The Great Alone
Mama looked up from the salmon she was gutting at a table in the yard. There was a smear of pink guts across her chin. “It’s a smokehouse,” Mama said, cocking her head toward Thelma. “Thelma is teaching me how to smoke fish. It’s quite an art, apparently—too much heat, you cook the fish. It’s supposed to smoke and dry at the same time. Yum. How was your first day of school?” A red kerchief kept the hair out of her eyes.
“Cool.”
“No social-suicide issues with the clothes or the lunch box? No girls making fun of you?”
Leni couldn’t help smiling. “No girls my age at all. But … there’s a boy…”
That got Mama’s interest. “A boy?”
Leni felt herself blushing. “A friend, Mama. He just happens to be a boy.”
“Uh. Huh.” Mama was trying not to smile as she lit her cigarette. “Is he cute?”
Leni ignored that. “He says there’s a community barbecue tonight, and I want to go.”
“Yeah. We’re going.”
“Really? That’s great!”
“Yeah,” Mama said, smiling. “I told you it would be different here.”
* * *
WHEN IT CAME TIME to dress for the barbecue, Leni kind of lost her mind. Honestly, she didn’t know what was wrong with her.
She didn’t have a lot of clothes to choose from, but that didn’t stop her from trying on several different combinations. In the end—mostly because she was exhausted by the desire to look pretty when pretty was impossible—she decided on a pair of plaid polyester bell-bottoms and a ribbed green turtleneck beneath a fringed, fake-suede vest. Try as she might, she couldn’t do anything with her hair. She finger-combed it back from her face and twined it into a fuzzy, fist-sized braid.
She found Mama in the kitchen, placing thick squares of cornbread into a Tupperware container. She had brushed her shoulder-length, shag-cut hair until it glimmered in the light. She had definitely dressed to impress in tight bell-bottom jeans and a fitted white sweater with a huge Indian turquoise squash-blossom necklace that she’d bought a few years ago.
Mama seemed distracted as she burped the lid of air from the container.
“You’re worried, aren’t you?”
“Why would you say that?” Mama gave her a quick, bright smile, but the look in her eyes couldn’t be so easily transformed. She was wearing makeup for the first time in days and it made her look vibrant and beautiful.
“Remember the fair?”
“That was different. The guy tried to cheat him.”
That wasn’t how Leni remembered it. They’d been having a good time at the State Fair until her dad started drinking beer. Then some guy had flirted with Mama (and she had flirted back) and Dad had gone ballistic. He shoved the man hard enough to crack his head into the tent pole at the BeerHaus and started yelling. When the security guys came, Dad was so belligerent that the cops were called. Leni had been mortified to see two of her classmates watching the altercation. They’d seen her dad get dragged over to the cop car.
Dad opened the cabin door and came inside.
“Are my beautiful girls ready to party?”
“You bet,” Mama said quickly, smiling.
“Let’s go, then,” Dad said, herding them into the bus.
In no time—it was less than a quarter of a mile as the crow flew—they drove up to the steel gate with the bleached-white cow head on it. The gate was open in welcome.
The Walker homestead. Their nearest neighbors.
Dad drove slowly forward. The driveway (two ribbons of flattened grass that undulated up and down on lichen-covered ground) unfurled in a lazy S through stands of skinny black-trunked spruce trees. Occasionally there was a break in the trees to her left and Leni saw a splash of distant blue, but it wasn’t until they came to the clearing that Leni saw the view.
“Wow,” Mama said.
They emerged onto a flat ridge situated above a calm blue cove. The huge piece of land had been cleared of all but a few carefully chosen trees and planted in hay.