But things were different now.
“I got into the University of Alaska at Anchorage, Mama.”
“Oh, my God, that’s great!” Mama said. A smile lit up her face and then faded. “But we can’t afford—”
“Tom Walker and Large Marge and Thelma and Ms. Rhodes are paying for it.”
“Money isn’t the only issue.”
“No,” Leni said, not looking away. “It’s not.”
“We will have to plan this carefully,” Mama said. “Your dad can never know Tom is paying. Never.”
“It doesn’t matter. Dad won’t let me go. You know he won’t.”
“Yes, he will,” Mama said in a firmer voice than Leni had heard from her in years. “I’ll make him.”
Leni cast out the dream, let the hook of it sail over blue, blue water and splash down. College. Matthew. A new life.
Yeah. Right. “You’ll make him,” she said dully.
“I can see why you have no faith in me.”
Leni’s hold on resentment lessened. “That’s not it, Mama. How can I leave you here alone with him?”
Mama gave her a sad, tired smile. “There will be no talk of that. None. You’re the chick. I’m the mama bird. Either you take flight on your own or I shove you out of the nest. It’s your choice. Either way, you’re going off to college with your boy.”
“You think it’s possible?” Leni let the amorphous dream turn solid enough that she could hold it in her hands, look at it from different angles.
“When do classes start?”
“Right after Labor Day.”
Mama nodded. “Okay. You’re going to have to be careful. Smart. Don’t risk everything for a kiss. That’s the kind of thing I would have done. Here’s what we’ll do: You stay away from Matthew and the Walkers until September. I will squirrel away enough money to buy you a bus ticket to Anchorage. We’ll fill your bug-out bag with what you need. Then, one day, I’ll arrange for a trip to Homer for all of us. You’ll say you have to use the bathroom and slip away. Later, when Dad calms down, I’ll find a note you left, saying that you’ve gone to college—without saying where—and you’ll promise to be back on the homestead for summer. It will work. You’ll see. If we’re careful, it will work.”
Don’t see Matthew until September.
Yes. That was what she would need to do.
But could she do it, really? Her love for Matthew was elemental, as powerful as the tide. No one could hold back the tide.
It reminded her of that movie she’d watched with Mama a lifetime ago. Splendor in the Grass. In it, Natalie Wood had loved Warren Beatty in that overwhelming way, but she lost him and ended up in a loony bin. When she got out, he was married, with a kid, but you knew neither one of them would love anyone else in that way again.
Mama had cried and cried.
Leni hadn’t understood then. Now she did. She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous. Leni had it in her to love the way her mother did. She knew that now.
“Seriously, Leni,” Mama said, looking worried. “You will need to be smart.”
*
IN JUNE, Dad worked on his wall every day. By the end of the month, the skinned log stanchions were all in place; they stuck up from the ground every ten feet along the property line, an elliptical boundary between their land and the main road.
Leni tried to submerge her longing for Matthew, but it was buoyant, prone to bobbing up. Sometimes, when she was supposed to be working, she stopped and pulled the secret necklace out of her hip pocket and held it so tightly the sharp point drew blood. She made lists in her head of things she wanted to say to him, had whole conversations by herself, over and over. At night she read paperback novels that she’d found in the FREE box at the General Store. One after another. Devil’s Desire, The Flame and the Flower, Moonstruck Madness: historical romances about women who had to fight for love and ultimately were saved by it.
She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories. They made her feel as if women could be in control of their destinies. Even in a cruel, dark world that tested women to the very limits of their endurance, the heroines of these novels could prevail and find true love. They gave Leni hope and a way to fill the lonely hours of the night.
During the endless daylight hours, she worked: she tended to the garden, carried trash to the oil drum and burned it to ash, which she used to fertilize the garden and make soap and block pests from the vegetable beds. She hauled water and repaired crab pots and untangled skeins of fishing nets. She fed the animals and gathered eggs and fixed fencing and smoked the fish they caught.