The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I could live without him,” she said. “I know how to waitress. I could get the kids and me one of those cute little houses off O’Malley.”

  I had some idea of what she was doing, only because I had done it myself, which was leaving her husband in her mind in case he did die out in Brooks Range—​which he wasn’t going to—​so that, hopefully, she’d fall apart a little less. But the thing about having gotten divorced four times and widowed once is that people forget you also got married each time. You and your soft, secret pink balloon of dreams.

  “If you want anal sex, Candace,” I said, “just drive yourself down to the Las Margaritas, pick some guy on his third tequila, and go for it. Just don’t lose your house in the divorce like every other woman on this lake. Buy him out. Send him to some reasonably priced, brand-new shitbox in a subdivision. Keep your property.”

  Beneath her bronzer, Candace looked a little taken aback. “Gosh, Dutch,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you upset.”

  I shook a bunch of bottles at her. “Which are the sleepiest?”

  She pointed to a fat one with a tricky-looking cap. “Was it Benny?” she said. “Was it because I brought up crashing in the pass?”

  “I’m having a bad day,” I said, but only because there was no way to explain how I felt about Benny, my first husband, crashing his Super Cub, or about the search to find the wreckage, that smoking black hole in the trees. Even now, forty-one years later. The loneliness. The lostness. Not to mention what it had been like, being the first and only female homeowner on Diamond Lake.

  If I had been cute and skinny and agreeable like Candace, it might have been easier. But I was me. The rolled eyes during votes, the snickers when I tried to advocate for trash removal or speed bumps, the hands, the lesbo jokes, the cigars handed to me in tampon wrappers—​which I laughed about, seething, but smoked—​I got through it all. What hurt the worst was the wives, all of them women I had known for years, who dropped me off their Fur Rondy gala list every time I was single. And stuck me back on when I wasn’t.

  Benny was a world-class outdoorsman and an old-school shotgunner who did not believe in pretending that everybody got to make it to old age. On trips he took without me, he always said, “Dutch, if I don’t come back, hold tight to Howl Palace.”

  Four-plus decades later, I still had my property, and it had come at a sizable cost. Wallace put me through a court battle after I left him for Carl. RT needed an all-cash payment to make him run away to Florida. Add to that Lon’s rehab and Skip’s long-term care. The Cub and the 185 were gone, all the life insurance money, the IRA. Howl Palace was all I had left. And now I had to sell it in order not to die in a state nursing home, sharing a room with some old biddy who liked to flip through scrapbooks and watch the boob tube with the volume cranked up high. You can’t cry about these things. But you can’t sit around and contemplate them either.

  Luckily, Candace’s youngest boy, Donald, turned up at the top of the stairs. His electronic slab was tucked under his arm. “Where’s the charger, Mom?” he said.

  “Donald,” I said. “Let’s go fish for a dog.”

  “Donald has asthma,” said Candace. “He can’t handle a lot of dander.”

  “Get your boots on, Don,” I said. “You too, Candace.”

  “Really?” she said. “I get to come? Do I get to see the wolf room too?”

  For all the obvious reasons, I don’t like people on drugs in the wolf room. Or people with drinks, food, or mental issues. “If you help me with these safety caps,” I said. “And fine-tune the dosage.”

  * * *

  Donald was a little wheezy fellow, with glasses attached to a sporty wraparound strap that kept them stuck to his face. He knew how to hustle, though, and stuck to my side as I laid out the plan. Your mom’s job, I said, is to crush up some medicine and roll the moose rib in it. Your job is to take the spin rod I give you and cast the moose rib at the end of the line into the bushes. Then slowly, slowly reel it in. The minute the dog bites on the rib, you sit tight, play her a little. We’ll have only a few seconds for me to grab her by her collar. Then we’ll stick her in the kennel with the rib. Nighty-night.

  A few feet from the house, I got a feeling. It was a sucker-punch feeling—​the grill. I started running. Donald ran too, the way kids will, without asking questions, as if there might be matches and boxes of free Roman candles at end of it.

  “Hey, guys?” said Candace. “Wait up.” In her peaceful, freewheeling frame of mind, she had put on Rodge’s size 12 boots.

  The last few feet of the path I kept telling myself that I would not have taken the meat out and left it by the grill, that I would have not put the dishcloth over it to keep the flies off, that I could have, for some reason, left the meat in the fridge, even though everyone knows that meat can’t be slapped cold on a hot fire, it needs to mellow out at room temperature. Except that I knew exactly what I had done and why I had done it—​believing, at the time, that I didn’t own a dog.

  I also knew what I was going to find, even as I ran through the backyard finding it: bits of gnawed plastic and butcher paper pinwheeling all over the grass. Here a chunk of hot dog casing, there a lump of caribou burger. Blood juice dripped down the steps. The grill lay on its side, propane flames still burning blue.

  I knelt down and turned off the valve. The birches were in their last, tattered days of September green. A leaf whirled down and landed by my foot. It was small, the yellow so fresh and bright it belonged on a bird.

  “Dutch,” said Donald. “I saw her! She ran right by me.”

  “Don’t chase her,” I said. “She’ll think it’s a game.” I stayed down there with the leaf, just for a few minutes. Hiding. The leaf had the tiniest edge of dead brown.

  Footsteps thunked across the deck. Carl’s footsteps. Carl’s boots. He had not taken off and left me with the dog apocalypse. This was so unlike him, it took me a little longer than it should have to understand. “Your animal,” I said, “ate sixty pounds of meat.”

  “Most of it she threw up,” he said. “By the looks of the grass.”

  “I have an open house, Carl.” The flies were moving in—​a throbbing blanket of vicious, busy bottle green. With the sun out, the smell would be next.

  “I could always run to Costco. Pick us up some steaks.”

  He said this kindly, but steaks were not what I wanted. And there was no way to explain what I wanted, which was everything the way it was before, years before. Neighbors in the backyard. Charcoal smoke. Bug dope. A watermelon. People showing up with a casserole, leaving with their laughter and wet hair after a dip in the hot tub. Whatever my private upheavals, there was always that, at least.

  A duck paddled past my dock, blown over by the current that was ruffling the surface. I missed wind socks. Everybody on Diamond Lake used to have a rainbow wind sock tied to their deck. It added a cheerful note to the shoreline.

  “I had her by the woodpile,” said Carl. “But she gave me the slip.”

  “I think you should go,” I said. “Just go get your flight.”

  He shrugged, scratched a bit of dry skin on his neck. “I can get another.”

  “Right,” I said. “The fishing trip to Houston.”

  He looked at me, as if ashamed, and I felt a little bad about calling him on his lie. As far he, I, and everyone we knew understood Houston, it wasn’t even a city, just a mythical, cutting-edge treatment center, the Shangri-la of last-hope clinical trials. You went there to get a few more months to not die.

  “Well,” he said, “you got me, Dutch.” He laughed. I didn’t. Another leaf blazed down toward us. Fall lasts for weeks now—​which, despite my best efforts, still befuddles me. All my life, fall took about three days in August, the leaves dropping almost overnight, followed by a licorice snow taste in the wind. Global warming, the papers say, though almost all the articles talk about are the dying caribou and the starving puffins, never the less obvious, alarming changes of every day—​and t
he guilt about living in an oil state that goes along with it. As if the rest of the country, sucking up all that oil and burning all that coal, isn’t also to blame.

  Donald ran by us, headed for the water with a moose rib in his fist. Candace followed with my snow shovel and a garbage bag. She was still in her nightgown. Watching her try to scoop raw-meat dog vomit off the grass while wearing a gauzy orgasm of white chiffon was one of the more moving experiences of my life. She really did want to help.

  I sat down on the steps. Carl sat next to me, close, then an inch closer. “Dutch,” he said. “What a fucking corner we have found ourselves in.”

  I smiled. It felt like a small, broken snowflake in the middle of my face. There was a list of questions I was supposed to ask: what kind, what stage, what organ, herbal teas, protein smoothies? Instead an image floated through my mind. His trailer. His kitchen. The byzantine mobile-home cabinetry. For each of the six days that we lived together, I lay there in bed every morning, watching Carl make coffee, memorizing where he had stuck the cups, the creamer, the filters, so that I could make the coffee for us one day—​an idea that made me so happy I had to shut my eyes and pretend to be asleep.

  It was September then too. Mushrooms bloomed in the corners of the walls. Carl scraped them down with a pocketknife he wiped clean with a chamois. We made spaghetti and played gin rummy and dragged ourselves out of bed only for glasses of cold well water. I was careful where I left my clothes, though, careful not to leave them on the floor where they would take up room. I had left Wallace. And the dog. And even Howl Palace.

  On the morning of the seventh day, Carl sat me down and said, in the stiff, unsettled way he had adopted the minute I arrived, “It’s just that I didn’t know it’d be so close.”

  “Me neither,” I said, still thinking he was talking about square footage.

  How lonely it had to be, to realize that the only resource he had left—​besides his trailer and a few truly world-class stuffed rainbows—​was me. Maybe getting sick had made Carl softer. Maybe this was why he had shown up. Maybe this was why he had not left, despite my need for him, as fresh and pathetic as ever. The idea broke my heart, and into that jagged, bleak crevasse all my fears rushed to fill the gap.

  “I’m out of money,” I said. “Just so you know. In terms of helping you with your deductibles.”

  He looked at me—​puzzled, or maybe stunned.

  “Out-of-network is expensive,” I said. “That’s how it is, I hear, down in Houston.”

  “Dutch,” he said. “And you wonder why we always go to shit.” He stood up. He started walking down the backyard toward the dock, where Donald was standing with the rib tied to a length of frayed plastic rope he had found in the snow-machine shed.

  “Wait,” I said, standing up. “I’ll keep your stupid dog.”

  “I don’t want your money,” he said. “And you don’t even like her.”

  “Sure I do,” I said. “She’s kind of spirited, that’s all.”

  “What’s her name?” he said, not stopping, not slowing down in the least.

  “Rita,” I said. All his dogs were named Rita, one after another.

  He stopped to scrape some dog puke off the bottom of his boot. But he waved. “I call her Pinkie,” he said. “After your secret balloon of dreams.”

  That was how I knew it was the last time we would see each other. Carl always liked to leave me a little more in love with him than ever.

  * * *

  Even before the open house was officially open, people were pulling into the driveway, clutching phones. Silver had hosed down the backyard and sprinkled baking soda all over the grass. There was nothing left to do, she said, but hope for the best. One of her ways of hoping was to stick Donald down on the dock with his rib and his rope, where he would look like an imaginative, playful boy. Calling to his dog. Possibly homeschooled.

  Candace was subject to a similar redecoration. Silver laid her in a deck lounger under a blanket, so it would look like she was just dozing, enjoying the sun. I sat beside her for a while, wishing she could get herself upright enough to come up to the wolf room with me, the way she had always wanted and the way I was finally ready to let her—​high or sober or even just a little brain-dead from the chemicals. Carl was gone. I had no one. All over again.

  I did consider pouring water on her face. But she was curled up on her side, her hands tucked under her cheek—​not because her high had brought out the child in her, I saw only at that moment, but because the child kept surfacing despite the pills she took to keep it asleep.

  There was nothing to do but tuck her in under the blanket and take the back stairs, which are the only stairs up to the wolf room. The air in there is climate-controlled and smells just faintly of cedar from the paneling. I sat down in the middle of the skins, tried to look dignified, and waited.

  A young couple with matching glasses stopped in the doorway, looked in—​politely, alarmed—​and wandered off. Over and over, this happened for the next few hours. A couple with fake tans. A couple with a baby. A couple with man buns, both of them. Single people and old people, apparently, do not buy houses at my price point. Every time another couple turned up, I told myself to smile. Or invite them inside. Or leave so they could marvel at it openly. Or disparage it. Or discuss their plans to replace it with a master bath.

  Silver had told me that it was better for the closing price if the owner went out for lunch at a nice, expensive restaurant with a friend. Now I knew why. Nobody was being unkind, but you couldn’t tell, just by looking at it, that the wolf room used to be a nursery. That’s what it said on the plans that Benny and I ordered from Sears. The baby for the nursery didn’t work out, the way it doesn’t for some people. And so Benny and I did other things. He was tight with the Natives, as we called every tribe back then, as if they were all one big happy family or we just couldn’t bother to learn the phonetics. He had grown up in the village of Kotzebue, the son of the Methodist missionaries who had tried to convert Inupiat and gotten confused about their life’s agenda. The Arctic Circle is not the place to go if you have even the slightest existential question.

  That was something Benny always said. He knew Alaska better than me, mostly because I showed up on a ferry at age five, with a baby-blue Samsonite and a piece of cardboard hanging from my neck: FLIGHT TRANSFER TO ANCHORAGE. DELIVER TO MRS. AURORA KING. My parents had died in a head-on crash outside Spokane. Aunt Aurora was my nearest relative.

  Aunt Aurora was a second-grade teacher in the downtown school district. She was deeply into young girls being educated in the ways of our Lord, and I met Benny at yet another Sunday at United Methodist. I was seventeen. He grabbed me the last shortbread cookie at coffee hour and spilled tea on his flannel shirt so we would have matching stains.

  A week later he took me to the Garden of Eatin’, which was located in a Quonset hut in a part of Anchorage I had never been to. It was the fanciest place I had ever eaten in my life. Tablecloths on every table. Real napkins. We ate Salisbury steak and vanilla ice cream and I was careful not to lick my plate. Two months later we were married.

  Benny loved me, but he also loved men. He was not that different from a lot of guides and hunters at that time. They wanted to be out in the wilderness with another man without anybody seeing. For weeks. For whole summers. He never lied about it and I never asked beyond the minimum and we never discussed it. We understood what marriage was—​the ability to hold hands and not try to forgive the other person, not try to understand them, just hold hands.

  After my fifth miscarriage, they removed my entire reproductive system while I was asleep and couldn’t stop them. As soon as I was well enough to sit up, Benny dumped his shotgun buddy—​a guy he had been affectionate with, in secret, since high school—​and took me up to the snowfields to go after wolves.

  “You have to have a taste for it,” he said my first time. How else could he explain why you would shove your gun out of the open window of a single-prop pla
ne drilling hell for the horizon, your face a mask of eyes and ice, your hands so cold that when you aimed for the animal fleeing across the white, your fingers did not move the way they were supposed to. Or mine didn’t. The first time, I cut my finger on the window latch and had to pull back on the trigger still slick with my own blood.

  It was warm blood, at least. And I was alive. Despite any wish I might have had to be otherwise. Which was maybe what Benny was trying to show me.

  Most of this is to say that despite the local gossip, the wolf room was probably smaller than anybody at my open house expected. There are no windows. There is no furniture save 387 individually whittled pegs. On each peg hangs a pelt, most of them silver, black-tipped fur. Others reddish brown. The ones staple-gunned to the ceiling are all albino white. The ones laid down on the floor are all females, with tails that can trip you if you don’t watch out, though no one watches out. Walking into the wolf room is like walking into a forest of fur. Or a feathery winter silence that lets your brain finally go quiet.

  “You’ll never trust anyone like you trust your shotgun buddy,” Benny told me the night before my first hunt. Though he did not say it, he was speaking about his shotgun buddy and how much he missed him and who I had to be for Benny from there on out.

  Our fire was huge and fantastical in the flat white dark. I was afraid of the morning and what might happen, and I wasn’t wrong to be afraid. Shotgunning, as shooter, you have to aim into the wind and snow behind you—​the plane going faster than the racing pack—​while compensating for the dive of the plane at the same time, so that you not only don’t miss the wolf but also don’t get disoriented and shoot the propeller. And kill you both. Up front, the pilot has to get so low to the ground and swoop at such radical angles to keep up with the pack—​who keep spreading out over the snow like dots of quicksilver from a broken thermometer—​but not stall and crash. And kill you both.

  “Think about it this way,” said Benny. “We live or die together.” I was nineteen by then and he was the age I am now—​sixty-seven. I held on to his words as though they were special to our situation, not an agreement you enter into with every person you ever care about. Even just in passing.