Dana Stabenow - A Fine and Bitter Snow

“Bernie’s new barmaid.”

The song was thundering to a finish. “Introduce us.”

“Bernie will kill me,” Kate muttered. “Not to mention Dan.” But she did as she was told, a down payment on the payback.

Christie accepted an invitation to dance, and since the drummers were taking a break, Pete guided her to a chair instead and brought her a plateful of choice morsels. Kate, watching from behind the gift table, saw the infamous Heiman charm begin to have its inevitable effect. Pete had a weakness for blondes, having married three of them. She hoped Christie had the backbone to resist, because Pete’s ego was already big enough. Plus, he had to be at least thirty years her senior, not to mention her prior relationship with Dan. Where was Dan? She looked around but didn’t see him.

“Kate.”

She stiffened. “Jim.”

“Thought I’d drop by to pay my respects.” It was politic for the resident trooper to put in an appearance at big ceremonial events, something in the way of a diplomatic mission. And he’d known and liked Dina. And he’d known Kate would be there.

He looked at the picture in its many frames. “Nice idea.” He picked a dark blue one and slipped it into an inside pocket. “I wondered how you’d get around the gift thing.”

She took a careful breath. “People seem to like them. And I didn’t want to give any of Dina’s stuff away. Have you talked to the hospital today?”

He nodded. “The same.”

When he looked at her, she saw a fading corner-shaped bruise on his left temple. She hugged her elbows, caught in a sudden draft. Or so she told herself. “How long can she stay like that?”

“She’s not in pain.”

“How do we know that?”

“We don’t.”

“Then don’t say it.”

“Sorry.”

There was a pause, broken by her stomach growling.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

“No.” Her stomach growled again.

“I’ll get us plates.” He walked away.

I’ll get us plates. I’ll get us plates. Whichever way you looked at it, the phrase made her nervous.

As if she had conjured him up, Ethan materialized in front of her, Johnny in tow. “Hey.” He leaned over to kiss her just as Jim came back. Kate turned so that she caught the kiss on her cheek. Ethan’s eyes narrowed. Jim handed one plate to Kate, and smiled at Ethan. Ethan didn’t smile back. “Kate,” Ethan said, “I’ve got to talk to you.”

“I’m kind of busy, Ethan.” Just then, the drummers started up again and circles formed on the floor. Johnny said hopefully, “Urn, will you teach me to dance?”

“Sure!” Kate said, and followed him to the floor, trying not to run.

Jim sat down and put the second plate to one side. “I’ll just keep this for Kate,” he said to Ethan, and began to eat under Ethan’s baleful glare. “You should eat, Ethan. There’s some great stuff on the table.”

“Stay away from her,” Ethan said.

Well now, Jim thought. It seemed that Ethan didn’t know that Jim had recently been where no Ethan had gone before. He wondered why Dandy Mike was holding his fire. Probably hoping that it would get him a job. “That’s her choice,” he said.

“Stay away from her, goddamn it.”

Jim smiled at him again, and it was about as friendly an expression as it had been before. “You’re still married, aren’t you, Ethan?” He watched with interest as Ethan’s fair skin flushed right up to the roots of his hair. “You thinking you can have your cake and eat it, too? If so, you don’t know your women.” He took a ruminative bite of macaroni and cheese casserole, then added in a voice as patronizing and as patriarchal as he could make it, “But then, I never thought you did.”

For a moment, he hoped he might have gone too far, but no. Ethan regrouped and gave him a contemptuous look. “Big talk from the man with the badge.”

Oh. Right. He was in uniform. “Happy to take it off for the duration, Ethan,” he said softly. “Just for you.”

“Fuck you,” Ethan said after a simmering moment, and stalked away.

“He doesn’t appear to like you,” said Pete Heiman, who was sitting next to Jim with Bernie’s new barmaid, whose big blue eyes were even bigger and bluer than usual.

“He sure doesn’t,” she said. Her voice was light and breathy, perhaps consciously so, and her gaze was languishing. Jim looked at her and, as an experiment, tried to exercise the inner muscle that always used to come into play when he was faced with a pretty woman. Nothing. He was appreciative but not covetous. Interesting. But not as alarming as it had been.

He returned to his plate, his appetite good.

Meanwhile, out on the dance floor, Bobby Clark had joined Kate and Johnny. As his wheelchair rolled back and forth to the beat, Dinah danced around all three of them with Katya, who was in a backpack, waving a rattle. Mandy and Chick were down the circle a bit, Mac Devlin was doing his usual lumbering grizzly bear impression, and Bernie and Edith were jitterbugging, which was an interesting, though obviously not impossible, exercise to the beat of Native drums.

The drums beat once, twice, three times, each time harder and louder than the time before, and a cheer went up from the gymnasium floor when the last one struck. Kate handed Johnny over to Auntie Vi, from whom he would learn the smoothest moves, and went to the microphone set up at one side of the stage. “Hello the Park,” she said.

“Hello!” the crowd shouted back.

“We’re here today to honor the memory of one of our own. You know who I mean.”

“Dina!” they answered with one voice.

“That’s right, Dina Willner. She died a week ago yesterday, and we’ll miss her. But we’ll never forget her. And this is why.”

Kate primed the pump by telling the story of Dina teaching her to rappel. She told it well, keeping it light and at her own expense, and everyone laughed.

She was followed to the microphone by Mac Devlin, who glowered out at the crowd from beneath wiry red brows and growled, “God knows, Dina and me hardly ever agreed on nothing. She was a greenie from the word go, and I think the best thing you can do with a tree is cut it down and make something out of it somebody can eat off of or sit down on. But”-he fixed the crowd with a gimlet eye- “she weren’t no stealth greenie. What she was and what she believed was right out front for everybody to see, and she fought clean. I won’t go so far as to say I’ll miss her, but I respected her.” He added gruffly, “And she was a good friend to everyone in the Park, whether you agreed with her or not. My house burned down and she was first to step forward and offer me a place to stay until I got rebuilt. She was a good friend to the Park,” he repeated. “Nobody can say better than that.”

Kate eased from the stage as Auntie Vi followed Mac. “Alaka, that Dina,” Auntie Vi said, and everyone laughed just from the expression on her animated face. “I remember that time of ANCSA and we all go to Washington, D.C., when Dina gets into a fight with the secretary of the interior. Ayapu, she thinks she’s Muhammad Ali, that girl-”

Kate moved over to lean against the wall. “Here,” Jim said, handing her a plate. “Eat.”

Kate’s stomach was still growling and the plate was heaped with all manner of good things, so she took it, but she managed to get her mouth so full that her “Thanks” was barely audible.

“You know that lockbox you beaned me with?” He watched her as he said the words. One of the minor annoyances with being hung up on someone with brown skin was she might be blushing and you’d never know it. “It had some interesting paperwork in it.”

“Oh?” Kate said, her voice uncompromising in the extreme.