Angelo eyed her carefully. “Yet your legal practice is mainly Alaskan.”
“Don’t remind me.” She shuddered. And to Angelo’s eye, what she’d intended to be mock horror had turned to very real disgust.
This was not the time or place to ask about that particular problem. So, instead, Angelo looked about the room, narrow enough to touch both walls with out-stretched arms and barely twice as long.
“Anything in here you want? If not, I’m getting you out of here.”
“Let me go through the desk drawers just in case.”
Nothing surfaced, and Angelo was going to shoo her out when he spotted a picture on the wall that didn’t seem to fit the others.
“What’s that one?” He pointed at the one image. It was small. A postcard of a penguin Photoshopped to be flying above the clouds with a little thought bubble. “Look Ma, I’m an eagle!” You could see the penguin’s trajectory was failing and headed for a splashdown in the ocean far below. The “Ma” had been crossed out and replaced with “Jo” in faded pen.
Jo reached out slowly and pulled out the thumbtack holding it to the wall.
She turned it over and held it so that they could read it together.
Dearest Jo, I could find no way to fly in K-kan. By the time I could remember even how to crawl, it was too late for us. Say hi to Dan for me. All the best! Eloise (not the boat)
And a somewhat pathetic smiley face.
It was dated five years ago.
She and Angelo had a quiet night at the Cape Fox Lodge. They ate a meal at the restaurant, with no seafood involved, as if they’d both been overwhelmed by the Salmon Fishing Capital of the World. Jo had the Russian Chicken and Angelo the Pepper Steak. They split a piece of Chocolate Cheesecake, but had been unable, or unmotivated to finish it.
She slept like the dead, curled against his chest, wrung out to her very core. Somewhere in the middle of the night she’d needed more. He’d woken easily, in that quiet way of his, and been very good to her, kissing away her tears of exhaustion that found their way out even as her body released the spring wound so tightly inside.
In the light of morning, with room service pancakes cooling on the small table, she’d finally faced the task of sorting through the box. Angelo stayed out of the way, pretending to watch a baseball game with the sound turned way down, which she appreciated. When she had it sorted and started on the phone calls, he’d gone for a run. A dozen phone calls later she’d arranged for someone to clean out the house, someone else to sell it in the name of the estate, the land had to be worth something. She cancelled utilities, medical, and car insurance. By the time the first round was done, she had a couple of pages of a hotel pad covered with notes.
She could draft her first motion for probate, except for the conditions of the will that mandated she find a woman twenty-six years gone. She could argue for probate in absentia and probably get it. Even throw her mother’s half into a trust in case she ever surfaced. But was it worth the pain and aggravation? She didn’t know, couldn’t think. So she set it aside for the moment.
Angelo drifted back in just as she started digging into what he’d recovered from her father’s room. No letters. No strange postcards from the past. Mostly junk she could just throw out once she’d looked at it. Near the bottom, there was a photo. Her father and a woman she didn’t recognize, or at least not completely.
She’d snooped often enough as a child trying to find some evidence of her mother, and found none. Yet here in a cheap wood frame stood a much younger version of her father, his face and hair dark with Tlingit blood. Behind him, the newly painted prow of the Eloise, her name in bold blue lettering on the white hull. Beside him, a pretty woman with her own dark hair almost down to her waist, but fair features, perhaps of the East Coast, perhaps California. She wore bright yellow fisherman boots, jeans, and a plaid flannel shirt. Though her eyes seemed hidden, hazed in some way that Jo couldn’t quite discern, her smile appeared bright.
And she cradled a tiny child in her arms. A child, Jo now knew, who had skin the color of her father’s and the features of a mother she’d never met but would recognize in the mirror.
“One last stop, then we’re gone.” It was early in the afternoon and she and Angelo had managed two seats on the evening flight back to Seattle.
Jo pulled up in front of the Crab Hole and cursed when she saw the “Closed for Funeral” sign. She checked her watch and cursed again, there was still plenty of time.
They drove down to the docks, the Eloise still floating in the slip. A small group had clustered on the dock. Jo parked and took the truck title and keys with her, and the postcard.
“Engine’s conked,” Carl informed her. “Doesn’t matter, crematorium mixed up the preserve-the-ashes order, so there’s not a thing to scatter anyway. Didn’t know you could get a cremation with no ashes, but seems you can order it that way. We figured we’d go down to the end of the pier, drink a pint, and piss inta the Narrows.”
Jo managed a laugh. It was so fitting that it was sad and funny and touching all at the same time. Her body didn’t know what to do with the collision of the conflicting feelings and so she just nodded her head in approval.
She pulled out the title and keys, “Do you need a truck?”
“Yeah, one of us will take the thing. Best thing to do for that beast is drop her off the end of the pier to make a fish reef for divers, like them old battleships.”
Jo hugged him. She knew that was as close as any of them would get to saying they’d liked her father and would miss him. He held her lightly when he returned the gesture, patting her back like a child’s.
“He was proud o’ you. Even when we didn’t understand what you were doin’, he was so proud of you. Missed you as much as Eloise, but was proud.”
She wondered if he meant Eloise her mother or Eloise the boat after he’d sold her. She decided the politic action was not to inquire.
Then Carl was gone and turned into the wind so that he’d have an excuse to wipe at his eyes.
Each came to hug her goodbye and pat her back. Fred groused about his arthritis and that if anyone else was gonna die before him they’d better be doin’ it soon or he wasn’t comin’ to their funerals. Gerta offered Jo a nod. Bernie said something about it being a good thing they didn’t have any ashes or old Earnest might get pissed when they pissed on him.” Adam just rolled his eyes at Bernie’s back and shook her hand.
Angelo, bless him, was hanging with them by the Eloise easing any awkwardness. He gave them someone to speak to besides Earnest’s daughter after they’d already said goodbye to her.
When Dan came up to her last of all, the others had moved off a bit to check on the status of the engine repairs and to get a beer. Dan gave her a big, hard hug as if she were his own daughter somehow. Being hugged by Dan was like being enfolded in the arms of a gentle papa bear, someplace warm, soft, and very safe.
He started to turn away, and Jo almost let him go. It was an option. Burn the will and postcard, turn her back, and let the state take it all. She was technically in violation of the laws of probate for doing what executor tasks she’d done so far, by canceling utilities and removing items from the house. She should first have filed the death certificate and will with the state who would then certify her in the role of executor.
However, she was licensed to practice law in Alaska and while this wasn’t her area of specialty, she knew the Alaskan laws well enough to know the penalty wouldn’t amount to much more than a scowl from the judge, if that. At this point, she could take the wooden crate back and dump it on the living room floor, throw the key in behind it, and walk away clean.
Except it wouldn’t feel clean.
Instead, she stopped Dan with a hand on his arm, and pulled the postcard from her coat pocket. His broad, dark face went bright when he saw the writing, then sad before he could possibly have read even the few lines there.
“You were closest to her, weren’t you?”
Dan nod
ded slowly, “In coupla ways.” He rubbed a meat cleaver-sized hand across his face. “Earnest sat ta’ end. Eloise sat twixt us’n. He wanted her included.”
“She stayed in touch.”
“Birthdays an’ such. Yours and mine. I kep’ in touch on hers.”
“You know where she is.” Jo had figured that must be the message, “Say hi to Dan.” Her mother had stayed in touch with Dan, knowing he’d be in touch with Earnest and so could hear how her daughter was faring. Her father had been smart enough to understand that when he’d seen the postcard, but he’d still been hurting enough to not forward the card. There’d been nothing on the card for him. But he hadn’t been angry enough to throw it out either. She’d give good money to know if he’d tacked it to the wall when it arrived, almost a spit in Jo’s eye of “you’ll never see this because you never come home” or had he tacked it up when he found out he was dying, specifically so that Jo would find it.
Dan didn’t look away.
In that look, she saw the pain of knowledge. Earnest had sat next to him for the last five years knowing for a fact that Dan was in touch with Earnest’s departed wife, the wife he’d remained married to until death did he part. Her father must have mentioned the postcard. She could almost hear the conversation at some moment when only the two of them were there at the bar.
“Got a postcard.”
Dan waiting in silence.
“For Jo.”
A slow turn and meeting of their gazes.
“From her mother.”
A long silence, followed by a slow nod on Dan’s part.
A mutual turning away.
Then five more years of sitting side by side with that conversation now hanging between them.
Jo scrubbed at her arms to remove the chill of that on a warm day, knowing full well that’s exactly how it had been.
“March,” Dan said after such a long pause that Jo almost didn’t catch it. “Eloise March.” Then he turned, joined the others, and they headed down to the end of the pier to drink together and piss into the Narrows. Angelo hung back, waiting for Jo.
“March” for Jo March, for Little Women and the strong mother, Marmee March, who Eloise must have wished she could be. Everything done in the literary tradition, as Eloise had been part of that tradition before her daughter.
That Dan had said nothing more meant that her mother either couldn’t be found, or could be found very easily.
That in turn meant…
In Seattle, by looking in the phone book. All Jo had needed to find her mother all this time was her chosen last name.
Chapter 30
“I love you.”
Jo was shocked to stillness at the whisper. The jet had just slammed on the power to roar down the Ketchikan airport runway and get her out of this place. She turned to Angelo praying she hadn’t really heard it. But he wasn’t facing out the window with a first time visitor’s curiosity, he was looking right at her.
She shook her head slowly once as the jet’s roar peaked and then the plane abruptly rotated its nose off the runway and pointed for the sky.
Angelo nodded.
“You can’t.”
His face pained. Obviously not the answer he wanted. Well she didn’t have that answer. He simply couldn’t.
He didn’t ease his grip on her hand.
“I can. And I do. And, before you go there, I’m not one of ‘those’ guys. You’re only the third woman I ever told that. The first two were my mother and Cassidy on the day she married Russell.”
Jo swallowed hard. It actually hurt to do so, but she couldn’t work up any moisture. The dry air brushing across her face from the little overhead vents didn’t help at all. The jet continued to roar almost as loudly as her pulse thundered in her ears.
She tried to remove her hand, but Angelo held onto it.
“I love you, Jo Thompson.”
“But,” this was crazy. “But why?” He’d just seen her at her very worst. Ketchikan had almost killed her. It probably would have if not for his presence.
Angelo’s laugh was soft and, thankfully, not bitter.
“Okay, let’s ignore the fact that you are easily the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been with.”
She doubted that, looking all gorgeous and Italian the way he did.
“The most fun in bed.”
Jo had to admit she’d never had such a good time with a man, not ever.
“And you’re far and away the smartest. We can also ignore the fact of how you smell.” At that he leaned in, using the fact of her incarceration in the narrow plane seat by the bright “Fasten Seatbelts” sign as they continued the climb out, and inhaled such a long sniff by her ear that she almost giggled.
“I take that back. I can’t ignore how you smell. It is a flavor I can never fully understand but could gladly spend a lifetime trying to reproduce. You smell so good, Jo.”
“I did take a shower. It’s called soap.”
He didn’t deign to answer that with more than an Italian wave of the hand to dismiss her attempted misdirection. It was hard to argue, he smelled amazing to her as well. That’s why she kept curling up with her face pressed against the center of his chest. It was like someplace she’d never known, like…she didn’t have the word for it.
“What I also can’t ignore was watching you with the alphabet gang.”
“What about them?” Defensive. She could feel her spine stiffen and her chin rise as she prepared herself for their defense. She was feeling protective of her father’s drinking buddies, which was utterly ridiculous, but an undeniable fact as well.
“You were so kind to them.”
That knocked her back in her seat.
“They were in so much pain. They aren’t sure who they are without your father there. You sat at that bar on his stool and you stood on that dock and told them it would be okay. That came straight from the heart, Jo. Straight from a really amazing heart.”
Jo tried to imagine who Angelo was talking about, it wasn’t anyone she recognized. All she’d done in Ketchikan was find out that her past hadn’t been neatly left behind. Instead it had risen like a specter of evil until her past now blocked every path forward. Like the case she’d managed not to think of for forty-eight hours, the one burying her desk. The case that would bring her back to Alaska.
That was it. There was her defense.
“Angelo, you’re really sweet. But you can’t love me. Besides, I’ll be in Alaska for a lot of the next three to five years.” No matter how awful that fact itself sounded.
The plane leveled out and Jo could see the steward starting down the aisle with the drink cart.
“You can’t do that.”
“My case is in Alaska. North Slope. There is an immense amount of relevant information there, both documentation and individuals who will need interviewing. I’m going to have to be there, and at the capital in Juneau, as well as New York. So you can’t love me, because I won’t be here.”
Couldn’t Jo see the pain it caused her each time she mentioned going back to Alaska, even as the plane was, at this moment, setting her free of the place? Angelo could see it written on her face. If he ignored, no, if he set aside his own pain at the moment, he could see hers as plain as a crack in an eggshell.
It was so hard to think straight around her. He could kick himself for saying he loved her when she was so emotionally strung out. He hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t known it was there to say until he did. It had been such a surprise he wasn’t even sure he’d said it aloud until she turned to face him.
Now, not only had she thrown it back in his face unanswered, Counselor Thompson had turned it into a full-court defense and was now performing courtroom dissection on it.
Who knew that loving someone could hurt this much? Sì, it was too soon, too fast. If it felt too fast for him, no matter how true, how must it feel for her? He’d even messed up falling in love.
Jo had just been through an emotional roller coaster. He’d never been someone’
s lifeline like that before, at least not a woman’s. He’d smacked Russell a couple of times during his courtship of Cassidy, or rather his non-courtship of her, but the guy had needed it.
Jo was a wholly different matter. For Russell, it had literally been a smack on the head. He’d wager that Jo wouldn’t appreciate that at the moment, even if she needed it.
Having Jo hang onto him as she had these last two days had left him feeling pretty darned powerful. In some ways, punching Yuri had been the least of it no matter how good it felt. Standing beside her in the apartment, sitting with her father’s friends at the bar, waiting at their crazy but somehow appropriate funeral so that she could touch each person’s heart. They were so good together as a couple, they hadn’t even had to talk about it.
Okay. Angelo took a deep breath. Okay. Another breath. Jo’s emotions were stirred up and he’d just have to accept that. And his timing sucked, he could admit that too. He’d have to shut up at the moment about how much she filled his heart. It was like heat and ice at the same time flashing through his body in alternating waves with each beat of his heart. But he could keep quiet about that for her sake. For now.
What he couldn’t ignore…
“Jo! How can a woman so smart as you even think of going back to Alaska? It tears you up.”
“No, Angelo.” Jo was gone. Counselor Thompson now sat in the airplane seat beside him. Somehow she’d recovered her hand from his without his even noticing. “I know you want me to stay in Seattle. I like you. We have fun together.”
“Fun!” he cut her off. “Fun? I tell you I love you and you tell me we ‘have fun’ together?” Okay, maybe he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He tried again.
“I’m not talking about me, Jo.” He waved away the drink cart lady. When she tried to distract Jo, he waved her off again. “For the moment, I’m not talking about how much I love you and how much you fill my heart.”
The drink cart lady now wasn’t going anywhere. She made a show of serving the threesome on the other side of the aisle, but had to ask them to repeat what they wanted several times. Well, he was the one who’d decided to confess his love on an airplane, now he’d have to live with that for the rest of his life.
Where Dreams Reside Page 19
