All the Winters After

by Seré Prince Halverson

  Kache turned up the hill and into an almost vacant lot and parked. “Ready?”

  “No,” she said, but she opened her car door anyway.

  They approached a building with big glass doors, which slid open for them. The warm air hit her, along with the aromas of bacon and coffee mixed with cleaning products and the urine smell of a bathroom that needed to be cleaned. She felt a little queasy again. Kache led the way, stopping to talk to old people sitting in wheelchairs or making their way down the hall, taking slow half steps with canes or leaning on metal contraptions.

  So much to see. She tried taking off her sunglasses, but even then, she could not focus on any one thing; it seemed like an abstract painting in one of Elizabeth’s art books. Kache was introducing her, which made her uncomfortable, so she replaced her glasses and nodded and stayed behind him. She did hear one man ask, “Where’s your guitar, boy?” and Kache replied that he would bring it tomorrow. He’d never mentioned playing for them.

  He took her to a small room, where Lettie sat in a wheelchair, looking out at the view of the bay. Kache knelt beside her and said, “Hey, Gram. I brought someone.”

  Lettie turned and smiled, but then her eyes grew wide behind her glasses. “Nadia!”

  Nadia’s shyness disappeared, and she bent to hug her. Lettie was the only person who had held Nadia in the past decade, and their embrace felt so familiar, even now, that Nadia sighed and tried unsuccessfully to will the tears away.

  “How good of you to come. How brave. You leave the homestead now?”

  Nadia and Kache exchanged a look. “This is my first time.”

  “Your first time ever? And you came to this old, smelly place?”

  “I missed you.”

  Lettie gripped her hand. “I missed you. Look at you. Young and beautiful and strong and full of life. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  So Nadia told her about the garden expansion and how the goats and chickens were doing and about the addition of the cow, Mooze. “And Leo has grown up to be a wonderful friend to me.”

  Kache said, “Hey, me too.”

  Lettie said, “Hey, you too have become a wonderful friend to her?”

  Kache turned a shade of red. “Well, yeah, I guess so. I was talking about Leo. He’s my buddy too. But Nadia and I are buddies, right, Nadia?”

  She smiled, but she couldn’t quite meet his eyes. Watching him interact with all the older people, and seeing his bond with Lettie… She’d never seen him with others like this, his goodness and kindness; he was the same with them as he had been with her.

  “I miss those days working in the garden, going into town and chatting with the locals, even the tourists and all their wide-eyed wonder. Energy. I miss all that shared energy. Now you two get out of here and go enjoy some of it for me, will you? It goes by lickety-split.”

  But they lingered and talked a bit more, until Lettie insisted she needed her nap. After they hugged good-bye, Lettie said, “Will you please help me convince my overprotective daughter and grandson that I can handle a road trip out to the homestead?” Nadia assured her she would try.

  In the truck on the way back, Nadia fell quiet, thinking how all of those people who couldn’t walk or see or remember their own names were stuck in one place and that, eventually, she would be too.

  “Turn around this truck, please?”

  Kache glanced in the rearview mirror and slowed down. “Did you forget something?”

  “Yes.” She lifted her shoulders the way he always did. “I forgot to see the rest of Caboose.”

  • • •

  As they came back into town, Kache pointed to the glove compartment. “I bought earplugs too if you need them. I imagine Caboose might seem loud to you.”

  “Haven’t you heard the gulls and crows and blue jays when they’re all bickering? But thank you for thinking of these things.”

  “Even blue jays seem peaceful when you start hearing motorcycles and horns and fishermen shouting, so keep them in your pocket just in case.”

  “I promise I will not start this tearing out of my hair and banging of my head against a post if it is loud.”

  He smiled. “I’m so relieved.” He drove up and down, looking for a parking spot so they could walk along the spit. Colorful tents still lined the beach on the north side, where the Spit Rats, out of college for the summer, camped and worked at the fish processing plant. When Nadia was a little girl, she asked her mother if she could join them.

  Kache said, “Maybe we should have come a different day of the week, or better, waited until fall. It’s so crazy with all the tourists.”

  “I like it,” she said. “Please, no worrying. I am fine.”

  And she was more than fine while they browsed in shops overflowing with a kaleidoscope of bright things, things, things, and ate fish and chips and drank a beer and picked out gladiolas. (“My mother loved those,” Kache said, staring at her again, and Nadia had to stop herself from saying I know.) Tourists lined up for photographs alongside their enormous bear-size hanging halibuts.

  A wonderland. Rows upon rows of docked boats, tourist shops, a handful of restaurants, a bar, and the still caboose, sitting at the end of the spit. And this was not San Francisco, not even close. She shut her eyes and tried to picture the Golden Gate Bridge, the Coit Tower, the pyramid—imagine a tall skinny mountain in the middle of a city!—the rivers of people, and the clanging cable cars.

  “Let’s go in,” Kache said, holding open the door of the caboose and motioning her inside.

  It took a few minutes for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. Old photographs and tools that the homesteaders used lined the shelves. It smelled like the inside of some of Elizabeth’s oldest books. A slide show flashed onto one wall. An older woman sat behind the counter, talking on the phone. As Nadia looked around, she heard her hang up and say, “Look at you! How many years has it been?” and Nadia’s heart started pumping double time. But the woman was looking at Kache, not Nadia.

  “Hi there, Miss Rose.”

  “I just saw your aunt a few weeks ago, and she mentioned you were in town. And who’s your lovely friend?”

  “This is my cousin,” Kache said without hesitation. “Gretchen. From Colorado.”

  “Well, hello, Gretchen from Colorado. I taught this boy everything he knows about math and science, didn’t I, Kache?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Nadia managed to smile, but she didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. Kache and Miss Rose continued to talk while Nadia looked at the various exhibits until she came across an enlarged photograph with a caption that read The Winkel family on their homestead. A couple and a young boy and girl. She didn’t recognize any of them, until she noticed the way the thick braid ran down the right shoulder of the young woman. Lettie! So the man was A. R. and the boy was Glenn and the girl was Snag. All bundled up and stiff-armed in their layers of clothes, propped up on the front porch of the home where Nadia had lived for the last ten years. The home had expanded since the photo was taken and now had another floor.

  She searched for more photographs of the family and then noticed a sign at another display:

  “Only one thing was certain. We weren’t in Kansas anymore.” —A. R. Winkel, Caboose homesteader

  “It was hard work, but it was worth every sore muscle. No regrets. I never wanted to live anywhere else.” —Lettie Winkel, Caboose homesteader

  Nadia tried to imagine what it would be like to never want to live anywhere else, when she constantly obsessed about living somewhere else. She remembered Lettie telling her that she’d moved here from Kansas. Maybe if Lettie had lived in San Francisco, she would have never moved here; she would have been so happy to be in the hilly city with all its beautiful architecture and views of the bay and the bridges and museums twenty or more times the size of this one.

  “Ready?” K
ache stood next to her. She pointed to the sign with his grandparents’ words, and he nodded. “Yep. That land was always imprinted on her heart.”

  “Was this true for him?”

  Kache shrugged. “He died when I was pretty young.”

  • • •

  Back in the truck, sitting at a stop sign, Nadia asked Kache to pull the truck over again.

  “You sick?”

  She shook her head and pointed to Salon & Saloon.

  “That’s the women’s version. The guy’s is called Beer & Barber. A wife and husband own them. You can drink while you get your hair done.”

  “I want to.”

  “We can get a drink down at the Spit Tune. Want to go there? Here, it’s more about the haircut.”

  “I want to get that, my hair cut.”

  “I thought you Old Believer women don’t cut your hair.”

  “They do not. That is why I want to cut mine. Plus, it will be less recognizable.”

  “Don’t you want to think about it for a few days first?”

  “I have been thinking for many years about it. Once, myself, I cut it, but I did not do this good, so I only now trim the ends. I want it short and how did the magazine say it? Sassy? Like boy.”

  “You can try all you want, but you will never look like a boy.”

  “No, I want only this short hair like boy. Not to look like boy. Like girls in magazines. Your mother, she had this shorter hair, yes?”

  “Yes, she did. Short with curls.”

  “I like this short hair. I want to have it now.”

  By then, Kache had found a parking place and turned off the truck. “Okay then. A haircut it is.”

  But as they approached the shop, Nadia remembered that it would cost money to have her hair cut, and she slowed down.

  “Maybe not. Never mind.” She turned away.

  “You don’t want to cut it?”

  “No, I do it myself. This way is too much money.”

  “Nadia, I have money. I owe you for taking such good care of the place. Come on.” He stepped toward the door and opened it, waiting for her. She paused, people veering around her, the wind blowing the bells on the door. “Hurry,” he said. “My treat.”

  Kache sat and read a newspaper while a woman about Nadia’s age, with pink-and-orange hair shaved on one side and longer on the other, looked at the photographs Nadia pointed out in the magazines. She said Nadia would look awesome with her hair short. “You definitely have the cheekbones for it.” She led Nadia to the back of the salon where there were large brown sinks. Nadia sat in a black chair that leaned back so that her neck rested on the cool rim. The woman ran warm water over her head and commented on how long Nadia’s hair was. She washed her hair with something that smelled like honey and flowers Nadia couldn’t name, rubbing her scalp and her temples, the back of her neck. Her fingers were strong and careful, and Nadia felt herself relaxing her head into the woman’s hands. She remembered her mother washing her hair when she was a child, but her mother never rubbed her head and neck like this. No one ever had, and the gentleness made Nadia’s throat ache a little.

  The woman walked Nadia back to her chair in front of the mirror and began snipping off long sheaths to Nadia’s shoulders. “You’ve got so much hair I’m going to dry it before I cut anymore.” The hair dryer thrummed warm and loud, and the woman, whose name was Katy, continued to rub Nadia’s head and run her fingers up through the hair closest to her scalp. She shouted over the hair dryer that she just wanted to get some of the moisture out before she started cutting. While she picked out scissors from her drawer, she talked loudly of her boyfriend, how they were renting an apartment in Caboose, that she was from Seattle.

  “I love it here, but there are some things you’d never guess from the postcard version. Like, for instance, the best place for spotting bald eagles? The town dump. Who would have thunk it? Kind of depressing, if you ask me.”

  Nadia didn’t know what to say when she asked her questions like, “You live here or just up visiting?” So Nadia would nod or just answer yes or no. She didn’t want to give away too much information, and then she wondered if Katy knew Miss Rose, and should Nadia be going with the Gretchen-from-Colorado story Kache had concocted? Probably. But it was too late.

  Nadia soon forgot all that, and Katy grew quiet as she snipped and combed, snipped and combed. She took out a razor not unlike the one Nadia had shaved Kache’s face with and started working on her bangs; the pull of it felt good, the sound of it sawing and chewing through her hair. The hair fell off, first in longer strands, then in chunks, then in smaller and smaller flakes, like the softest snowfall. Except, instead of covering everything up, it was revealing. Revealing Nadia. There were her eyes, huge and blue, staring back at her. Her ears, small. Her bare neck, long. She smiled, and Katy smiled back. “Look at you, girl. You’re gorgeous. I wish I had your collarbones. And those cheekbones.”

  Nadia wondered why someone would want her bones, but she just smiled back. She looked completely different, like another person altogether. Like a young woman who lived in San Francisco and drove a little convertible, and when the wind blew, it didn’t even bother her; her hair never got in her eyes. She could always see where she was going, and she was always going somewhere.

  Nadia pointed to Katy’s ears, the line of earrings going up them. “I want those too,” she said. Many of the girls in the village had pierced ears, but Nadia’s father had prohibited it.

  Katy smiled. She had a dimple in one cheek. “You want me to pierce your ears? I can’t today, because I have another client coming in. And we’re not really set up for it, so my boss would get pissed. But I totally know how to pierce ears. Here’s my number”—she started writing on a pink card—“and if you call me, you can come over, or I can come to your house, and I’ll pierce your ears. Ten bucks a hole is all I’d charge, but you’ll have to buy the earrings.”

  Nadia took the card and held it under the smock that was covered with her blond hair. Once they stepped foot off the homestead, everything cost money. Could she trade eggs for earrings? Katy removed the smock and brushed Nadia’s neck with a soft brush. She handed her a mirror and turned Nadia’s chair so she could see the back. She was facing Kache, who shook his head and smiled, smiled so big, back at her.

  “Wow, you two,” Katy said. “You better get out of here and go get a room.”

  Kache said, “It’s not like that.” Like what? But Nadia didn’t bother to ask because their talking faded as she focused on the person in the mirror. Yes, yes, this is me.

  She stared at her reflection, tilted her head. Like a woman in a magazine. Like a woman finally stepping off the page.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  The more they worked in the garden, the more the garden—and workload—grew. Kache stood, straightened his back, and pulled the spade behind his shoulders to stretch. He’d spent the early morning getting the smoker ready for the salmon, and the wondrous scent of fish and wood smoke permeated the air. The sun, unleashing itself on the bay, flashed a multitude of lights at him like he was some kind of celebrity. A thin silver band of clouds rested between water and peaks, and on days like this, it seemed he could reach across the water and leave his handprint on one of the pale blue glaciers wedged between those mountains.

  Why had he hated this place so much growing up? Why couldn’t he wait to leave, even before the accident? But he knew why: it was his father’s extremism, the homestead zealot, that turned Kache off. It didn’t have to be that way. There could be some kind of compromise, where you gave of yourself and took from the land and sometimes gave your cash and took from the Safeway. You could hook up a computer and even the Internet and live in paradise at the edge of the earth and still have a front-row seat to whatever was going down in New York City.

  In order to survive, you didn’t have to shoot big, brown
-eyed creatures if you didn’t want to, and you didn’t have to leave the world behind. It was 2005. A good time to be alive.

  Maybe that was the bridge for those lyrics he was working on.

  He hauled the basket of potatoes and carrots and onions along with the smoked salmon into the kitchen and set it on the counter next to the sink, still full of lettuce and a cabbage the size of a basketball. He tore off a couple of pieces of the salmon and offered one to Nadia. Man, it was almost as good as his dad’s.

  “Delicious.” Nadia sat on the couch with her legs crossed under her, the Mac on her lap, her short blond hair sticking up in the back like a beautiful Russian version of Dennis the Menace. Her lips were oily from the salmon, and a tiny track of four gold dots ran up her right ear, with just one gold dot in her left. He’d insisted on paying for the earrings as a gift, but he also wanted to pay her a salary and back pay for all her years of caretaking. She’d said no, but she might feel differently if she ever spent more time out in the world.

  It was getting more and more difficult for him not to reach out and touch her hair. Could it possibly be as soft as it looked?

  But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. She was still skittish sometimes and reluctant to talk about her fears. She’d lived alone all of her adult life. He’d hardly lived at all most of his. They would mess each other up worse than they already were.

  Still, he wondered if the span of his large hands would reach all the way around her waist. He wondered how it was that he felt so completely known when he was with her. Maybe all the solitude made her especially intuitive and sensitive to other people. Or maybe it was just that he knew so little about her in comparison.

  Leo leaped from his nap to snap at a fly but missed. Kache picked up his guitar and started playing with a ditty going through his head that he was calling “Young at Heart.”

  “I read about a fellah who’s a hundred and two.

  Makes pottery for something to do.

  Has a girlfriend who’s fifty with eyes of blue.