Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  It would have been better to have Daniel there as well, but the last five years had mellowed that specific grief from the sharp anguish of loss to a lingering nostalgia. She could go back now, and the pleasant reminders of this second husband would be welcome; time had finally made memories more significant than absence.

  “We had six fine years before you nicked off, you stubborn old Aussie coot,” she said to him fondly and aloud, a habit that she enjoyed and hadn’t attempted to break. He was still good company.

  But Daniel McNabb, Australian expatriate, from whom she had picked up the bits of Aussie slanguage that frequently enlivened her speech, was not the only husband Maxie cherished and had outlived. At forty-five she had scattered the ashes of Joe Flanagan, her high school sweetheart and first husband, into the waters of the bay where he had drowned in the storm that sank his commercial fishing boat. Meeting and marrying Daniel years later had been a surprising gift when she least expected it and considered herself a confirmed widow. Once again alone at sixty-two she knew she had been lucky in both her relationships but had no inclination toward another. Her independent spirit had finally won out over her heart and desire for companionship. Daniel’s careful investments had left her with no financial concerns, so she had used some of the interest to buy a thirty-four-foot Jayco motor home, found a caretaker for her house in Homer, and gone off to see the world she had missed while living in the far north for the first fifty-nine years of her life.

  A no-nonsense woman with a solid sense of humor, a fine practical mind, and a zest for life, Maxie had a realistic balance in her expectations of the good and bad the world had to hand her and knew how to manage what she could not control. She no longer bothered to fool herself or others about much of anything, but took what was positive with appreciation, dealt directly and as little as possible with the negative, looked life straight in the eye, and got on with it. A plaque that hung in the kitchen of her house without wheels said it well: “Life ain’t all you want, but it’s all you ’ave, so ’ave it, stick a geranium in your ’at, an’ be ’appy!”

  As she drove up a hill and the highway began to level out, the sharp summons of her cell phone attracted her attention. Slowing slightly as she looked for a place to pull off the road, she answered it.

  “Maxie.”

  “Hi, Mom. It’s Carol. Can you talk?”

  “I can in a minute or two. There’s a gas station ahead. Hold on.”

  Parked out of the way at one side of the station with the engine turned off, she stared at the cell phone for a moment, took a deep breath, and decided she was as ready as she could be to speak to her daughter. “All right—I’m here now.”

  “Are you okay? Where are you?”

  Why couldn’t Carol ever assume she was okay instead of the reverse? Wishful thinking?

  “I’m just fine, thanks, and I’m between Cranbrook and Lake Louise in British Columbia. How are you, dear, and how is dear old Boston?”

  “Oh, you know—the usual—too busy. I thought we agreed you weren’t going to drive that appalling highway to Alaska again.”

  Maxie took a deep breath and held onto her patience.

  “No. You attempted to get me to decide that. I never agreed.”

  “Mother! You did! Now I’m really concerned. Don’t you even remember? We talked it all over at Christmas and—”

  “Carol, I recall our conversation in great detail. I’ve not yet gone ’round the twist, whatever you may think. You gave me your opinion. But you didn’t ask for mine, so I refrained from giving it. I’m going to Homer for the summer, as I planned.”

  There was a pause, in which Maxie could anticipate what would come next. It did.

  “Philip won’t approve of this at all. You shouldn’t be driving alone in that thing. It’s not sa—”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but I don’t arrange my life to please your husband. He may be a fine lawyer—”

  “Attorney, Mother.”

  “Attorney then, if you wish—but your stepfather always thought he was a bit of a sook. I may be an oldie, but I’m not yet close to falling off the perch and I’m perfectly capable of deciding what suits me. Just now, heading up this beautiful highway toward home couldn’t suit me more.”

  There was an offended silence from the phone, which Maxie waited out.

  Carol’s voice was frigid when she finally spoke again.

  “Well. I just called to wish you a happy Mother’s Day. It is this Sunday, you know.”

  Maxie had forgotten, and wished her daughter had as well—as she wished they would forget to remind her exactly how old she was on every birthday—but put a smile in her voice before she answered.

  “Thank you, dear. Have a nice one yourself. How’s Brandon?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you sending him up to visit me this summer?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? He loves to visit—wherever I am.”

  “That we never know where you’ll be next is part of the problem. He’s playing Little League this year.”

  “All summer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Well—give him a big hug and tell him I’ll miss him.”

  Extended silence.

  Maxie wavered but decided against accusing her daughter of withholding her grandson as punishment for not following unsolicited and unwanted advice. She waited, elbow in the curve of the steering wheel, forehead resting in her free hand. Why did it always have to be so…

  “Look, I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Mother,” Carol eventually said icily. “We have a right to worry about you. It’s an unstable way to live—wandering around in that absurd motor home. What can people think?”

  You are incessantly telling me what to do and how to do it, Maxie thought, but did not say. Did anyone but Carol and Philip really care, she wondered—not for the first time. Everyone she knew who mattered seemed to admire her having the freedom and the nerve to take off on her own—thought it sounded interesting and exciting. Everyone, that is, but Carol and her wowser of a husband, who felt they had a position and an image to maintain that were somehow threatened by a sixty-two-year-old “vagrant” mother. If they had their way, she wouldn’t even return to Alaska periodically but would live tidily tucked up in some health care facility for senior citizens—near them—where they could keep an eye on her instability—with a power of attorney over her bank account.

  “Thank you for the call, Carol. I’ll think of you on Sunday, but I have to go now,” she said brightly.

  “But Moother, I think—”

  But Maxie didn’t want to know what Carol thought. “Bye-bye, dear. I’ll talk to you when I get to Homer.” Resolutely pushing a button, she hung up on the resentment in her daughter’s voice and dropped the phone back into its holder.

  She had always hoped Carol would be happy but suspected that her daughter didn’t even realize she was not. How in the world had appearances become so important to her? As a child she had been a rumble-tumble tomboy, hated dresses, loved adventures. Now she was all volunteer efforts and civic occasions intended to help advance her husband’s legal and political career. Somewhere under it must be a vestige of the bright-eyed, carefree little girl who had bound up the wings of injured birds, organized treasure hunts on the beaches of Kachemak Bay, emoted in high school dramatics, spent summers working on her father’s fishing boat, and wanted to be an archaeologist when she grew up.

  Stretch, who had climbed from his basket to the passenger seat, then to the floor, now stood beside her with his front paws on the edge of her seat. Her hand still lay on the phone in its holder, and all he could reach was the wrist, which he licked. Wrenched back from memories of long-ago summers and children rolling over each other like puppies down the front lawn, Maxie reached down to lift him back into his basket.

  “Thanks, lovie. Shall we be rolling again?”

  Firmly she emptied her mind of impossible regrets and put the motor home in gear.

&nb
sp; Pulling back onto the highway, she passed a young man at the intersection with his thumb out, but since she never picked up hitchhikers she dismissed the figure in jeans and green plaid shirt, whose eyes were concealed by his sunglasses, his mouth by the apple he was munching.

  It was time to do some nice, comforting thing for herself, and that new campground wasn’t far ahead, with a shower she hoped would be hot.

  6

  THE SUN WAS MORE THAN HALFWAY DOWN THE WESTERN sky when Jessie turned the Winnebago off the highway and followed a short, winding gravel road that ended in a neatly organized campground beside a small river.

  From Fort Steele the highway had continued up the long valley of the Purcell Trench, which extended far into British Columbia. It had been a pleasant drive with remarkable views of the rugged Rocky Mountains to the east, reminding Jessie that they formed the Continental Divide. From her side of their spectacular heights, every river and stream flowed west and eventually to the sea. These included the narrow beginnings of the Columbia River, which first trickled north gathering strength from a myriad of tributaries, then curved in a large loop and fled swiftly south into Washington, gradually becoming the mighty river that powered Grand Coulee Dam, watered the apple-growing country of Wenatchee and Yakima, rolled past The Dalles, and finally emptied into the ocean at Astoria, where Lewis and Clark had made camp on the Pacific.

  Though she had intended to go on another twenty miles and find a place to stay in Radium Hot Springs, Jessie was a little tired from her first day of driving on unfamiliar roads. Still getting used to handling the thirty-one-foot motor home, she wanted plenty of time and light to park and get it hooked up before dark. So when she noticed a sign for Dutch Creek Resort and RV Park, she remembered her vow to stop when and where she liked and impulsively turned off the highway to take a look.

  Pleased with what she found, she stopped in front of a Register Here sign and stepped out, leaving Tank to wait for her. Across a wide green lawn was an immaculate white and green office and a friendly young man who assigned her space 26 and circled it for her on a piece of paper with a map on one side, rules and information on the other.

  “It’s a pull-through, so you won’t have to back in,” he told her with a smile. “And since you don’t want a sewer connection, I’ll put you close to the washroom. Okay?”

  She assured him that would be fine.

  “In case you’re interested, we have a couple of nesting pairs of osprey right now—here and here,” he informed her proudly, pointing out the locations on the map. “And please—keep your dog on a leash.”

  The campground was about half full, and after driving slowly around a large loop that branched every thirty feet or so into individual spaces for RVs, Jessie found number 26, bordering on another, smaller loop where she could see several tents set up among the pine trees. Pulling into it, she checked the spirit levels on the dash and was glad to see that whoever had graded the parking place had done a good job; she would need to make no adjustments—front to back, side to side, the motor home was almost perfectly level. She took out the list she had made the night before, reversed the order of the things she had made sure to remember to do before leaving that morning, soon had her rig connected to electricity and water, turned on the liquid propane gas, and cranked open the ceiling vents and several windows to let the late afternoon breeze wander in along with the faint sound of running water.

  Time to take Tank for a walk to the river and get a look at the ospreys—and some pictures, if she could, before it grew too dark. Retrieving her camera case from the closet, she moved the Minolta, with its usual 35-to 70-mm lens, to a light daypack, along with a second lens that would zoom from 70 to 200 mm, hoping it would let her see shy birds well enough to photograph.

  A quick check of the map told her that the nearest of the two nests lay directly to the east beyond the tents, near a pool the owner had told her was available for swimming. As she walked through the area, she was glad not to have to crawl into a small tent for the night.

  A boy and a girl in swim suits, with inner tubes and towels slung over the handles of their bicycles, zipped by as she passed a tent more than big enough for the young couple who were cooking dinner on the two gas burners of a Coleman stove. A small girl in a pink shirt, with matching ribbons in her hair, rocked her bicycle from side to side on its training wheels as she peddled furiously to keep up with a woman who walked ahead in the direction of the washroom with a baby on her hip. Two of the other tents were zipped tightly closed and seemed momentarily abandoned, one with a line of clothes drying nearby on a line tied between two trees. In the middle of the line a green shirt tossed limply in the light breeze, reminding Jessie of the person who had stolen her lunch, but the shirt was not plaid. She still thought the incident odd but humorous. Her vanishing lunch was long gone by now, leaving no evidence, and to go around accosting everyone she saw in green would be absurd.

  Several times on the looping road that connected campsites she had to step off to one side as vehicles passed, their occupants looking for a space for the night. Most were motor homes or pickups, either with campers or pulling fifth-wheel trailers, but some were people traveling in cars who would set up tents. Once a green Suburban surprised her into an awkward leap off the road by making less noise than the heavier RVs as it came up behind her. It cruised slowly past with no one inside but the driver, who stared at her as he passed from under the brim of a western hat, and did not return her nod.

  Looking for someone else, she thought, and turned away to continue the walk.

  She and Tank, on his leash, were soon standing on the riverbank, where one of the bicycles had been hastily dropped on its side. She could only hear splashes and shouts, for the pool lay hidden beyond a low brush-covered ridge across the swiftly moving but shallow water.

  Some distance away, also on the other side, stood a pole perhaps twenty feet high with a two-foot-square platform on the top. There the ospreys had built a large nest, and Jessie could just make out the black-and-white head of one of them, sitting on her eggs. Replacing the 35-to 70-mm lens with the stronger one, she used it to focus and zoom in on the bird and was able to make it out more clearly, body out of sight below the edge of the tangle of dry sticks that made up the nest.

  At first she didn’t see the male osprey. Perched in the top of a nearby tree, he was so still as to be almost invisible until, carefully searching, she spotted a slight ruffle of feathers and a flash of his white underside. Through the camera lens she could see that the gold of the sinking sun warmed the color of his feathers to a dark brown, not black, and she detected a gleam from his watchful yellow eye as he slowly turned his head in her direction.

  Though they were seldom seen in Alaska, she knew that these raptors were not hawks, though they were often called “fish hawks” and lived near water—especially coastal marshes—where their finned prey swam and could be sighted from the air. Like their terrestrial cousins, the eagles she saw often at home, they hovered above the water till they located a fish, then dove and snatched it in their strong talons. Peering through her lens, she could see that the male’s upper beak curved sharply over the lower, a cruel but effective scimitar for stripping flesh from its catch.

  Jessie took several pictures, noticing that the bird seemed aware of her and a bit nervous, or perhaps it was the presence of Tank, who sat patiently by her side. Then, as she watched, the male osprey suddenly launched itself into the air with a sharp kip kip kiyeuk and soared off above the trees. As it glided away, its powerful wings formed a distinctive M—inner wings thrust forward, outer swept back—that made it look more like a gull than a hawk or eagle, which had a wider and straighter wingspread. For a few seconds it was visible against the golden glow on the spires of the eastern Rocky Mountains as it sailed off and disappeared along with its cry. The female remained in the nest, silent and motionless.

  For half an hour Jessie and Tank walked along the riverbank and through the campground, enjoying the war
mth of the late afternoon and being away from the constant sound and motion of the Winnebago. Heading back toward their home-away-from-home, they were passing the space next to their own when a small brown body sprang suddenly from under a larger motor home, dragging a leash and barking loudly. He rushed toward them with all four short legs a blur of motion, slid to a halt in the road between them and space 26, and continued his noisy assault. Both Jessie and Tank stopped to stare in astonished amusement at the miniature dachshund who was challenging their right of way with such bravado.

  “Stretch, you twit—come back here. Stop that barking.” The voice was low in pitch and strong in its insistence but held a note of long-suffering affection for the small tornado that held Jessie and Tank more in amazement than at bay. “Come here, dingbat.”

  The attractive older woman who stepped out the door of her motor home with a pleasant, if slightly exasperated, expression and followed her small, short-haired companion into the road was as tall as Jessie but tanned to a healthy glow. She wore a full denim skirt with large patch pockets and an oversized white shirt with red stripes, sleeves rolled to the elbow. The pair of reddish-brown moccasins on her feet almost matched the color of her dog, and her own hair, a salt-and-pepper blend pulled back into a heavy braid, was more dark brown than gray. Her apologetic grin was young, and her eyes sparkled with good humor as she hurried to catch the leash her dog was trailing.