All the Winters After

by Seré Prince Halverson

  Gilly returned with a pink drink for Snag, and Snag closed her eyes and downed enough of it to put out that hot coal for good.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw the beer sitting to the side, sweating, and beyond it, good ol’ kindhearted Gilly, her new friend and nothing more, so help her God. Snag let out a sigh of relief.

  Gilly must have thought it was a sigh of appreciation for the drink, because she said, “So I see you like it.”

  Snag nodded and tilted her head toward the man at the bar. “An admirer?”

  Gilly shrugged. “Not my type.”

  Snag raised her eyebrows, but Gilly didn’t elaborate, so Snag started filling her in on the chamber meeting, how everyone else seemed desperate to keep the old Herring Town caboose stuck at the end of the track. “That poor old caboose has been sitting there for decades, a pitiful museum to its former life. Why wouldn’t they want to see it useful and moving again?”

  “Excuse me for asking this, Snag, but why not just let the old caboose stay put and let there be a new version—a reproduction of the old one? Then everyone will be happy.”

  “I won’t be. It’s the principle of the matter. That caboose makes me sad.”

  “Sad?”

  “Yep. Sad. Doesn’t it make you sad? A bygone era, a town built on an industry, and then the whole thing up and dies because of greed, and the town almost died too.”

  “But it didn’t. It kept going. It reinvented itself.”

  “Exactly! Which is why I’d like to see that caboose moving again.”

  “I guess I’m not quite following you. Some might say the caboose has reinvented itself—as a museum.”

  “Museums are about the past, not the future.”

  “Ah.” Snag took a sip of the City Sexy drink without looking at Gilly, who continued, “Okay, I’ll give you that much. But I don’t think that’s what’s been eating you up lately.”

  Rex came by and set a bowl of peanuts on their table. “Your boyfriend wanted to buy you another round, but I told him you were married so he’d lay off. Strange dude, even by Alaska standards.”

  “Oh yeah?” Snag asked. “How’s that?”

  “He’s a drifter. Says he has a cabin off the grid by the lake. Russian.”

  “Old Believer?”

  “Heh. Not even close. He had a job up at Prudhoe Bay, married a Native woman a while back, didn’t work out, so now he’s here again. Says he’s a hermit except when he comes in to watch TV or listen to the band. Just want you to know I’m watching out for you two fair maidens.”

  “Thanks, Rex,” Gilly said. “Does that mean you’re buying the next round?”

  “Hell no. Man’s gotta make a living.” He grinned, flipped his towel over his shoulder, and headed back to the bar.

  “Rex,” Snag said. “Always the gossip. I’m guessing he’s scaring the guy off because Rex fancies you too.”

  Gilly shook her head. “Naw, not Rex. He’s been in love with Tilde Miller since the mastodons walked these parts. So. Here we are, despite the fact that you’ve managed to cancel on me three Thursdays in a row.”

  “I can’t even remember what I was so upset about that day you offered to talk.”

  Gilly popped a peanut in her mouth and smiled. “I imagine you do remember.” Gilly was nice even when she was pinning you into a corner. She gently refused any bullshit.

  Snag felt her face redden and was glad for the dim light of the bar. “I guess you’re right. But it doesn’t feel so urgent anymore.”

  “Snag, you surely don’t have to tell me one iota of anything, but I do find it helps me to talk this stuff out. Life can tie a person up in knots. Talking can loosen those knots, sometimes even set us free.”

  “That’s a nice idea, but it’s not really true when you’re talking about the past. Talking can’t undo past mistakes. Nothing can. Especially when those mistakes set the people you love on a course bound for tragedy.”

  The bar was practically empty now, Gilly’s admirer gone and just old Johnny Mathis-Yes-That’s-My-Real-Name and his son, Bobby, sitting down at the end of the bar, eyes locked on the TV. It was early yet, and the band wasn’t due to start for another forty minutes.

  Snag needed to move. Now. She started to get up, but Gilly reached for her arm, pulling her back down, and Snag landed with a plop. She stared at her hands. She liked her hands, with their nicely shaped nail beds, with her father’s gold wedding band settled on her middle finger. They were capable hands. Gilly rested her hand on Snag’s and waited.

  Ever since Kache had come back, Snag had felt ready to burst at the seams with her secrets. And here was Gilly, all concerned eyes and ears—her earrings even dangled like carrots, beckoning Snag to finally speak. And so she did. “Are you ready for this one, Gilly? You’ve been a friend to me, and it’s been nice knowing you, but all that’s about to end. And that’s okay. I’ll understand. Because here it is: I was in love with my own sister-in-law. For twenty-two years, I was like a puppy following her around. Pathetic. I even fantasized about my brother kicking the bucket and her declaring her love for me. And then he went and did exactly that. And so did beautiful Bets and my sweet teddy bear of a nephew, Denny. And I’m to blame.”

  It took all Snag had not to bolt out of there. Moments came and went. Empty glasses clinked behind the bar, and a commercial came on for a cruise line, causing Snag to wish she were in the tropics, alone on a ship of strangers rather than in the town bar confessing her sins to Gilly, who still hadn’t pulled her hand away. She squeezed Snag’s and said, “That is a tragic story. And I’m so sorry. But the biggest tragedy is that you’ve been blaming yourself for bad weather one day twenty years ago. You are a sensitive, caring, strong woman, Snag. But I’m sorry—your thoughts don’t have that kind of power.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand. More than you think. And I understand that loving your sister-in-law did not make that plane crash into that mountain. I guarantee it.”

  “But you weren’t even there. There’s even more to it. I—”

  “I don’t need to know specifics. I don’t care. I know that you weren’t in that plane when it crashed. Planes crash everywhere, but they especially like to crash in Alaska. You need to knock off this excuse for not living your life. Right this second.”

  Snag exhaled. The breath kept coming. She had never told a soul, and now she’d just spilled her secret to a woman she didn’t know all that well. True, she hadn’t spilled everything, but she’d let go of enough to unplug the dam. Snag was making a scene, but nobody except Johnny and Bobby and Rex were there to witness it, and they were enthralled with golf up on the television. Gilly went to the bar for more drinks and brought back a stack of napkins, which Snag used to mop the tears on her face.

  A crowd started gathering as the band set up. Snag waved at Marion Tilloko, Kache’s old girlfriend and singing partner, whose grandfather’s room was three doors down from Lettie’s. Gilly waved too.

  Snag leaned across her fresh drink and said, “I still have never, not once, gone out to the homestead since right after the crash. I lied to my mom and Kache about that too.”

  “Are they mad about it?”

  Snag shook her head. “Miraculously, no.”

  “So there’s only one thing left to do then.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Let yourself off that hook you set back in the dark ages of 1985.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  Snag had left a note for Kache—Down at the Spit Tune listening to the band. Come join us!—which only further intensified his anguish. Not a band. The band, still playing at the same old bar, where in the early years, Rex had ignored the fact that the band was comprised of teenagers under the legal drinking age. They were going to be huge. That’s what they said, and that’s what everyone in town said, and that
’s what the newspaper reporter from Anchorage said. But this was all before Kache bailed.

  How was it that he’d neglected his passion? How was it that he’d left behind the most important thing in the world to him, besides his family? It had been a strange relief to head down to Austin without his guitar. Head down to the exact place he’d planned to dive into nothing but music, music, music—accepted to UT on a music scholarship. The University of Texas wasn’t so quick to offer the scholarship in accounting, but when Kache pointed out his perfect grades, not just in music, but in math, science, and English, as well as his volunteer work at the native village and his SAT scores, they pulled something they referred to as a hush-hush redistribution of funds and got him into the business department on a full ride. So there had been that hurdle. And then the daily hurdles of being in a town known for its abundance of music in most every bar, on most every street corner, not to mention all the festivals the whole city embraced—South by Southwest and Austin City Limits, to name a couple—and the way he’d practically bump into people like Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle and John Prine, his heroes sitting in a restaurant having lunch with a friend or hunched down in an aisle in a used bookstore or walking out of the pharmacy as he was walking in.

  But he preferred dealing with all that to dealing with what hit him when he played. He’d tried at first, still at home, in the weeks after they died. But the music always took him back to that last awful night.

  • • •

  That last awful night, Kache had retreated to his bedroom, locked the door, and strummed as loud as possible over his dad’s yelling and banging, his threatening to kick down the door, until he finally did. He pushed his face into Kache’s, but Kache kept on playing as loud as possible. He smelled scotch and the onions from the casserole Aunt Snag had brought. He’d seen his dad drunk before, but not often and not like this. All three of the adults were cutting loose that night, and his dad was getting ugly. After the complaints about Kache’s inability, his laziness around the homestead, it always came down to his music, as if it were a personal affront and the cause of all the evil in the world. It didn’t matter that Kache worked so hard at school and his music; it only mattered that he didn’t work hard enough at home.

  “You goddamn lazy ass! You pompous little shit. Don’t you ever lock your goddamn door on me again, you understand?” Kache didn’t answer. “You understand me?”

  Kache had been silently shaking, but he tried for boldness. “No. I don’t understand you. I never will.”

  His dad pulled him up by his hair and then did what he’d never done. He punched him, hard, and blood spurted like a surprise from Kache’s nose. Despite himself, tears filled his eyes while the blood filled his hand.

  Kache said what he’d never said before. “I hate you. Why don’t you just go fucking kill something? Go shoot your animals and leave me alone.”

  Snag stepped over the door, calling, “Bets, bring ice!” and chewed out Glenn, who stumbled away. “What are you, some kind of monster?” she yelled after him. But even Aunt Snag, who Kache had never seen drunk, slurred her words. She grabbed a T-shirt off the floor, not knowing it was his favorite, a Blaze Foley T-shirt that Marion had bought him at a concert in the Lower 48 and brought back last summer. Snag held Blaze Foley up to Kache’s nose and let the blood soak in. Kache closed his eyes and wished for Denny, but he was out on a date. None of this would have happened if Denny had been home. His dad wouldn’t dare touch Kache in Denny’s presence. Kache couldn’t believe he’d done it at all.

  Then it was his mom crouching over him, smoothing back his hair, saying, “I’m sorry, honey, I’m so sorry. That’s not your dad. It’s the drink,” but he smelled the scotch on her too. What the hell was everyone getting so drunk for? What had started as a nice enough meal with Aunt Snag and a game of Scrabble (planned for later but never played) had turned into a drunken brawl of an evening. Even later, as he lay on his bunk bed, pumped up with some painkillers leftover from his mom’s knee surgery, he heard more yelling and crying. He rehung the door as best he could, given his drugged state and lack of carpentry skills. Then he nailed it shut and refused to come out. Maybe if Denny had come home, he might have worked himself into Kache’s room and talked him into joining them. But Denny had spent the night at his girlfriend’s.

  The next morning, Kache wouldn’t acknowledge his father’s pleas for forgiveness. Instead, he played his guitar over his dad’s words. “I’m sorry as a man can be, Son. It was wrong of me. Kachemak? Please forgive me.”

  The front door slammed. He stopped playing. His parents’ footsteps on the front porch, the gravel. He quietly opened his window, straining to hear. The hunting and fishing gear thrown in the truck bed. Doors creaking open.

  His dad said, “He’ll be all right.”

  “Maybe I should stay with him.” These were the last words he’d ever hear her speak.

  “Sometimes, Bets, a man needs his space. Let’s give him that. Come on, hon. I told Den we’d pick him up by now.”

  One door slammed, the engine growled into a roar, and then Kache peeked out and saw his mother look up to his window. He wanted to step forward, wave, tell her to wait, but he stayed to the side and watched her climb in and pull her door shut. It would have been so easy to stop them. The time it would have taken him to pack up his stuff would have delayed them, might have changed everything. But he didn’t stop them. He watched the truck churn gravel as it turned and made its way up the road until they were gone.

  This is what Kache had heard whenever he’d tried to play the guitar again all those years before: His dad screaming, his dad threatening, Kache saying those words I hate you I hate you, go fucking kill something, his mom consoling, his dad apologizing, and then the doors shutting, the truck starting and leaving without Kache on their way to pick up Denny. Denny. The big brother who always stuck up for him.

  • • •

  He ran his fingers down along his nose and back up. He needed to pick up new strings. The thought taunted him as he sat on the bed in Snag’s guest room, holding his old guitar. He didn’t know if the background noise of that night would still be there when he played.

  If he hurried, he could get to Jeff’s Music to buy those strings before it closed.

  Or he could turn on Snag’s TV, lie back on the couch, catch The House That Jack and Jack Jr. Built, and call it a day. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been working his ass off.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  In the last month, Nadia had gone from plotting her escape to looking forward to Kache’s arrival every morning. Now she might have ruined their friendship.

  Since Kache had first shown up, she’d given up one of her favorite pastimes. What had once seemed to be intimately hers alone and a means of survival felt like rampant stealing in his presence. Even after he left in the evenings, though she was tempted, she resisted.

  But she kept slipping up. Conversation was still challenging to her, and though she craved it, it drained and confounded her. How many of the thoughts in her head should she transpose into words and let out of her mouth to travel the air to Kache’s ears? What was good for him to know? What would cause him unnecessary pain? What was she meant to keep for only herself?

  Elizabeth had meant to keep the diaries to herself; Nadia knew this from their content. Nonetheless, she had read them so often and so thoroughly that she often had difficulty drawing the line between her thoughts and Elizabeth’s. Handing Kache the guitar and asking him to play that song had been stupid, and he might be gone for good. Just like Lettie.

  And so, out of loneliness for Kache and in order to stop unknowingly quoting Kache’s own mother, Nadia convinced herself she should take a quick peek and refresh her memory. She took her three favorite notebooks out of the cardboard box where she’d first found them, packed away in Elizabeth and Glenn’s closet. She positioned herself between old boots and slippers an
d the hems of heavy coats, and counting on Leo to bark if the truck turned down the road, she opened a diary and read:

  Blessed, blessed summer is upon us, and I have the energy of eight of my winter selves. So much to be done, but let me at it and let me feel the sun on my arms and hair and back for eighteen hours straight. The garden is boiling over, the cabbage ballooning into the ridiculous. Sunflowers bigger than my face. Gladiolas! Pansies! Roses! The beans are reaching for the sky and will soon be vining themselves around a star. The same goes for Denny and especially Kache; the notches in the doorjamb need to be updated almost weekly.

  “Oh, Elizabeth,” Nadia whispered. “I have missed you.”

  And then this:

  We are a family of extremes, relying on one another in a land of extremes. We go forth in a constant state of alertness: for shifts in the sea and sky, for crashing of enormous antlers or huge claws through alders, for yet another clashing of personalities. We are a bear, a moose, a wolf, and an eagle, all living under this small roof, the illusion of shelter amid the magnificence.

  Now she wondered who Kache was supposed to be in that scenario. She could imagine him as a moose or an eagle or even a wolf. How did his mother see him? Leo barked, and Nadia dropped the notebooks into the box, scrambled out from her hiding place, and ran down the stairs, only to see the same cow moose and her calf that showed up every day, lumbering across the yard, Kache still nowhere, and it was late morning. What if he did not forgive her?

  She had pictured the two of them setting off for the beach to clear the fishing nets—much easier with two. But she shouldn’t wait any longer. She certainly shouldn’t be hiding in the closet when the sun gave itself so freely and completely, a thick slab of warm butter spreading out from the low sky to every corner. Brightness abounded. If only she had a big box in which she could store some of this light for the winter; when it stayed dark for most of the day, she could lift the lid and let the light reach out to warm her. But that’s what the box of Elizabeth’s words had done.