Seré Halverson - The House of Frozen Dreams

At the small Caboose airport, Kache recognized Snag before she turned around to face him. You couldn’t miss her height, a half inch shy of six feet. Long-limbed like he was, hair cropped short, with much more salt than pepper now. She was his father’s twin and they bore a strong resemblance—the deep dimples, the large gray eyes—maybe that’s why Kache had always thought of her as a handsome woman. Her back expanded, her shoulders hung limp in her hooded jacket. She fidgeted with her sleeves, touched her face. Many times that sad spring before he’d left, Kache had seen her cry with her back to him, as if she might protect him from all the grief.

He sighed, kept standing there, observing her broad back. How was it that you could leave a place for twenty years, stay away for twenty years , and walk right smack into the very center of what you left behind, like it was some bull’s-eye for which you were trained to aim?

“Aunt Snag?” He touched her arm and she jumped.

“Kache! Of course it’s you.” As tall as she was, she still had to stand on her tiptoes to swing her chubby arms around him. “Oh hon, look at you. Your momma and daddy would be so proud.”

He held her soft face, wrinkled a bit more, though not as much as he’d expected, but a little … dirty? Streaked with something. With Snag it was more likely mud than makeup. He smiled. Their eyes stayed on each other for a long minute. There was a lot to say but all he got out was, “Let’s go see Gram.”

Snag blew her nose, blew some more. “She’s not herself. And I tried and tried, but I couldn’t keep up. It’s a decent place, though. It is. We can stop on the way home.” She pulled his head down, ruffled his hair, like he was eight years old instead of thirty-eight. “You look so handsome. Kache Winkel, you’re home. Is that your only bag?”

He nodded. He’d packed the few warm clothes he still owned, along with the old holey green T-shirt he would never throw out, the one that said, No, I don’t play basketball. Denny had it printed up for him because at six foot six inches, Kache had gotten tired of being asked. And he’d packed the only item of his mom’s he’d taken, her favorite silk scarf, which had smelled of her perfume for years after she died. Snag asked him where his guitar was but he shrugged, as he had whenever she’d asked him in Austin. She raised her eyebrows, opened her mouth, but let the question go, just as she had before.

Even in the middle of winter Austin didn’t get this cold. In the car he rubbed his hands together and felt the pull and release of resistance and surrender; the place lured him back in, then yanked him hard with long lines of memories: Denny buying him beer at that very liquor store, which still sported the same flashing orange sign; his mom rushing him into that very emergency room when he was nine and had split his knee open. That same hardware and tackle shop his dad got lost in for hours while Kache waited in the truck, writing lyrics on the backs of old envelopes his mom kept in the glove compartment for blotting her lipstick. Kache wrote around the red blooms of her lip prints.

Some things had changed, sure, and yet not enough to keep away a hollow, emanating ache.

But it was breakup. Here, early spring was the depressing time of year, when the snow and ice gave way—cracking, breaking, oozing—as if the earth bawled, spewing mud everywhere, running into the darkest lumpy blue of the Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay.

“Thought we might get to see Janie. Couldn’t get away from work?” Snag said, glancing at Kache. He shook his head. “You’re awfully quiet. For you.” She smiled and fiddled with the radio while she drove, then turned it off. It was true that Kache’s dad had dubbed him Chatty Kachey, but that was a long, long time ago. “Ah, a break from the rain.”

“We don’t get enough in Austin. I’d like a good watering.”

“In a few weeks you’ll be soaked through to the bone, I’m betting. Fingers crossed we’ll have a decent summer. Since you don’t … you know, have to get back to work … You’re staying a while, aren’t you, hon?”

“I’m thinking a few weeks.” That was the goal, anyway, if he could stick it out. It would get easier in a day or two. He wanted to hang out with Snag and Lettie. Face the things he needed to face, get out to the homestead. Snag had said a nice family was renting it. He’d try to fix whatever out there needed fixing, do whatever needed to be done for Lettie and Snag, hold it together, be strong enough to look it all in the face so he could get on with his life. Janie was right. It was way past time.

Snag pulled the car into the parking lot of the low brick and concrete building. “She’s a lot weaker, Kache. She asks about you still, though. It depends. Some days she’s clearer than most of us, and some days she’s cloudy, and some days she’s plain snowed in.”

He got out and held open the glass door—flowery pink and green wallpaper and paintings of otters, puffins, and bears on the walls of the lobby.

He nodded approval. “Not bad, considering.”

“Believe me, it’s much better than the third world prison camp they call a nursing home down in Spruce.” She smiled wide. “Hello there, Gilly.”

“So this is Kache.” A woman probably a little younger than Snag reached out and shook his hand. “Not a mere figment of Snag and Lettie’s imagination, after all.” She wore a nametag printed in oversized letters pinned on a cheery smock, had blue eyes with nicely placed crow’s feet, the kind that told you she’d spent a lot of time laughing. “If I’d known last month you were coming up, I might have been able to talk my daughter into staying. I told her we have a boatload of single men up here, but she only lasted a couple of weeks. She said, ‘Mom, I’m going back to Colorado where at least the men shave.’ That and the fact that folks regularly get their eyebrows and noses pierced by hooks while combat fishing on the Kenai, fairly crushed her fantasy version of Alaska.”

Snag touched Kache’s face. “Five o’clock shadow.”

Kache said, “Can’t help that. But it’ll be gone by morning.”

“See, Gilly? Your daughter missed out.”

Kache rubbed his chin. “It won’t be long before I start forgetting how to shave, I suppose.”

Even though the place was not-bad-considering, as he followed Snag down the hall it still smelled faintly of urine, medicine and decay, all mixed with boiled root vegetables.

The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn’t recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews. Grandma Lettie sat off to the side with her head in a book. Literally. The book lay open on her lap, her head drooped to almost touching it. She wore her hair in the same braid she always had, but it was as thin and wispy as a goose feather. In the photos of her as a young woman it had been a thick, dark rope coiling down to her waist.

Kache knelt in front of her. A thin line of drool hung from the center of her top lip down to the page. He wiped it with his sleeve while Snag handed him one of her crumpled tissues. “Gram?”

She looked up, peering, and then her mouth opened in a smile.

“Kachemak Winkel!” The smile slipped down. “Where have you been?

“I’ve been in Texas, Gram.”

She shook her head. “Where’ve you been ?”

“Working, Gram.” His answers sounded feeble.

“No.” She started to whimper and turned to Snag, whispering loudly. “Does he know about the crash?”

Snag nodded. “Yes, Mom, he was here. Remember?”

“But he didn’t die.”

“That’s right.”

She whispered again, enunciating slowly, her eyes wide, “He was supposed to go on that plane.”