Mama went to Dad, put her arms around him, pulled him close. “Hey, you,” she whispered, kissing his throat. “I missed you.”
“They fired me. Sons of bitches.”
“Oh, no,” Mama said. “What happened? Why?”
“A lying son of a bitch said I was drinking on the job. And my boss is a prick. It wasn’t my fault.”
“Poor Ernt,” Mama said. “You never get a break.”
He touched Mama’s face, tilted her chin up, kissed her hard. “God, I missed you,” he said against her lips. She moaned at his touch, molded her body to his.
They drifted toward the bedroom, pushed through the clacking beads, apparently unaware that anyone else was in the cabin. Leni heard them fall on the bed with a thump, heard their breathing accelerate.
Leni sat back on her heels. Good God. She would never understand her parents’ relationship. It shamed Leni; that unshakable love both she and Mama had for Dad gave her a bad, heartsick feeling. There was something wrong with them; she knew it. Saw it in the way Large Marge sometimes looked at Mama.
“It ain’t normal, kid,” Large Marge said.
“What is?”
“Who the hell knows? Crazy Pete is the happiest married person I know.”
“Well, Matilda’s no ordinary goose. You hungry?”
Large Marge patted her big belly. “You bet. Your mama’s stew is my favorite.”
“I’ll get us some. God knows they won’t be out of the bedroom for a while.” Leni wrapped up the meat she’d butchered, then washed her hands with water from the bucket by the sink. In the kitchen, she cranked up the radio as loud as it would go, but it wasn’t enough to drown out the reunion in the bedroom.
*
BREAKUP IN ALASKA. The season of melting, movement, noise, when the sunlight tenatively came back, shone down on dirty, patchy snow. The world shifted, shrugging off the cold, making sounds like great gears turning. Blocks of ice as big as houses broke free, floated downstream, hitting anything in their way. Trees groaned and fell over as the wet, unstable ground moved beneath them. Snow turned to slush and then to water that collected in every hollow and indentation in the land.
Things lost in the snow were found again: a hat taken by the wind, a coil of rope; beer cans that had been tossed into snowbanks floated to the muddy surface of the road. Black spruce needles lay in murky puddles, branches broken by storms floated in the water that ran downhill from every corner of their land. The goats stood knee-deep in a sucking muck. No amount of hay could soak it up.
Water filled tree wells and ran along roadsides and pooled everywhere, reminding everyone that this part of Alaska was technically a rain forest. You could stand anywhere and hear ice cracking up and water sluicing from tree limbs and eaves, along the sides of the road, running in rivulets along every indentation in the oversaturated ground.
The animals came out of hiding. Moose ambled through town. No one ever took a turn too quickly. Sea ducks returned in squawking flocks and settled on waves in the bay. Bears came out of their dens and lumbered down hillsides looking for food. Nature was spring-cleaning, scrubbing away the ice and cold and frost, clearing the windows to let in the light.
On this beautiful blue evening, beneath a cerulean sky, Leni stepped into her rubber Xtratuf boots and went outside to feed the animals. They had seven goats now and thirteen chickens and four ducks. Slogging through ankle-deep mud, along watery tire grooves, she heard voices. She turned toward the sound, toward the cove that was their family’s link to the outside world. Although they had spent years here, the property remained stubbornly wild. Even in her own backyard Leni had to be careful, but on days like this, when the tide was in and water lapped up on the shell-strewn shore, it still took her breath away.
Now she saw canoes down on the water, a flotilla of brightly colored boats gliding past.
Tourists. Probably unaware of how fast things could change in Alaska. The water beneath them was calm, but the small bay filled and emptied twice a day in fast, rushing tides that could strand or drown the unwary before they recognized the danger.
Mama came up beside Leni. She smelled the familiar combination of cigarette smoke, rose-hip soap, and lavender hand cream that would always remind her of her mother. Mama looped one arm over Leni’s shoulder, gave her a playful hip bump.
They watched the tourists glide into the cove, heard their laughter echo across the water. Leni wondered what their lives were like, those Outside kids, who came up here for a vacation and backpacked up mountainsides and dreamed of living “off the land,” and then went back to their suburban homes and their changing lives.