The couple lived in Fairbanks. They would be heading in a different direction. They walked Amy Raye to her truck, were delighted to see she had a dog. They even gave Amy Raye hugs good-bye, and in those hugs, she missed Farrell. She thought about how he would have liked these people. She almost told them about him, but she and Farrell had gone their separate ways. She had not checked in with Farrell since she had left, and she wondered about that as she saw this couple who almost seemed cartoonish in their bliss. There was a simple sweetness to them that Amy Raye wanted to believe was real.
It was close to eight that night when she got to McCarthy. She parked at the footbridge and grabbed her small duffel bag, and she and Saddle walked across the bridge and the half mile to town. She stopped at Lancaster’s Hotel and checked into the one vacancy, a small room with a twin bed and thin mattress, and a corridor bathroom shared by other guests. She was hungry, not having stopped to eat dinner, so she walked next door to the Golden Saloon, found a quiet corner among the revelry, ordered a beer and a steak. She did not own a cell phone, though most everyone did, so she was glad when she saw a pay phone beside the restrooms, because as she ate alone, she missed Farrell, and without thinking too long about it, she found the coin change in her jeans pocket and stood up to call him. But when she pulled out the handful of coins, she found the small piece of paper with Lew’s telephone number, so she called him instead. Lew did not pick up, and she wondered if he was outside doing a chore or putting tools away, or perhaps he’d driven to town and wasn’t back yet. Before leaving Delta, she’d pulled up beside Lew in the yard. With his arms folded, he’d leaned on the rolled-down window of her truck. He’d asked her what she was running away from, and she told him she wasn’t, that she just liked to get out there and see different things. He asked her if she’d gotten traveler’s checks because he didn’t like to see a woman alone on the road with all that cash, and he knew she didn’t own a credit card. She didn’t want him to worry, so she told him she’d gotten traveler’s checks earlier that day, though the truth was, almost all of her cash, about twenty-eight hundred dollars, was in a side pocket in her small duffel bag. She carried another two hundred dollars in her wallet.
“Well, all right, then,” Lew said. And he walked away, and Amy Raye felt a lump knot up in her throat because she’d seen his eyes get a little misty, and she knew hers were getting misty also.
Amy Raye hung up the phone and walked back to her table, the mood to call Farrell having passed.
The next morning after taking care of Saddle, who’d slept in the room with her, she returned to the Golden Saloon for breakfast. The manager was there and talked with her for a while. He asked her if she was going to have enough money to get back home. She told him she’d already spent a good two thirds of her money getting to Alaska and fixing her truck, and that she was going to have to stay for a while and hoped to find work. He told her about a friend of his who was looking for seasonal help.
“What kind of help?” Amy Raye asked.
“He’s got some cabins about a mile up the road past the footbridge. You would have passed them on your way in. He wants someone to do the housekeeping and help take care of the grounds.”
“I could do that,” Amy Raye said.
“Might have a bunk you could sleep on also.”
“What about my dog?” Amy Raye asked.
“That won’t be a problem.”
He wrote down his friend’s number. Told Amy Raye to give him a call.
The friend ended up hiring Amy Raye and giving her a place to stay, a bunk in an eight-by-eight shed at the back of the property. The cabins had been newly built and had a full house of reservations for the summer—backpackers and fishing groups and families. “We’ve got to be able to turn the rooms over fast,” the owner told Amy Raye.