It was beyond her why Gran had been so adamant that one of them take over for her here at the post office. It was either that, or have her continue. Gran absolutely refused to turn the job over to an outsider. The position had belonged to someone from Gran’s family ever since the first piece of mail had come into Hades some hundred and ten years ago.
As far as April saw it, this was just another rut to leave behind, not something to aspire to.
Certainly not something to take pride in. But Gran took pride in it and Gran was the one who counted, she thought, resigning herself for the umpteenth time and trying desperately to be patient. Patience was not her strong suit. It never had been. She’d always had the sense that there was something else, something better, waiting for her just around the next corner. So she kept turning corners. And anticipating.
April paused to flex her shoulders and straighten her back. “Wanderlust,” Gran had called it. She supposed in a way that gave her something in common with her father. The only thing in common. She would never hurt anyone, the way her father had, to get what she wanted. Wayne Yearling had had itchy feet. He’d tried to resist temptation for a while, or so he’d said, but then he’d finally given in and left. Her mother had thought for days that he would return, but April hadn’t. Even at eleven, April had known better. She’d known that her father was gone for good.
She’d gotten one postcard from him a few months after he’d left Hades. The only communication she’d ever had from him. One postcard in over thirteen years. The picture had been of Manhattan with its steel-girder skyscrapers making love to the sky as they reached up to forever. She’d fallen in love with the city the second she’d seen the postcard. The inscription on the back had been the typical “Wish you were here” and she wished she was there. Wished it with all her heart.
Gran had slipped the postcard to her, telling her in a hushed voice to not let her mother see it because in her anger and grief, Rose Yearling would have immediately ripped it up. So April kept it like a secret treasure, not even letting Max or June know about it. She’d slipped the postcard beneath her pillow and dreamed dreams of New York City and other places that had never seen a dogsled.
It had taken April seven years to make her dream come true. Her mother was gone by then and there seemed little reason to remain in Alaska. Gran could take care of June, and Max was almost grown. So she had left Hades to make something of herself, to forge a career that suited her and the wanderlust she’d inherited.
She found her answer and her calling in freelance photography and proceeded to make a minor name for herself. That she never remained long in any one particular place was just a pleasant by-product of her career. She went where the stories were and considered herself a citizen of the world rather than as someone belonging to a tiny blip on the map.
Sighing, she ran a hand through the tangle of blond hair that refused to fall into neat waves the way June’s always did. Her hair, Gran used to say, was every bit as rebellious as her soul. She supposed that it was. April had always rather liked the description. It made her view her hair as a badge of some kind rather than just a sea of golden corkscrew curls that repeatedly defied styling.
According to one of her acquaintances, she was in style now. Eventually, she mused with an absent smile, everything was.
Digging out another stack of envelopes from inside the mail pouch, the frown that returned to her lips deepened. It was too quiet for her.
Returning to Hades, she’d forgotten how quiet it could be here at times. How quiet and how dark. It was spring now so the endless winter darkness that assaulted the town was six months away, but even so, once the lights went out, there would be nothing but inkiness in the world right outside her window. Nothing like in the city where there were always streetlights and illumination coming in from all sides.
Here, dark was dark, like the bottom of the mine shafts that half the male population of Hades regarded as their prime source of livelihood.
Dark like a soul without love.
She stopped. Where had that come from? In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, she recalled Tennyson’s line. Maybe a young man’s, but not hers. Love would turn her into someone who was needy. Someone who could be hurt. Like her mother. She’d vowed that was never going to happen to her.
But there were times when she felt as if something was missing. Something…
She was just hot, April told herself. Hot, bored and a victim of cabin fever.
Setting down the stack of mail, she moved toward the open stairs in the rear of the post office. The living quarters were upstairs. She, Max and June had grown up there, living with Gran. Now only Gran still called it home, even though April had tried time and again, if not to lure her away, to at least buy her a small house of her own. Gran wouldn’t hear of it.
“Don’t want to get used to anything new at my age, except maybe a man,” Gran had said with a wink. “You keep your money and buy a house for yourself.”
And that was that. Telling Gran she didn’t want a house of her own was out of the question. Gran wouldn’t have believed her. She had her own preconceived notions of what people did or didn’t want and there was no talking her out of them.
“Gran,” April called up the stairs, “is there anything I can get you?”
“No, I’m fine, dear,” her grandmother’s voice assured her. “Just watching my story. I’ll be down to help you as soon as it’s over.”
April shook her head as she hurried up the stairs to head off her grandmother. The woman had a patent on stubbornness. They’d waltzed around this argument every day since she’d arrived. The first day had been the most difficult, but April hadn’t fooled herself into believing that she had won the war, just tiny skirmishes here and there.
“No, you won’t,” April informed her, entering a tiny living room filled to overflowing with knickknacks that had taken more than six decades to accumulate. April seriously doubted that Gran threw out anything, convinced that the moment she would, a need for the item, no matter how obscure, would arise. “If you remember, the reason I’m here, playing solitaire with all those envelopes, is so that you can rest—and sensibly see your way clear to going to the hospital in Anchorage for—”
Lying on the sofa, Ursula Hatcher waved a small hand in the air to push away the words she knew were coming. “Stuff and nonsense,” she proclaimed. “Bunch of children playing doctor, poking at me for no good reason.” She raised her chin, tossing her gray-streaked faded red hair over her shoulder. “My heart’s fine. It’s just a little tired, but it has a right to be. It’s been working nonstop for sixty-nine years without a vacation. You’d be tired, too, if you’d worked that hard,” she insisted staunchly.
April reached over to adjust the black-and-yellow crocheted throw draped over her grandmother’s legs. “That’s just the point, Gran—” April began.
Ursula finished adjusting the throw herself, then cocked her head, listening. “Is that the doorbell downstairs?”
April pinned her with a look. Her grandmother was a great one for diversions when she didn’t like the subject under discussion. “Whoever it is down there will keep, Gran. They can’t be in any sort of a hurry if they’re living in Hades.”
“Think you know everything, don’t you, child?” Ursula began digging her knuckles in on either side of the sofa, giving a masterful performance of a person struggling to get up. “It’s a postmistress’s duty to be there when someone walks into the post office. But that’s all right, dear, you’re busy. I’ll go—”
April struggled to keep from laughing. Her grandmother was ruining her attempt at being stern with her. Very gently, she pushed the older woman back against the mound of pillows she’d personally fluffed up this morning.
“God, but you are good at dispensing guilt,” she informed her grandmother. The older woman smiled in response. “Stay