yet kissed, and maybe this was the night he would make his move.
I was bowling pretty good too. Not like Go, but better than Stanley and way better than the girls, who were buzzed, giggling every time someone saw them sipping from the water bottle. Sometime around the fifth frame I leaned over Kiana to see my score. She’d only given me twenty-seven points. I was in last place. She almost laughed when I looked at the card. And I knew she hadn’t forgotten about me.
That was when Mom leaned in with her hot breath and said, “Thanks for bringing Go-boy, that’s real good of you.”
By the eighth frame an argument had started. Kiana was doing terrible and getting frustrated. She’d rolled her fourth gutter ball in a row and was ready to storm off, half drunk. It was a one-sided argument about how lame bowling was, and everyone pretended they couldn’t hear her.
Go said, “We shouldn’t be keeping score. It doesn’t matter.”
“Gotta keep score,” Uncle Stanley claimed. He pulled his dentures from his mouth, licked the gum side, and slipped them back in.
“Stanley, you can keep your own,” Go said. “Then compare with the little kids. See who’s better.”
Stanley said, “I know who’s better.”
This was when Go saw his girlfriend and smiled like everything before that moment was forgotten. She was at the far end of the room, watching someone bowl, with her baby nephew asleep on her back, held between her jacket and body like a hiking pack, like how all the ladies in town carried babies. She smiled across the room, and the cracking sound of bowling pins wove between them as they shared in each other’s sameness. I knew they would kiss tonight.
The dog musher had shown up while Kiana rolled another gutter ball, and he and Mom were flirting, not paying attention to anyone. Stanley stepped up to the lane, getting ready for his turn. This was when Kiana started to argue, not with anyone or anything but just with the state of things, complaining and not noticing that nobody was responding.
“It’s so . . . false,” she said. “How can I relate to something like it?”
I tried to ignore her like everyone else, but she turned to me and said, “Hateful.” It was the first thing she’d said to me since the party.
“We should play Donkey Kong instead,” I said, and smiled.
Kiana dialed in an expression like she remembered she was pissed at me. She walked over, stood above me, and grabbed my arm. She started talking about us. Her anger may or may not have been authentic, it may have just been the booze, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe both. Her voice was loud enough that Mom and the dog musher could now hear everything, interrupting their bowling-alley moment. Go-boy even turned from smiling at his girlfriend, and Stanley paused before he tried to roll a spare on a seven-ten split. Kiana called me an asshole and kept reinforcing the fact that she had a boyfriend. “Loser,” she said. You can imagine a drunk seventeen-year-old mathematician, angry, giving you hell in front of your mom. But it was Go-boy I wanted to protect from hearing this more than anybody. I didn’t want to ruin his night. It was Go-boy who would be wounded and haunted for days by the weaknesses of his stepsister and his cousin, the weaknesses of his family.
“Yeah, we had sex,” Kiana said. “But it wasn’t anything.”
Her confessions got so loud that other groups started noticing. I had the feeling of being tried and convicted and sentenced, which I hated because I was a terrible liar. When pressed, I gave in. This was why I hated Wicho’s trial because I knew his testimony was a lie, and the whole time I worried the prosecutor would grab me from my seat and ask me if Wicho was guilty. What would I have said?
And this was why I hated the thought of my friends sitting in jail for the rape of that girl. They were waiting to be tried, and how could they not say my name, knowing I was free? I imagined Kid Cab and the others, alone with a couple of cops, being questioned, recorded, pressured. I wondered, under all the stress and fear and intimidation, if Kid Cab was ready to crack, ready to break down, ready to tell them everything that had happened, tell them everyone who was there. I know I would have cracked, and that was why, each day before we’d moved to Alaska, I’d waited for the cops to stop in front of our house—just like they had the day Wicho had been hauled off—but each day passed, no cops, no phone calls, nothing. Even in Alaska I was waiting for it all to catch up to me, like I was expecting it. And I knew if I walked away from the rape without being convicted, it was by luck. I walked away free because I had no priors and because I wasn’t well known to our enemies—to the girl—and because my friends still held true to the backward rules of all that gang shit. I walked away free and I wasn’t sure that was such a good thing.
Mom stepped in and pulled Kiana away from me, quieting her anger. It was then that I left the potluck.
Late the next day Mom told me the dog musher had proposed—right there in that bowling alley, at the funeral potluck. It happened after I left. In front of a small group of people, including Stanley and Go-boy and Kiana, he stood up on an orange bench seat and said a whole bunch of beautiful things to his drunk bride. He ended the speech with a marriage proposal. They were planning a fall wedding.
As she told me this she was soaking her seal finger, sitting at the kitchen table. It was just the two of us in the quiet house and only her hand agitating water in an ice-cream bucket made any sound. Kiana had told her a mixture of saltwater and boiled stinkweed would shrink the swollen bump. But that wasn’t true, and Mom would later realize this. There was no cure for her seal finger.
She said, “You’ll like him.”
Mom could see me through the doorless frame that separated the living room from the kitchen, but I couldn’t see her. I could see a silhouette. I was on the couch, flipping through more photo albums. Sunlight glared through a kitchen window from behind Mom so that everything between me and the window was an overexposed blur.
“He’s a good guy,” she said. “He mushes in the Iditarod. He’s working construction at the new jail.”
Sometimes Mom would pull her thumb from the bucket and hold it up to examine the seal finger. When she did this, her hand was just outside the beam of sunlight, beside the window, and I could see her thumb against the flat background of wood paneling. I watched the water drip off and melt down her forearm. Steam smoked into the path of light as she flipped her hand back and forth—thumb up, thumb down—and her finger was still as bloated as before. She did this every ten minutes or so, sometimes massaging to feel the bump, and I watched with her, and it never got any smaller.
There was a time when I might have said something at that moment. I would’ve told her not to jump into another marriage so quick. I would’ve told her I didn’t like the idea of this guy—he didn’t sound very smart. Who proposes at a funeral?
Mom kept soaking her hand at the kitchen table, holding it up every few minutes to watch if the swelling had gone down. There was a time when she might have said more to me too. She would’ve used this opportunity to explain herself and try to get any sort of reaction. She would’ve tried to further sell the idea of her marriage. But now we both stayed silent, waiting and watching her seal finger, not sure what would come next.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
