“Yes, finally, the prick did go home,” Bobby said.
“Alone,” Kate said.
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Bobby said. “You actually think I should have gone with him?”
“Oh, man.” Kate sighed and shook her head. She got to her feet and went to the window, looking at the Quilaks for inspiration. She stretched a little, wincing as new skin rubbed against her shirt. “I ever tell you how Emaa died?”
She heard the whisper of rubber tires as he wheeled up next to her. “No.”
“It was in the middle of AFN. She wasn’t feeling well, kept rubbing her left arm. For crissake, I trained as an EMT when I worked in Anchorage, I even went on a few runs. I know the signs, but I didn’t see them on my grandmother.” She closed her eyes. “She was supposed to make a speech on subsistence in front of the whole convention, in front of Alaska Natives from Metlakada to Point Lay. Hundreds of people in the room, and she was such a giant, they all wanted to hear what she had to say. It would define the issue for a lot of diem, they’d go home quoting her.”
She took a deep breath. “So she’s feeling lousy, and she hands it off to me.” She looked down at him, her smile wavering. “Just walks away, and leaves me standing there with no speech and no track record and no profile to speak of, not compared to hers.”
She was wrong about that last, but Bobby held his peace.
“So I told them some yarn about shooting a moose in my front yard that year. They held still for it, they even put their hands together for it.”
Bobby somehow managed to hide his amazement.
“Right after, a woman I know, she’s-well.” Kate gave up on trying to describe Cindy Sovalik. “Someone I met when I was doing that job for Jack in Prudhoe Bay. She said I should check on Emaa. Well, that was what she meant, anyway. So I did.”
She took a long, shaky breath. “I got the maid to let me into her hotel room, and she was just lying there, kind of frowning. And already cool to the touch.”
She shoved her hands in her pockets and turned to look at Bobby. “She handed off to me, did it in public so everyone could see that she expected me to take up where she left off, and then marched off to die.”
There followed a bleak silence, broken when Bobby cleared his throat. “I don’t see that you could have done anything but what you did.”
“No.” A ghost of a laugh. “Emaa called the shots in her death, the same way she called the shots in her life.”
“Then I don’t get it,” Bobby said. “My father’s calling the shots here, too.”
“You’re letting him.”
He looked at her, angry. “I’m not letting him dictate to me, if that’s what you mean.”
“Sure you are. You let him push you out of your own home, let him push you into the army, let him push you all the way to Vietnam. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you chose to rebuild your life in Alaska, about as far away from Tennessee as you could get and still be in the same country.”
“But he wants me to come home.”
“Don’t go home for him. Go home for yourself. He helped make you what you are, Bobby, like it or not. Go home and say good-bye.” She paused, and said slowly, “I didn’t get the chance to say good-bye to Emaa. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”
There was another long silence. From her seat on the couch, cradling a sleeping Katya, Dinah looked from one stubborn face to the other, biding her time.
“I just hate the thought of doing anything Jeffie wants me to,” Bobby said at last.
And there it was. “This is a guy who’s never been out of the state of Tennessee before, right?” Dinah said.
Bobby snorted. “I’d be surprised if he’s ever been fifty miles from his own front doorstep.”
“Until now,” Dinah said. “He was here, though. Humbling himself to you, begging you to come home.”
“Ordering,” Bobby said, “ordering. There’s a difference.”
“Whatever it sounded like, he was begging. His father, your father is dying. He could even be dead by now.”
There was a brief silence. Finally Bobby said, “Dad always did like him best.”
Relieved, Dinah laughed a little harder than the jest deserved.
Bobby looked at her. “So you think I ought to go home, too?”
Dinah chose her words carefully, knowing they would live to haunt her marriage if she got them wrong. “I want a life with you, Bobby, a long one. You brought a lot of baggage with you. I don’t care, it’s who you are.” She smiled a little. “It’s part of why I love you. But I also think it’s time to get rid of some of it, so it doesn’t weigh us down.”
“Why, Dinah,” Bobby said, “that’s fucking poetry.”
Dinah reddened. “I mean it, Clark.”
Bobby, sober now, said, “I know you do, Dinah.” He rolled over to her and lifted both her and the baby into his lap.
Kate walked past them. “You’ll think about it?” she heard Dinah say.
“No,” Bobby said, jaw coming out. “I’ll go. If I think about it, I won’t.”
20
The morning Bobby left, Dinah decided she needed something to occupy her time, otherwise she’d sit around waiting for Bobby to call and say they were moving back to Nut-bush, Tennessee. It wasn’t the call she feared so much as the move. She had fallen in love at first sight with Alaska, and she didn’t want to leave it. Not to mention which, Jeffrey’s reaction to the undeniable fact of her overwhelming whiteness had been somewhat daunting. She could deal with that, and with any hundred other people who reacted that way, too, but how would those same people treat Katya?
She looked down at her daughter, a hot heavy sprawl in her arms, a little milky drool coming from one corner of her mouth. Love pierced her like a knife. If anyone in Nutbush, Tennessee dared, if they dared to say something hurtful to Katya, if anyone dared to call her half-and-half or half-breed or mongrel, Katya’s mother would…
“What would Katya’s mother do?” she said out loud. Katya stirred, and Dinah gathered in her child’s rambling limbs and tucked her into her own bed. Then she went for a pad and paper and started making a list. She liked making lists as much as Kate Shugak, and this one was a list Kate would get behind.
At least she hoped so.
She spent the next week on the Internet and the phone, talking to suppliers in Anchorage and a trucking firm in Ahtna that boasted enough vehicles for her purposes. The following week she strapped Katya into the children’s seat, strapped the seat into the truck, and drove around the Park knocking on doors. Her plan was met with enthusiasm and near universal approval, mostly under the heading of “Jeeze, I wish I’d thought of that.”
She stopped by the trooper post to touch base with Jim Chopin. He listened courteously and agreed to everything she suggested. She came away with a crease between her brows. Something was seriously wrong there. Jim was a pretty even keel kind of a guy. The only time she’d seem him angry was with Kate Shugak, who seemed to know where every button on his control panel was located and exactly when to push which one. At the moment, he had his guard up. Dinah wondered if he had his guard up with Kate. She wondered about that little smile she’d seen on Kate’s face.
She hesitated before knocking on Billy Mike’s door, but he received her idea with hosannahs, and he and Annie convened the Native Association’s board of directors and essentially made her plan happen. Afterward she realized that she’d done them a favor. Anything was better than sitting around grieving. Billy even managed to pull some string that connected to the manufacturer Outside that bumped their order to the top of the list. It came into the Port of Anchorage on board the CSX Anchorage the following week, and the shipping firm, mindful of maintaining good community relations in a place as small as Alaska, took care to see that the shipment was first out of the hold and first off the dock. A day later it was in Ahtna, and by then the road into the Park had dried out enough to grade. This time Old Sam pulled a string-Dinah suspected the driver was an old drinking buddy of his -and the grader stationed at the state highway maintenance facility outside Ahtna led the parade, and a parade it was. First the grader, then a fleet of flatbeds and a couple of semis, followed by a dozen rigs of varying age and shape, all riding very low on their axels.