. “You look so handsome. Kache Winkel, you're home. Is that your only bag?”

He nodded. He'd packed the few warm clothes he still owned, along with the old, holey green T-shirt he would never throw out, the one that said,
No, I don't play basketball
. Denny had it printed up for him, because at six-foot-six, Kache had gotten tired of being asked. And he'd packed the only item of his mom's he'd taken—her favorite silk scarf, which had smelled of her perfume for years after she died. Snag asked him where his guitar was, but he shrugged, as he had whenever she'd asked him in Austin. She raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth but let the question go, just as she had before.

Even in the middle of winter, Austin didn't get this cold. In the car, he rubbed his hands together and felt the pull and release of resistance and surrender. The place lured him back in. Then it yanked him hard with long lines of memories: Denny buying him beer at that very liquor store, which still sported the same flashing orange sign; his mom rushing him into that very emergency room when he was nine and had split his knee open; that same hardware and tackle shop his dad got lost in for hours while Kache waited in the truck, writing lyrics on the backs of old envelopes his mom kept in the glove compartment for blotting her lipstick. Kache had written around the red blooms of her lip prints.

Some things had changed, sure, and yet not enough to keep away a hollow, emanating ache.

But it was breakup. Here, early spring was the depressing time of year, when the snow and ice gave way—cracking, breaking, oozing—as if the earth bawled, spewing mud everywhere, running into the darkest lumpy blue of Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay.

“Thought we might get to see Janie. Couldn't get away from work?” Snag asked, glancing at Kache. He shrugged. “You're awfully quiet. For you.” She fiddled with the radio while she drove and then turned it off. It was true that Kache's dad had dubbed him Chatty Kachey, but that was a long, long time ago. “Ah, a break from the rain.”

“We don't get enough in Austin. I'd like a good watering.”

“In a few weeks, you'll be soaked through to the bone, I'm betting. Fingers crossed we'll have a decent summer. Since you don't…you know…have to get back to work. Or, apparently, Janie? You're staying a while, aren't you, hon?”

“I'm thinking a few weeks.” That was the goal anyway, if he could stick it out. It would get easier in a day or two. He wanted to hang out with Snag and Lettie. Face the things he needed to face, get out to the homestead. Snag had said a nice family was renting it. He'd try to fix whatever out there needed fixing, do whatever needed to be done for Lettie and Snag, hold it together, be strong enough to look it all in the face so he could get on with his life. Janie was right. It was way past time.

Snag pulled the car into the parking lot of the low brick-and-concrete building. “Gram's a lot weaker, Kache. She asks about you still though. It depends. Some days she's clearer than most of us, and some days she's cloudy, and some days she's plain snowed in.”

He got out and held open the glass door. The walls of the lobby were covered in flowery pink-and-green wallpaper and paintings of otters, puffins, and bears. He nodded approval. “Not bad, considering.”

“Believe me, it's much better than the third-world prison camp they call a nursing home down in Spruce.” She smiled wide. “Hello there, Gilly.”

“So this is Kache.” A woman, probably a little younger than Snag, reached out and shook his hand. “Not a mere figment of Snag's and Lettie's imaginations after all.” She wore a name tag printed in oversize letters pinned on a cheery smock and had blue eyes with nicely placed crow's feet, the kind that told you she'd spent a lot of time laughing. “If I'd known last month you were coming up, I might have been able to talk my daughter into staying. I told her we have a boatload of single men up here, but she only lasted a couple of weeks. She said, ‘Mom, I'm going back to Colorado where at least the men shave.' Plus, she heard that folks regularly get their eyebrows and noses pierced by hooks while combat-fishing the Kenai. It all fairly crushed her fantasy version of Alaska.”

Snag touched Kache's face. “Five o'clock shadow.”

Kache said, “Can't help that. But it'll be gone by morning.”

“See, Gilly? Your daughter missed out.”

Kache rubbed his chin. “It won't be long before I start forgetting how to shave, I suppose.”

Even though the place was not-bad-considering, as he followed Snag down the hall, so did the faint scent of urine, medicine, and decay, with a hint of boiled root vegetables.

The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn't recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews. Grandma Lettie sat off to the side with her head in a book. Almost literally. The book lay open on her lap, her head drooping to practically touch it. She wore her hair in the same braid she always had, but it was as thin and wispy as a goose feather. In the photos of her as a young woman, it had been a thick, dark rope coiling down to her waist.

Kache knelt in front of her. A thin line of drool hung from the center of her top lip down to the page. He wiped it with his sleeve while Snag handed him one of her crumpled tissues. “Gram?”

She looked up, peering, and then her mouth opened in a smile.

“Kachemak Winkel!” The smile slipped down. “Where have you been?”

“I've been in Texas, Gram.”

She shook her head. “Where've you
been
?”

“Working, Gram.” His answers sounded feeble.

“No.” She started to whimper and turned to Snag, whispering loudly. “Does he know about the crash?”

“Yes, Mom, he was here. Remember?”

“But he didn't die.”

“That's right.”

She whispered again, enunciating slowly, her eyes wide. “He was supposed to go on that plane.”

Kache swallowed hard. Snag held his elbow and moved a lock of white hair from Gram's vein-mapped forehead. “Mom, Kache has been away. Just away. From here.”

Gram raised her eyebrows, nodding, and rubbed Kache's long hand between her two bony, speckled ones. “Of course you have, dear. Oh, but…” She looked over her shoulder and then back at him. Her voice raised higher, almost a child's. “It was like all four of you were dead. Now at least we have you back.” She picked up his hand in hers, moving it up and down to the beat of each word: “And
that
is a very good thing.”

“Thanks, Gram.” How had he stayed away so long? How had he come back? He was tempted to grab himself a wheelchair and steal the remote from the guy in the Hawaiian shirt and cardigan, flip the channel to the DIY Network, and let a few more decades go flickering past.

Instead, he drove with Snag over to her place. He braced himself for the onslaught of mementos, but surprisingly, Snag didn't have one piece of furniture or even a knickknack or painting of his mother's. Sentimental Aunt Snag, who loved her brother and adored her sister-in-law. Where was all their stuff? It didn't make sense to sell or give away every single thing. And when Kache asked about heading out to the homestead, she changed the subject. Earlier she'd said she'd rented it. She wouldn't have sold it, would she? He knew she'd sold his dad's fishing boat to Don Haley, but all four hundred acres, without saying a word to Kache? It was true that Kache had given her power of attorney, back when he was eighteen and didn't want to deal. But she wouldn't have sold it without telling him. No way.

Later that afternoon, he went to the Safeway for her and bumped into an old friend of his father's, Duncan Clemsky. Duncan clapped him on the back, kept shaking his hand while he talked. “Look at you, Mr. City Slicker. I still think of you when I have to drive by the road to your daddy's land. Only time I get out that far is when I make a delivery to the Russian village.”

“The Old Believers are accepting deliveries these days? Progressive of them.”

“Some of them at Ural even have satellite dishes. Going soft. Won't be long until they're wearing useless, pretty boots like those.” He nodded toward Kache's feet. “Change eventually gets ahold of everyone, I suppose.”

“Suppose so,” Kache said, his face heating up. Nothing like a lifelong Alaskan to put you in your place. He wanted to ask Duncan if Snag had sold the land, but he wasn't about to let on that he didn't know, if it was even true. No need to get a rumor heading through town that would end up like one of the salmon on the conveyor belt down at the cannery, the head and tail of the story cut off and the middle butchered up until it became something unrecognizable.

“You're gonna need to get some real boots before folks start mistaking you for a tourist from California. Thought you were at least in Texas, my man.” Duncan shook his head and winked. “You tell your aunt and grandma I said hello, will you?”

“Will do, Duncan. Same goes for Nancy and the kids.”

That opened up another conversation, with ten minutes of Duncan Clemsky filling Kache in on every one of his five kids and sixteen grandchildren and seven seconds of Kache filling Duncan in on the little that he had been up to for the last twenty years. “Yeah, you know…working a lot.”

On the way back to Snag's, Kache decided that if she didn't bring up the homestead that evening, he would just come out and ask her if she'd sold it. Part of him hoped she had; the other part hoped to God she hadn't.

FIVE

Snag filled the sink with the hottest water she could stand while Kache cleared the dinner dishes. She'd decided on Shaklee dishwashing liquid, since she'd used Amway for lunch and breakfast, and now she was trying to decide how on earth to tell Kache about the homestead.

Staring at her reflection in the kitchen window, she saw a chickenshit and a jealous sister, and there was no hiding it. Looking at it, organizing the story in her mind, lining it up behind her lips:
This is how I let it happen. It started this way, with my good intentions but my weaknesses too, and then a day became a week became a year became a decade became another. I hadn't meant for it to happen like this. I hadn't meant to.

She squeezed out more of the detergent, let the hot water cascade over her puffy hands. She laid her hands flat along the sink's chipped enamel bottom where she couldn't see them beneath the suds. If only she were small enough to climb into the sink and hide her whole self, just lie quietly with the forks and knives and spoons until this moment passed and she no longer had to see herself for what she really was. Sometimes drowning didn't seem so horrible when she thought of it in those terms. Better than dying the way Glenn and Bets and Denny had. She shivered even though her hands and arms were immersed in the liquid heat.

It would have brought them honor in some small way, if she'd done the simple thing everyone expected of her. Simply take care of the house and Kache. But she'd failed at both.

“Aunt Snag?” Next to her, he held the old Dutch oven with the moose pot roast drippings stuck on the bottom. There were never any leftovers with Kache, even now that he was a grown man. “Are you okay? Want me to finish up so you can catch the end of the news?”

“No… Well, okay.” She dried her hands on the towel and started to walk out, but she turned back. “I've got to tell you something, hon, and it's not going to be pretty. You're going to be real upset with me, and I won't blame you one bit.”

“You sold the homestead.” It was a statement, not a question.

“What?” she asked, though she'd heard him perfectly.

“You sold it. You sold the homestead.”

“No, hon, I didn't. I didn't sell it.”

He smiled, sort of, a sad, tight turning up of his mouth while his shoulders relaxed. “I guess I'll need to go out. Check up on things. I've been meaning to ask. But it's hard, thinking about driving out, seeing it for the first time, you know? Do you go out there a lot?”

Still such youthfulness to his face. He didn't seem like a grown man who'd seen a lot of life. Snag couldn't tell what it was exactly. Trust? Vulnerability?

She said, “Not a lot, no.”

“Just enough to take care of things.” His voice didn't rise in a question.

“No, not that much even.” She breathed in deep, searched in her pockets and up her sleeve for a tissue. “I haven't been out there at all.”

“This spring?”

“No. I mean not once. Not at all.”

“All
year
?”

“No, Kache. Not all year. Not ever. Not once. I never went out like I told you I did. I planned to a million times, but I never closed it up, never got all your stuff, never put things in storage. I never…”

He stood with his mouth agape for what seemed to Snag like a good five minutes. “Wait a second. You said you'd been renting it out. No one has been out there since I left? Not even the Fosters? Or the Clemskys? Jack? Any of those people? They would have been glad to help. They would have insisted on it.”

Snag leaned against the counter for support, inhaled and exhaled. “Don't you see?
I
insisted it was taken care of. I told them I'd hired someone, to scrape the snow off, patch the roof, run water in the pipes.”

“I don't understand. Why?”

“Embarrassed by then. I hadn't even been out since you left, to water the houseplants or—I'd never planned to be so negligent—clean out the pantry.” She fell silent. The water dripped on and on into the sink. “I left it all. I tried. I drove part way dozens of times, but then I'd chicken out and turn the car around.”

Kache didn't scream and holler at her like she'd expected. He hugged her, a big old bear of a hug. In his arms, she had the sense that she might not be worn down to a nub by shame after all. But grace dragged another weight of its own. He said her name tenderly and sighed. “You know it's the anniversary today, almost to the hour?”

She nodded, because she did know without thinking about it, the way she knew she was breathing. He told her it was okay, that he did understand, more than he wanted to admit, that he'd fought the same problem in trying to come back.

She was glad she didn't use the line she'd been holding on to in case she needed it, that at first, way back when, she'd waited for him to return so they might go
together
. And that's what she'd pictured happening now, the two of them braving the drive out
together
. But forgiving or not, he'd already let go of her, grabbed the car keys, and called out, “I'll be back in a while. Don't wait up.”

He was starting the truck when she whispered, “Wait.” But she knew. Even though he'd reacted with kindness, she had seen the shock pumping through him and that he'd needed to put some distance between them. It scared her to have him go off upset. The tires screeched like they did when Kache was still a teenager, as if they'd woken up the morning after the crash and no time had passed at all.