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 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 wrote 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 the Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay.
“Thought we might get to see Janie. Couldn’t get away from work?” Snag said, glancing at Kache. He shook his head. “You’re awfully quiet. For you.” She smiled and fiddled with the radio while she drove, 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 … 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. “She’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—flowery pink and green wallpaper and paintings of otters, puffins, and bears on the walls of the lobby.
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 and Lettie’s imagination, after all.” She wore a nametag printed in oversized letters pinned on a cheery smock, 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.’ That and the fact that folks regularly get their eyebrows and noses pierced by hooks while combat fishing on the Kenai, 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 it still smelled faintly of urine, medicine and decay, all mixed with 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. Literally. The book lay open on her lap, her head drooped to almost touching 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?”
Snag nodded. “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, 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 boney speckled ones. “Of course you have, dear. Oh, but …” She looked over her shoulder, 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 knick-knack 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. She wouldn’t have sold it, would she? He knew she’d sold his dad’s fishing boat right away 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
