He hadn’t taught her anything about love. Neither had Abel, Ethan’s father, her guardian after Stephan died. That, she was still struggling to figure out on her own.
A mirror hung on the wall over the sink, and the grave woman reflected there, with the narrow, tilted hazel eyes and the very short dark hair beginning to go a little shaggy around the edges looked tired. Her summer tan had faded, too, leaving her skin looking sallow and stretched over her high cheekbones. Her wide mouth was unsmiling, a tight-lipped line of repudiation and denial. Ruthe and Dina had made that woman laugh. When was the last time she had laughed out loud?
A discordant jangle interrupted her reverie, and she looked over at the couch to see a frustrated expression on Johnny’s face. “Here,” she said, crossing the room and extending a hand. “I’ll show you.”
The guitar was in serious need of tuning, and she got out the tuning fork. It was a tedious process, but Johnny stuck with it. Afterward, she took him through the C and G chords, threw in a little practice on B7 just to keep things interesting. He liked the song “Scotch and Soda,” and she located the Kingston Trio tape and played it for him so he’d know how it was supposed to sound. She tried him on “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” but although he liked the tune, he made a face at the lyrics. “Blowin‘ in the Wind” was okay, and so was “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he misplayed with gusto.
“Okay, enough,” Kate said at nine o’clock. “You going to Ethan’s or you bunking here?”
“Here,” he replied, which meant she didn’t have to roll out the Arctic Cat again to follow him home, and she was grateful. She made more mugs of cocoa with Nestle’s, evaporated milk, and hot water from the kettle, but no marsh-mallows.
“My fingers hurt,” he said.
She took his left hand and looked at the tips of his fingers. They were red and felt warm to the touch. “If you keep it up, they’ll hurt worse. And then you’ll work up calluses and they won’t hurt anymore.”
Unexpectedly, he took her left hand and looked at the tips of her fingers. “You don’t have any.”
“Not anymore.”
“Because you quit playing.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t sing anymore, so there didn’t seem to be much point.”
His eyes went to her throat, to the scar that bisected it almost from ear to ear. “Because of that?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you get it?”
“A guy had a knife. I took it away from him.”
“But he cut you before you did.”
“Yeah.”
“When you were working for Dad.”
“Yes.”
“Does it still bother you?”
“The scar, or not being able to sing?”
“Both.”
“Both,” she replied, “although not as much as they used to.” She put down the mug and picked up the guitar from where it was leaning against the coffee table. The weight of the body on her thigh felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and the neck settled into her left palm with a tentative feeling. She gave the strings a few experimental strums, and without stopping to think about it, launched into “Molly Malone.” Mutt, stretched out on the bearskin in front of the woodstove, raised her head, her ears going up, and fixed Kate with a steady gaze.
Kate’s voice sounded husky to her hypercritical ears and she had to change octaves to hit the high notes. “Yesterday” was even harder to reach, but when she came to the end of the last verse, Johnny said, “That sounded fine. You can sing, Kate.”
Her fingertips were tingling. She stood up and hung the guitar on its hook next to the door, making a mental note to oil the wood before Johnny’s vigorous playing split the instrument in half. She looked over at Mutt, who had lowered her head back to her paws and appeared dead to the world.
“Can I learn to do that?”
“You can learn to do just about anything,” Kate said. “It takes practice, is all.”
He was about to reply, when a yawn split his face. She fetched sheets, blankets, and a pillow, and, in that unnerving fashion of adolescents, he was asleep before she smoothed the blankets over him. Shadows gathered as she turned off three of the kerosene lanterns, turning down the one hanging in the kitchen corner to leave a soft, dim glow in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night. Shadows moved with her across the floor and on the walls.
The book Johnny had been reading was a history textbook. School wasn’t in session for another week. Kate sighed. Johnny was studying as hard as he could because it was his avowed intent to pass his GED when he turned sixteen, thereafter to walk away from school and never go back. She was hoping against hope that he’d fall in love with a girl whose avowed intent was to graduate high school in four years and go on to college afterward.
She stoked the fire in the woodstove, checked the oil stove to see that the pilot light was still burning, and refilled the wood box. After brushing her teeth and washing her face with the last of the water in the kettle, she refilled the kettle and set it on the back of the stove. She climbed the ladder to the loft and lit the lamp that hung next to the bed, undressing by its light, pulling on a nightshirt, and sliding beneath the thick down comforter. She was rereading My Family and Other Animals for what was probably the twenty-seventh time, but she had only lately gone back to full-time reading, and for the present, her preference was for books she had already read and enjoyed, ones with no surprises in them.
But even ten-year-old Gerry Durrell and his scorpions in matchboxes couldn’t keep her attention this night. She put the book down and turned off the light to stare at the ceiling.
Jack Morgan had been dead for over a year now. She missed him, missed having him in her life. She missed his voice, she realized suddenly, that slow, deep bass voice that had made every feminine nerve she had stand up and salute every time she’d heard it.
Ethan’s voice wasn’t as deep, but that wasn’t necessarily enough to deny the man her bed.
Jack had been brawny, a bruiser with the muscles of a prizefighter and a face that could most kindly have been described as interesting.
Ethan could have made a living modeling clothes for Brooks Brothers.
Only now did she realize how patient Jack had been, how long-suffering, how much he had put up with. When she had left Anchorage six years before, fresh out of the hospital, unable to form words clearly for four months-never mind sing-she had left the job and the man at one and the same time, vowing never to return to either. Eighteen months later, Jack had showed up in the Park with an FBI agent in tow and a missing person’s case in hand. Eighteen months, during which she had tried to find his substitute in two other men, to no avail, both of whom she had made sure Jack knew about. If it had bothered him, he had never shown it. Much. He had waited for her-waited for her to heal, waited for her to come back to him-like he’d taken a vow to the Church of Kate Shugak and would not allow himself to become apostate.
He’d irritated her, bewildered her, astounded her, and charmed her. He had wooed her with Jimmy Buffett and seduced her with chocolate chip cookies, and in the end, he had saved her life at the expense of his own. “I love you, Shugak” had very nearly been his last words to her, and it was only after his death that she realized what they had meant.