They sat in a companionable silence, which amazed Leni. Usually she was a nervous wreck around kids she wanted to befriend.
Out on the beach, the party was in full swing now. Through a break in the trees, they could see it all. A mason jar was being passed from person to person. Her mother danced in a hip-swaying, hair-tossing way. She was like a woodland fairy, lit from within, dancing for the burly, sodden tree folk.
The beer made Leni feel woozy and light-headed, as if she were full of bubbles.
“What made you guys move up here?” Matthew asked. Before she could answer, he smashed his empty beer can into a rock, crumpling it.
Leni couldn’t help laughing. Only a boy would do that. “My dad’s kind of … an adventurer,” she settled on as her answer. (Never tell the truth, never that Dad had trouble keeping a job and staying in one place, and never that he drank too much and liked to yell.) “He got tired of Seattle, I guess. What about you guys? When did you move here?”
“My grandpa, Eckhart Walker, came to Alaska during the Great Depression. He said he didn’t want to stand in line for watery soup. So he packed up his stuff and hitchhiked to Seattle. He worked his way north from there. Supposedly he walked Alaska from shore to shore and even climbed Mount Alyeska with a ladder strapped to his back so he could cross glacial crevasses. He met my Grandma Lily in Nome. She ran a laundry and diner. They got married and decided to homestead.”
“So your grandparents and your dad and you all grew up in that house?”
“Well. The big house was built a lot later, but we all grew up on this land. My mom’s family lives in Fairbanks. My sister is living with them while she goes to college. And my folks split up a few years back, so Mom built herself a new house on the homestead and moved into it with her boyfriend, Cal, who is a real douchebag.” He grinned. “But we all work together. He and Dad play chess in the winter. It’s weird, but it’s Alaska.”
“Wow. I can’t even imagine living in one place my whole life.” She heard the edge of longing in her voice and was embarrassed by it. She tilted her beer up, swallowed the last foamy drips.
The makeshift band was going all-out now, hands banging on buckets, the guitar strumming, fiddles playing.
Thelma and Mama and Ms. Rhodes were swishing their hips in time to the music, singing loudly. Ro-cky Mountain high, Color-ado …
Over at the grill, Clyde yelled out, “Moose burgers are ready! Who wants cheese?”
“Come on,” Matthew said. “I’m starving.” He took her hand (it seemed natural) and led her through the trees and down onto the beach. They came up behind Dad and Mad Earl, who were off by themselves, drinking, and Leni heard Mad Earl clink his mason jar against Dad’s, hitting it so hard it made a sturdy clank. “Tha’ Tom Walker sure thinks his shit don’t stink,” Dad said.
“When TSHTF, he’ll come crawling to me ’cuz I’m prepared,” Mad Earl slurred.
Leni froze, mortified. She looked at Matthew. He’d heard it, too.
“Born rich,” Dad added, his words slurred and slow in coming. “Thass what you said, right?”
Mad Earl nodded, stumbled into Dad. They held each other up. “He thinks he’s better’n us.”
Leni pulled away from Matthew; shame made her feel small. Alone.
“Leni?”
“I’m sorry you heard that,” she said. And as if her dad’s slurred bad-mouthing weren’t bad enough, there was Mama over there, standing too close to Mr. Walker, smiling up at him in a way that could start trouble.
Just like all the other times. And Alaska was supposed to be different.
“What’s the matter?” Matthew asked.
Leni shook her head, feeling a familiar sadness creep in. She could never tell him how it felt to live with a dad who scared you sometimes and a mother who loved him too much and made him prove how much he loved her in dangerous ways. Like flirting.
These were Leni’s secrets. Her burdens. She couldn’t share them.
All this time, all these years, she’d dreamed of having a real friend, one who would tell her everything. How had she missed the obvious?
Leni couldn’t have a real friend because she couldn’t be one. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “It’s nothing. Come on, let’s eat. I’m starving.”
SIX
After the party, back at the cabin, Leni’s parents were all over each other, making out like teenagers, banging into walls, pressing their bodies together. The combination of alcohol and music (and maybe Tom Walker’s attention) had made them crazy for each other.
Leni hurried up into the loft, where she covered her ears with her pillow and hummed “Come On Get Happy.” When the cabin fell silent again, she crawled over to the stack of books she’d bought at the Salvation Army. A book of poetry by someone named Robert Service grabbed her attention. She took it back into bed with her and opened it to a poem called “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” She didn’t need to light her lantern because it was still freaking light outside, even this late.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold …
Leni found herself falling into the poem’s harsh, beautiful world. It captivated her so much that she kept reading, next about Dangerous Dan McGrew and the lady known as Lou, and then “The Law of the Yukon.” This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain: / “Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane.” Every line revealed a different side of this strange state they’d come to, but even so, she could never quite get Matthew out of her mind. She kept remembering the embarrassment she’d felt at the party when he overheard her father’s ugly words.
Would he still want to be her friend?
The question consumed her, made her so tense she couldn’t fall asleep. She would have sworn she didn’t sleep at all, except that the next morning she woke to hear, “Come on, sleepyhead. I need your help while Mama cooks us up some grub. You’ve got time before school starts.”
Grub? Had they suddenly become cowboys?
Leni pulled on her jeans and a big sweater and went downstairs for her shoes. Outside she found her dad up on that doghouse-looking thing on stilts. The cache. A skinned log ladder like the one leading up to the loft was propped up against the frame. Her dad stood near the top, hammering planks in place on the roof. “Hand me those penny nails, Red,” he said. “A handful.”
She grabbed the blue coffee can full of nails and climbed up the ladder behind him.
She fished out a single nail and handed it to him. “Your hand is shaking.”
He stared down at the nail in his hand; it bounced in his trembling fist. His face was as pale as a sheet of parchment and his dark eyes looked bruised, the bags were so dark beneath them. “I drank too much last night. Had trouble sleeping.”
Leni felt a jab of worry. Lack of sleep wasn’t good for Dad; it made him anxious. So far, he’d been sleeping great in Alaska.
“Drinking does all kinds of bad shit to you, Red. I know better, too. Well, that’s it,” he said, pounding the last nail into the suede work glove that had been used to make the door’s hinge. (Large Marge’s idea—these Alaskans knew how to make do with anything.)
Leni climbed down and dropped to the ground, the coffee can full of nails rattling at the movement.
Dad rammed his hammer into his belt and started climbing down.
He dropped down beside Leni and tousled her hair. “I guess you’re my little carpenter.”
“I thought I was your librarian. Or your bookworm.”
“Your mama says you can be anything. Some shit about a fish and a bicycle.”
Yeah. Leni had heard that. Maybe Gloria Steinem had said it. Who knew? Mama spouted sayings all the time. It made as much sense to Leni as burning a perfectly good bra to make a point. Then again, it made no sense at all that in 1974 a grown woman with a job couldn’t get a credit card in her name.