Seré Halverson - The House of Frozen Dreams

Instead, he kept his arms crossed, shook his head. “Do you know that crazy lady?” he asked Snag.

Gram was of sound mind and body at the time, just being herself, the Lettie he had always adored. Every few minutes, Aunt Snag and Kache saw her arm pop out of the sapphire drift, waving a bee away.

But in the past four years Gram’s health had declined and Aunt Snag didn’t want to travel without her. When he’d talked to Snag early that morning, she’d said Lettie was deteriorating fast. “And I’m not getting any younger. You better hurry and get yourself home, or the only people you’ll have left will be in an urn, waiting for you to spread us with the others on the bluff.”

He’d let too much time slip by. Twenty years . He was thirty-eight, with little to show for it except a pissed-off and, as of last night, officially ex -girlfriend, along with a sweet enough severance package for working his loyal ass off for sixteen years, and a hell of a savings account—none of which would impress Aunt Snag or Grandma Lettie in the slightest, or do them any good.

A stop in Seattle, another three-and-a-half hours and countless thickly frosted mountain ranges later, the plane landed in Anchorage, which Snag and Lettie grumpily called North Los Angeles. But of course it was their destination for frequent shopping trips and they didn’t hesitate to get their Costco membership when it first opened there. The in-flight magazine said that just over 600,000 lived in the state, and two-fifths of that population resided in Anchorage. So even though it was Alaska’s biggest city, it had over three million to go before catching up with LA.

He caught the puddle jumper to Caboose. During the short flight he spotted a total of eight moose down through the bare birch and cottonwood trees on the Kenai Peninsula, along with gray-green spruce forests, snow-splotched brown meadows, and turquoise lakes. Soon the plane banked where the Cook Inlet met Kachemak Bay, the bay whose name he bore. Across it the Kenai mountain range, home to nesting glaciers, rose mightily and stretched beyond sight.

From the other side of the Inlet, Mt Illiamna, Mt Redoubt and Mt Augustine loomed solid and strong and steady. But looks deceive; Redoubt or Augustine frequently let off steam and took turns blowing their tops every decade or so, spreading thick volcanic ash as far as Anchorage and beyond, turning the sky dark with soot. His mom used to say Alaska didn’t forgive mistakes. As a boy, Kache wondered if those volcanic eruptions were symptoms of its pent-up rage.

There was the Caboose Spit, lined with fishing boats, a finger of land jutting out into the bay where the old railroad tracks ended, the rusty red caboose still there.

“See that?” his mom had shouted over the Cessna’s engine that first day they’d all flown together, his dad finally realizing his dream of owning a bush plane. “The long finger with the red fingernail pointing to the mountains? I bet the earth is so proud of those mountains. Wants to make sure we don’t miss seeing them.” She tucked one of Kache’s curls under his cap, her smile so big. “As if we could! Aren’t they amazing?”

It had always been a breath-stopping view, the kind that made him inhale and forget to exhale, especially when the clouds took off, as they just had, and left the sea every shade of sparkling blue and green against the purest white of the mountains. He had to admit he’d never seen anything anywhere—even now during the spring breakup, Alaska’s ugliest time of year—that came close to this height or depth of wild beauty.

But now the view did more than take his breath away. Maybe his mom had been wrong. Maybe that strip of land was the world’s middle finger, telling him to fuck off, saying, Who you calling flat? Today that red spot of caboose looked more like a smear of blood on the tip of a knife than a fingernail. Either way, the view stabbed its way into his chest, as if it were trying to finish him off before he even landed.

Snag hadn’t stopped maneuvering through her small house since Kache’s call. Kache. Finally agreeing to come home . In the wee hours of that morning she’d mistaken the ringing phone for the alarm and kept hitting the snooze button until she sat up in a panic, thinking, It’s about Mom . But no, it was Kache, calling back from Austin. Ever since they’d hung up she’d been bathing every surface with buckets of Zoom cleaner, suctioning up the cat hair and the spilled-over cat food with the vacuum, stuffing the fridge with a ready-to-bake casserole, moose pot roast, and rhubarb crunch, and wrapping the bed in clean sheets.

Snag thought she, herself, resembled a well-made bed. Polishing every last streak off the mirror, she saw her chenille robe creased under her breasts as if it were a bedspread tucked around two down pillows. They rose and fell with her deep breaths. She moved fast despite her size, wiping the counter now, putting away a pepper grinder, a bottle of salad dressing with Paul Newman’s mug on it. She closed the refrigerator door.

There was the memory of Kache, sitting on the kitchen stool, dark curly head bent over his guitar, then opening that same door and standing in front of the assortment of cold food like the refrigerator was some god requiring homage. How many times had she swatted him, told him to close the damn door? “A million? A billion?”

Since the day she had to put her mom into the home, Snag had been talking to herself. Before that, sometimes all Lettie had added to the conversation was, “Is that right, Eleanor,” but it was something.

No one but her mom still called her Eleanor. Around age nine she came home from fishing the river alone for the first time, holding up a decent-sized salmon. “Look, Daddy. I caught a fish all by myself.”

Her daddy laughed and pulled the hook out of the side of the poor fish. “Eleanor,” he said, “what you did was snagged yourself a fish.” Glenn, jealous that he was the same age and had yet to catch or even snag anything, started calling her Snag. The name took hold and never let go. Most of the town’s newcomers thought the name came from the fact that she had a gift for selling. It was true. Whether someone needed Mary Kay or Jafra cosmetics, Amway detergent, or a new house, Snag was the person to call.

Real estate had been particularly good to her. She preferred to live in her simple house, but she waxed poetic about the benefits of a sunk-in tub or a granite countertop. Lately she’d stepped back from showing houses. She’d made enough, and she wanted to give the newbies a shot. The one element in life that had come easily to Snag was money and she didn’t need to be piggy about it. She still sold products for the pyramid businesses, but more as a service to the citizens of Caboose than out of her own need. The only thing she couldn’t sell anyone on was the idea of getting the town mascot, the old Caboose parked at the end of the spit, moving again. But she didn’t have time to dwell on that now.

She climbed into the car and took a deep breath. Kache. “He’s going to want to kill me, and I can’t blame him one bit.” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her rain jacket, surprised to see a black smear across it. She wore the mascara for the first time in years in honor of Kache’s homecoming. It was the brand she’d demonstrated at kitchen tables, rubbing it on a page of paper, then dropping water on it, holding the paper up so the drop ran down clear as gin. Now she smoothed her fingers under her eyes: more black. She licked her fingers, ran them over and over her face, took the balled-up tissue from under her sleeve and wiped more. She adjusted the rearview mirror to check herself. “Aw, crap,” she said. It looked like someone had struck oil on her face. With all her finesse for cleaning, Snag sometimes felt that her biggest contribution to mankind was making a mess of things.