“I’m okay, Auntie,” Kate said. The fry bread and the coffee were soothing in a traditional sort of way. She could almost forget that she was homeless.
“Lucky you not there.”
“Yes,” Kate said. “Very lucky.”
Sharp black eyes examined her shrewdly. “You mad?”
Kate took her time answering. “Yes, Auntie,” she said, proud of how calm she sounded. “I’m mad.”
She made the mistake of looking up. Auntie Vi nodded once, satisfied. “Good. But you be careful.”
“I will.”
“I mean it, Katya,” Auntie Vi said sternly. “You have that boy looking to you now. You keep him safe. You build a cabin with more room, make it his cabin, too.”
“I will.” Although for the life of her she didn’t know where the money was coming from. She’d earmarked last year’s earnings to fight off Jane’s custody suit. She wouldn’t touch it. But the kid had to have a place to sleep.
“Good.” Another sharp nod. “Good. Now. What you want to know?”
“You know I was gone last summer.”
“Humph. I know.” Auntie Vi waited, clearly not going to make it easy for Kate. She didn’t approve of running; she was a stand-and-fight kind of woman, always had been. She had survived three husbands; nine children, two of whom had died of cancer, one in a car wreck on the Glenn, and one of drowning; thirty-two grandchildren; and a home that had changed hands from Native to federal to state and back to Native again, all in the span of her lifetime. She’d fought for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and had sopped up oil on the beaches of Prince William Sound after the RPetCo oil spill. She served on the board of the Niniltna Native Association and on the board of their regional corporation, as well. She fished subsistence and owned and operated her own business, the bed-and-breakfast whose kitchen they were in now.
In fact, there wasn’t much Auntie Vi couldn’t have survived if she made up her mind to. In spite of every effort to ignore it, Kate felt a sense of shame at her headlong flight from the Park the year before. She remembered the conversation she’d had with Johnny. I don’t want you to learn that running away is an acceptable response to trouble. He had shown up on her doorstep the day of her return, and she didn’t know if he’d been told how long she’d been gone.
Well, he could just learn to do as she said and not as she did. She firmed up her jaw and said, “I’m trying to trace Len Dreyer’s movements last year, Auntie. It’s hard because he worked for everyone, all over the Park.”
Auntie Vi grunted. “What you know so far?”
Kate produced her notebook, and Auntie Vi produced some reading glasses that when donned didn’t make her look anything like Millicent Nebeker McClanahan.
An hour later Kate’s head was reeling and she had the frustrated sense of having gone over the same ground for the third time in a row. Auntie Vi never missed a tangent when it presented itself. “You know those Drussells?”
“Gary and Fran? Sure.”
“They move to town.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She endured a less than tolerant glance her way. “You not here. How could you know?”
“Why are Gary and Fran selling their place?”
“Gary, he like everybody, not making a living with the fish. He go back to school, he say, learn computers, get a job in Anchorage.”
Kate thought of the tall, raw-boned man with hair bleached blond by the sun and a perpetual sunburn, dressed eternally in ragged, oil-stained, scaly overalls, and tried to imagine him in a button-down shirt with a tie, sitting in front of a computer terminal in one of those little cubicles on the fourth floor of one of those office buildings in Anchorage where the closest you got to the outdoors was the view of Knik Arm through the window. She shuddered and looked back at her list. “Gary was on Bonnie’s list, Auntie. He passed a message to Len Dreyer last May that he needed some work done on his homestead.”
Auntie Vi nodded sagely. “Spruce the place up, get a better price for it.”
“Who did Gary sell it to?”
“Not sold yet.”
“How much is he asking for it?”
“Too much.”
“Don’t any of the girls want it?”
The Drussells had three daughters, all in high school, although the oldest one might be out by now. Maybe the two eldest, Kate couldn’t remember. Auntie Vi shook her head. “Girls go to school in Anchorage, too.”
Auntie Vi cut the bread into fourths and began shaping it into loaves. “Gary, he want to fix up his house before he put it on the market. To get a better price, you know.”
“I know, Dandy already told me he and Dreyer worked on it together.”
Auntie Vi glared at her. “If you already know everything, why ask?”
“Well, Auntie, I – ” Sentences to Auntie Vi that began “Well, Auntie, I – ” had an historic tendency to run on forever and end up with Kate apologizing for her own stupidity and for wasting her aunt’s valuable time. Kate folded her lips down over her teeth and shut up.
Auntie Vi greased four loaf pans and patted the loaves into them. “You know this brother of Bobby’s?”
“No. I haven’t met him. Not yet.”
Auntie Vi said something in Aleut that sounded highly uncomplimentary, but then Aleut spoken properly was full of a lot of rich, back-of-the-throat gutturals that just naturally lent themselves to insult. Kate caught a word here and there, enough to inspire a devout hope to see Jeffrey Clark coming so that she could head in the other direction. When she ran down, Auntie Vi switched back to English. “Len Dreyer put a new roof on Bobby’s house in October.”
This time Kate kept her mouth shut.
Auntie Vi gave her a sharp look. “You not writing this down?”
Kate snatched up her pencil. “Of course. Bobby’s roof, you said? October? Very important, very important information indeed.” A glance from Auntie Vi told her that she might be overdoing it. She picked another topic at random. “Johnny’s made a friend.”
“Boy or girl?”
That was Auntie Vi, cutting right to the chase. “Girl. But not like that.”
Auntie Vi cast her eyes up to heaven, pleading for help in the face of this idiocy on the part of her niece. “It always like that between a boy and a girl.”
“They’re just kids.”
Auntie Vi looked at her with a raised brow. “And you just a kid when Ethan come home from college.”
Kate made a face. “I talked to him.”
“Good.” Auntie Vi slid the loaves into the oven and set the timer. “Which girl is Johnny’s friend?”
“Vanessa Cox.”
“Ah.” Auntie Vi, wiping down the breadboard, nodded sadly. “Poor girl.”
“Why poor?”
“She lose her parents in a car wreck Outside. That make anyone a poor girl.”
Kate couldn’t argue with that. “At least she had somewhere to go.”
Auntie Vi made a face. “The Hagbergs.”
“What’s wrong with the Hagbergs?”
“Nothing,” Auntie Vi said, “nothing. But she is young. They old. And that Virgil, he don’t care nothing about nothing except Telma. And Telma, she care nothing about nothing, I don’t think.” She fixed a stern look on Kate. “You watch out for that girl, Katya. She start feeling lonely, she start being around your boy more, and you know what happen then.”
“She’s Johnny’s friend,” Kate said. “I’m not going to forbid her on the premises.”
“Didn’t say you should,” Auntie Vi said promptly. “Who said I said you should do that? Maybe a good thing, that, with her and your boy. Both not from Park.” She ruminated in silence for a moment. “I hear something about Virgil Hagberg,” she said, her brows knit. “I think he selling the homestead.”
“You’re kidding. I was just out there yesterday, Auntie. He didn’t say a word about it.”
“Virgil thinking since they don’t have kids they leave the homestead to that land conservancy Ruthe run.”
“Really,” Kate said. “I bet Ruthe loves that plan.”