“Dad, I’m almost eighteen. I know all that.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Eighteen only sounds old to you. Humor me.”
“I won’t leave the property and I’ll lock the door,” Leni promised.
“Good girl.” Dad grabbed a box full of pelts that he would sell to the furrier in Sterling and headed for the door.
When he was gone, Mama said, “Please, Leni. Don’t screw up. You’re so close to leaving for college. Just a few weeks.” She sighed. “You are not listening.”
“I am listening. I won’t do anything stupid,” Leni lied.
Outside, the truck horn honked.
Leni hugged her mother and literally shoved her toward the door.
Leni watched them drive away.
Then she waited, counted down the minutes until the ferry’s departure time.
Precisely forty-seven minutes after they left, she jumped onto her bicycle and pedaled down the bumpy driveway, through the opening in the plank wall and onto the main road. She turned onto the Walker’s road. She came to a thumping stop in front of the two-story log house and stepped off her bike, glancing around. No one would be inside on a day like this, not with so many chores to do. She saw Mr. Walker off to the left, near the trees, driving a bulldozer, moving piles of dirt around.
Leni dropped her bike in the grass and walked over the grassy berm and stared down the wide, weathered gray steps that led to the pebbled beach. Broken mussel shells lay scattered across the kelp and mud and rocks.
Matthew stood in the shallow water at a sloping metal table, filleting big silver and red salmon, pulling sacs of bright orange eggs out, carefully laying them out to dry. Seagulls cawed overhead, swooping and flapping, waiting for scraps. Guts floated in the water, brushed up against his boots.
“Matthew!” she yelled down at him.
He looked up.
“My parents are on the ferry. Going to Sterling. Can you come over? We have all day together.”
He put down his ulu. “Holy shit! I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
Leni went back to her bike and jumped on.
At the homestead, she fed and watered the animals and then ran around like a madwoman, trying to get ready for her first real date. She packed a picnic basket full of food and brushed her teeth—again—and shaved her legs and dressed in a pretty, off-white Gunne Sax dress Mama had given her for her seventeenth birthday. She twined her waist-length hair into a single wrist-thick braid and tied the end with a piece of grosgrain ribbon. Her stretched-out gray wool socks and wafflestompers kind of ruined the romantic effect, but it was the best she could do.
Then she waited. Holding her picnic basket and blanket, she stood on the deck, tapping her foot. Off to her right, the goats and chickens seemed agitated. They were probably sensing her nervousness. Overhead, a sky that should have been cornflower blue darkened. Clouds rolled in, stretched out, dimmed the sun.
They were on the ferry now, pulling into Homer; they had to be. Please don’t let them come back for something.
While she was staring down the shadowy driveway, she heard a distant motor whirring. Fishing boat. The sound was as common here in the summer as the drone of mosquitoes.
She ran to the edge of the property just as an aluminum fishing boat puttered into their cove. Nearing the beach, the motor clicked off and the boat glided soundlessly forward, beaching itself on the pebbled shore. Matthew stood at the console, waving.
She hurried down the stairs to the beach.
Matthew jumped down into the shallow water and came toward Leni, dragging the boat higher on the beach behind him, mesmerizing her with his smile, his confidence, the love in his eyes.
In an instant, a glance, the tension that had held her in its maw for months released. She felt giddy, young. In love.
“We have until five,” she said.
He swept her off her feet and kissed her.
Laughing at the sheer joy she felt, Leni took him by the hand and led him past the caves on the beach to an inland trail that led to a stub of forested land that overlooked the other side of the bay. Cliffs jutted out beneath them, defiant slabs of stone. Here, the ocean crashed against the rocky shore, sprayed up and landed like wet kisses on their skin.
She laid out the blanket she’d brought and set down the picnic basket.
“What did you bring?” Matthew asked, sitting down.
Leni knelt on the blanket. “Easy stuff. Halibut sandwiches, crab salad, some fresh beans, sugar cookies.” She looked up, smiling. “This is my first date.”
“Mine, too.”
“We’ve lived weird lives,” she said.