“You sold it. You sold the homestead.”
“No, hon. I didn’t. I didn’t sell it.”
He smiled, sort of, a sad, tight turning up of his mouth, while his shoulders relaxed. “I guess I’ll need to go out. Check up on things. I’ve been meaning to ask. But it’s hard, thinking about driving up, seeing it for the first time, you know? Do you go out there a lot?” Still such youthfulness to his face. He didn’t seem like a grown man who’d seen a lot of life. Snag couldn’t tell what it was, exactly. Trust? Vulnerability?
She said, “Not a lot, no.”
“Just enough to take care of things.” His voice didn’t rise in a question.
“No, not that much even.’ She breathed in deep, searched in her pockets and up her sleeve for a tissue. “I haven’t been out there at all.”
“This spring?”
“No. I mean not once. Not at all.”
“All year?”
“No, Kache. Not all year. Not ever. Not once. I never went out like I told you I did. I planned to a million times, but I never closed it up, never got all your stuff, never put things in storage. I never …”
He stood with his mouth agape for what seemed to Snag like a good five minutes. “Wait a second. You said you’d been renting it out. No one has been out there since I left? Not even the Fosters? Or the Clemskys? Jack? Any of those people? They would have been glad to help. They would have insisted on it.”
Snag leaned against the counter for support, inhaled and exhaled. “Don’t you see? I insisted it was taken care of. I told them I’d hired someone … to scrape the snow off … patch the roof … run water in the pipes.”
“I don’t understand. Why?”
“Embarrassed by then. I hadn’t even been out since you left, to water the houseplants, or—I’d never planned to be so negligent—clean out the pantry.” She fell silent. The water dripped on and on into the sink. “I left it all. I tried, I drove part way dozens of times but then I’d chicken out and turn the car around.”
Kache didn’t scream and holler at her like she’d expected. He hugged her, a big old bear of a hug. In his arms, the sense that she might not be worn down to a nub by shame after all. But grace dragged another weight of its own. He said her name, tenderly, and sighed. “You know it’s the anniversary today, almost to the hour?” She nodded because she did know without thinking about it, the way a person knows they’re breathing. He told her it was okay, that he did understand, more than he wanted to admit, that he’d fought the same problem in trying to come back.
She was glad she didn’t use the line she’d been holding onto in case she needed it, the fact that at first, way back when, she’d waited for him to return so they might go together. And that’s what she’d pictured happening now, the two of them braving the drive out together. But forgiving or not, he’d already let go of her, grabbed the car keys, called out, “I’ll be back in a while. Don’t wait up,” and was tearing out of the driveway when she whispered, “Wait.” But she knew. Even though he’d reacted with kindness, she could see the shock pumping through him and that he needed to put some distance between them. It scared her to have him go off upset. The tires screeched like they did when Kache was still a teenager, as if they’d woken up the morning after the crash and no time had passed at all.
Kache couldn’t get to the house fast enough now. Now that too much time had passed and the place would most likely have rotted to ruins. The cabin Grandma Lettie and Grandpa A.R. built with their own hands in the early Forties, added onto in the Fifties. The place that his mom and dad added onto again, then transformed into a real house in the Seventies. The house Kache grew up in and loved and the only place he ever called home. Reduced to a pile of moldy logs.
He guessed that when he got out to the homestead it would be dark. The days were already starting to get longer and in less than a month would go on until midnight, though that didn’t help him now. He had no idea if the moon would show up full or a sliver, waxing or waning. Yes, he knew the DIY network lineup by heart but he’d lost track of the night sky long ago. He reached under the seat for the flashlight he figured Snag would have stowed there and set it next to him. Plenty of gas—he’d filled it that afternoon, so he’d make it out and back with some to spare.
Keeping an eye out for moose, he drove the first part of the road, the paved part, fast. Here the houses stood close enough to see each other, all facing south to take advantage of the view—the jagged horizon of mountains marooned across six miles of Kachemak Bay.
Kachemak. A difficult name to have in this town, the kids teasing him in his first years at school, when the teacher let his full name slip out during roll call instead of the shortened version he’d insisted on—pronounced simply catch—the kids adding Bay onto the end of it. Then in high school, the girls blushing and calling him What a Kache, asking him if he would write a song for them. Or the boys throwing balls of any type his way and saying Here, Kache, followed by You can’t! Kache!, which was absolutely correct.
At first his mom told him they named him for the bay because it was the most beautiful bay she’d ever seen and he was the most beautiful baby she’d ever laid eyes on. Whenever Denny protested, she’d laugh and say, “Den, I won’t lie to you. You had the sweetest little squished-up turnip face. Fortunately, you grew into your dashingly handsome self.”
Later, when Kache was sixteen and his father decided he was old enough to be let in on a secret, he told Kache that was all true, but there was more. Kache was conceived, his father said, grinning, in the fishing boat on the bay. The sun had been warm and the fishing slow—both rarities for Alaska. “Proved to be a fruitful combination, heh?” He slapped Kache on the back so hard it about knocked him over. “Denny, of course, was conceived on a camping trip to Denali.” Kache had told his dad that he didn’t need quite that much information, thank you very much.
He hit a pothole and mud splattered on the hood and windshield. Kache knew the house was probably too far out of the way and too well hidden for anyone to stumble upon. Old Believers wouldn’t want anything to do with a house outside their village, and the deepest cut of canyon on the whole peninsula added an uncrossable deterrent. Nobody with a brain would descend that canyon. The one other access besides their five-mile private road was by the beach, and only during the lowest tides. Most likely, the house stood its ground against the snow and rain and wind until the chinking filled like sponges, the roof turned to cheesecloth, the furniture rotted with moss, all his mother’s books … All those books. His mom’s paintings and her quilts and the photographs. The photographs he had never wanted, now he wanted them, even the blurry black-and-white ones he’d taken when he was five, when he’d snapped a whole roll of film with Denny’s new camera, and Denny had threatened to strangle him.
Damn it, Aunt Snag.
Where you been? Where you been?
Damn it yourself, Winkel. He hit the steering wheel, pulled on the lights, leaned forward as if that would make him get there faster.
The road turned to dirt—mud this time of year. A plastic bottle of Advil lodged between the seats rattled on and on. This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it.
No turning around now; the pull grew stronger, magnetic.
He wasn’t the first one to leave and get pulled back. In the mid-Sixties, even his dad couldn’t wait to get away, had gone off to Vietnam in a huff of rebellion mixed with a desperation to see someone other than the all-too-familiar faces in Caboose, Alaska. But he returned with a deep disdain for the World Out There. In