It was odd to watch. She fit in and she didn’t. The conversation, so slow and sporadic as to be almost nonexistent, had continued in its way. They liked her and she them. It was so obvious that she was a part of their world. Yet, though he’d never seen her so dressed down, she still stood out like a tourist. Her clothes were too new, too well coordinated. Her jeans didn’t just fit, they clung. Her hair wasn’t just clean, it shone.
He’d fallen so far under the spell of watching her that he hadn’t seen the big Russian arrive. Yuri had swept Jo into his arms like a long lost lover. Angelo had been frozen in place. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t have so misread the situation, it just couldn’t be. He’d kill himself. The betrayal hit him like a leaden weight that almost brought the half beer in his empty stomach back up as bitter bile.
Then he heard the whispered, “No,” and the sharp slap. That was all the motivation he’d needed. She’d begun to struggle in earnest even as he reached her side. It had been a pleasure taking the man down. His hand still stung like the dickens, though he’d be hanged if he’d admit it.
Gerta had given him an ice pack for which he was immensely grateful. He discretely wiggled his fingers again to make sure they weren’t broken. You could cook despite cuts and burns, but a broken hand would be a whole different matter. With one hand in ice and the other clamped onto by Jo, he wasn’t able to drink his beer, but that was the only fault he could find with the moment.
Chapter 27
The stories slowly unwound around Jo. The stories of her father’s friends huddled at the Crab Hole bar revealed a man she knew, yet didn’t know.
“He spoke even less than old Dan here. That’s why they ended up at the end of the bar. Whereas I never shut up which is how I ended up in the middle.” Carl spoke after a long, comfortable pause. In any other company, he’d be the silent one, but he was definitely the talker of this group.
“Adam and Bernie, well, they’re the youngsters. I think you were already born by the time they came along.”
Twenty-eight years they’d been sitting at this bar and they were still the youngsters. She shared a smile with Angelo.
After another silence, Fred looked at her. “Strange seeing the two of you sittin’ so close like that. Earnest and Eloise used to sit that way. Had six stools here for a pretty fair time. She came off one of the cruise ships and just didn’t leave. She glowed the way you do, Jo. That’s why she named you for the girl in that book Little Women. Said you had that same life in you.”
Jo hadn’t known that. It had seemed a little obvious, but she liked knowing it for certain. She’d taken Jo March to heart. That incredible strength. When she went into the courtroom, she kept the picture clearly in her head of Jo March taking on the whole world. Though on the inside she’d always felt more like Beth, the quiet, shy one.
“You’d sit in her lap,” Fred sipped his beer to drag out the story. “The two of you would just glow. You look so much like her, it’s hard to credit. You partly got your daddy’s coloring, but everything else you got from your mama.”
“Why did she go? Why did she leave us?” Angelo’s tight hold on her hand was the only thing that gave her strength to ask the question without her voice breaking. She had a thousand questions for him too, but for the moment all she could do was hold on as tightly as she could and draw stability from his being here beside her. It felt as if she was making some commitment that she wasn’t sure she was ready to make, but she’d have to unravel and straighten that out later. Her past was threatening to overwhelm her and for now all she could do was hold on.
The guys at the bar all looked at one another, as if no one wanted to speak first. The bar was quiet. Tourists didn’t come to dinner at a place like the Crab Hole and the locals who did wouldn’t be along for a while. With so many hours of sunlight in mid-June, dinner happened later and breakfast earlier than in the winter. For now, it was the six of them on one side of the bar, Fred on the other, and Gerta standing behind Fred leaning casually against his back with her arms over his shoulders. Jo had found out she was older than she looked, in her early fifties, and Fred was, she knew, in his seventies. Whatever was going on there, they looked comfortable together. Clearly the bar would someday be hers and she and Fred and the other locals were fine with that.
“She faded,” Dan spoke for the first time since asking if Jo was okay while Angelo threw a man half-again his size through the door. His first full sentence since she’d arrived. His deep voice made it a proclamation. The others nodded.
Carl took over. “I liked her, but Dan’s right. She faded here. Faded until the light in her went out and she had to leave to go find it again. Something in old Earnest broke the day she left. But he could no more leave than she could stay.”
“She never done divorce him.” Again the deep declaration.
“One postcard is all Earnest ever spoke of.” Carl inspected his beer then the mussel-shell ceiling as if searching his memory and finding nothing else. “Sent it the day she left. Jes’ to let him know she were alive. Maybe said something about goin’ to feed kids in Africa or somethin’. Don’t quite recall. No return address. Postmarked at Seattle airport.”
Jo looked over at Angelo. His mother was so alive, so vital, so present. She’d been and clearly still was such a force in Angelo’s life. What would that be like?
Well, that was something she’d never know.
Chapter 28
Over Fred’s protests, Jo had settled the bar tab, though it wasn’t too bad. Her father used to pay it off once the fishing season income started rolling in. Knowing he was dying, he’d sold the Eloise, “Which came as close to killing him as your mother leaving. Then he started into paying his tab monthly, makin’ the rest of us look bad.” Bernie, of course.
So, that was done. One less thing for her to worry about was all she could think. They’d already cremated him. Tomorrow evening the new owner was going to take them all out on the Eloise and scatter the ashes. She hadn’t committed to that, but she hadn’t said no either.
She had promised she’d come back through before leaving town. Still holding her hand, Angelo walked with her as she headed up Young Street, then Warren Street to her father’s house.
“What day is this?” Jo’s brain had already become scrambled by the events of the last two days. “Sunday?”
“Sunday,” Angelo confirmed.
“How could you leave the restaurant?”
Angelo laughed and shook his head, “I don’t really know, I just had to. I wondered about that on the flight up, but some part of me must have known it would be okay, even if I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Manuel can run the restaurant as well as I can. Apparently Graziella has had her eye on someone for front of house help, and she’s going to do a trial this afternoon. My mother loved your idea, so she’s going to be filling in for Eugene. There is no way I would ever have thought that up. How did you?”
Jo shrugged. She noticed the gesture was very unlike herself, but was one she saw on Angelo all the time. What other influences was she picking up from him?
“It simply made sense. Your mother is charming, a brilliant cook, and you clearly love each other so much that you can barely stand it. So, of course, she’d want to be with you.” Now why had she phrased it that way? Of course, his mother would want to help him. But that’s not what she’d said. Nor what she’d thought. “Want to be with Angelo.” Why did that phrase feel as if she were speaking of someone other than his mother? She pulled her flannel shirt tighter against the back of her neck.
Angelo inspected the sky which had briefly eased from misting to merely humid. With the temperature in the sixties it only dampened the air, rather than being muggy. He looked back down, apparently he hadn’t found anything up there to help him find a response to that.
They turned onto the old wooden stairs leading up to Warren Street. They slowly climbed above narrow Hopkins Alley where there were steep banks of scrub and low trees, below ranged the backs of old warehouses
wearing their gray paint as if to compete with the gray sky. The stairs creaked and groaned as they climbed them, but by Ketchikan standards this was a major thoroughfare, you could walk two abreast without a problem. Once they broke free of the warehouses they had a clear view over the tops of a light industrial stretch of Water Street and out to Pennock and Gravina Islands defining the Tongass Narrows.
Jo saw a jet lifting off the runway on Gravina, slowly filling the Narrows with its dull roar before turning south for friendlier climes. She’d pay good money to be done and aboard. Now there was the constant thought of her youth. “Get me out of here!” She could feel the shout rooted deep inside. But just as when she was a girl, she kept it bottled deep inside. Kept it there because once again her life had drifted out of her control.
No escape for today at least. All of the businesses she’d need to contact would be closed on a Sunday. Maybe she could escape tomorrow.
She squeezed Angelo’s hand again, just so pleased that he was there with her. That anyone was there with her.
Because next came the hard part.
Angelo looked at the strange houses lining the uphill side of whatever street they were on. His head was still spinning at the foreignness of this place. Sure, it was technically on U.S. soil, but it didn’t belong there. Everything was surreal. An airport separated from the town it served by a ferry that didn’t stand a chance in rough weather. And this was Alaska. He’d bet that there was a lot of waiting for the waters to be calm enough for the ferry during the winter months, which up here was probably about ten months of the year.
And the Crab Hole…he had to send some of his New York friends there, it was performance art at its finest, and most authentic. No edgy display observed by urban crowds dressed in black. That crab shell art and the patrons had been for-real surreal.
This street reminded him oddly of the Amalfi Coast of Italy. Houses perched on the edge of impossible cliffs. Long, stick-like understructures reaching multiple stories down to the street to support the front of houses who had their backsides planted firmly against the hill. He knew where they were going before Jo even turned toward it, and he really hoped he had it wrong.
Beyond a pickup truck made of equal parts red metal and brown rust, towered a house. A house that had clearly been built before the apocalypse and somehow survived. It perched upon a structure he wouldn’t trust to hold up a garden shed. Twenty-foot tall four-by-fours with a couple of two-by-four cross braces looked impossibly spindly, too little to support even the stair rail nailed into the side of them, never mind the house atop.
A long flight of stairs climbed along the sloping hillside straddled by the stickframe understructure. The steps reached the back end of the shack where the house rested against the cliff face. The only entrance was on the right side at the very back end of the house against the cliff.
The one-story structure that perched twenty or thirty feet above them might have once been white. Or perhaps blue. It was hard to tell with all of the peeling paint. He could see the green encroachments of moss or lichen or something else that wasn’t supposed to be growing on buildings but had on this one. This is where James Patterson should put his next psychotic murderer. There’d be no question about what had twisted up the villain.
Angelo opened his mouth to ask if she’d actually lived here, but snapped it shut when he saw that her dark skin was almost sheet white and her jaw was clenched so hard he was afraid for her next dentist appointment. He changed tacks.
“Do you really have to go up there?”
Her nod was tight, but affirmative. She was staring up the steps wide-eyed, having stumbled to a halt with her hand barely inches from the rail.
“Okay,” he’d be the stable one at the moment, even if merely looking at the place made him want to rent a flamethrower and call it done. “Let me have the key.”
He didn’t comment on her chilled fingers as she handed it over, merely led the way up the stairs, trusting that she’d follow. It took a few moments, but he began to feel the structure shaking with steps other than his. At the top he kicked aside a spool of rotting fishing line and unlocked the door.
Showing none of the hesitation he felt, he stepped inside, leaving the door wide open, and flicked on a light. Electricity was still working. That was a good start.
They entered at the back, where house met slope. A door straight ahead was tightly closed. A narrow, dark hallway led to the front of the house. Being braver than he felt, Angelo went down the hall hoping the building didn’t collapse from under him. Another closed door to the side. Then the main room. The front half of the house, the part perched out in space on spindly legs, was a single room. Kitchen, living, and what euphemistically could be called dining, faced a window hazy with dried salt. The furnishings were old but looked serviceable. The room was clean and neat, nothing much here but a sofa, a couple of chairs, and an old television.
One more door at the far end of the room stood open. The back half of the house, other than the narrow hall to the door, had clearly been divided into three rooms. Two bedrooms, with the bath in the center would be his guess.
How had the miracle of Jo Thompson come from such a past? He turned to look at her. She stood at the threshold to the main room, posed as if perfectly calm and collected. Her hands tucked easily in the front pockets of her rain jacket. And tears running down her face.
“Okay, I’m getting you out of here.” Angelo tried to sweep her out of the room and out of her father’s house, but Jo held her ground.
“No. I need to do this now before I lose all of my nerve. This isn’t hard,” she spoke more to herself than Angelo. It had to be easier than the murder scene she’d had to visit and catalog as an intern, an experience that had driven her hard into corporate law where most of the crimes occurred in sterile board rooms.
“What are we looking for?”
She’d think of it as collecting evidence. That’s all. Objective. She could be objective.
“A box.”
“Any more guidance than that? What’s in it?”
“An empty one, or a bag. We’re going to make one quick pass and gather any paperwork we can find, checkbooks, stuff like that. One pass, then out.”
Bless Angelo. He came back moments later with an old wooden box out of which he’d dumped a pile of broken winch blocks that her father had been meaning to repair since before she left for college.
“Could you do that one?” she indicated her father’s room. She simply couldn’t go in there.
He was gone in moments. She’d have to remember to thank him later. Thank heavens her father was a creature of habit and not a pack rat. By the time Angelo came back with the box about a third full, she’d completed her pass on the living room. Checkbooks in the second drawer of the coffee table along with two unpaid, but not yet overdue bills. A quick flip revealed that he’d gotten a hundred thousand for his boat, but medical and other outstanding bills had chewed up about half of that. He’d always lived season to season, and she remembered all too well how hard the bad seasons were. At his death, his savings were probably the highest they’d ever been in his life.
She found his spare truck keys. She’d drop them at the Crab Hole in case anyone wanted the old vehicle. The first drawer of the file cabinet revealed neatly filed bills in the separate hanging folders that she’d set up for him long ago. She pulled the most recent from each folder so that she’d know who to cancel. The other drawer included the truck title, which would go with the keys, and a small life insurance policy in her name. How hard had it been for him to maintain that? It wouldn’t have paid for a year of her college or what she now made in a month or two, but she was touched nonetheless.
Finally, she found what she’d really been wanting, his will. The old envelope cracked with age as she opened it. The paper had yellowed, but was otherwise fine. Jo flipped to the back page, signed and witnessed, dated shortly after she was born.
She flipped back and scanned down the first page. Dan wa
s named as the executor if Jo was under eighteen, otherwise Jo was executor. That simplified matters immensely.
Jo made it halfway down the next page before her knees let go and she dropped onto the couch.
Her father’s will named both Jo and Eloise Thompson as beneficiaries. Fifty-fifty split if they were both surviving and Jo was over eighteen.
Now she was legally required to find her mother, the woman who had abandoned her before she was three.
Chapter 29
“Together.” Angelo said when Jo froze at the last room. The door by the entrance must be Jo’s bedroom.
He opened the door, turned on the light, and stepped inside. There was a narrow, north-facing window that had been overgrown by moss. A tree in full leaf pressed hard against the cracked glass. The overhead bulb behind a faded papier-mâché shade did little to light the room.
It was perhaps the most depressing place he’d ever been. A desk, a narrow bed, and a closet that stood empty. The walls had posters curling from the damp, of astronauts and the space shuttle. Of the Martian surface and fantastic science fiction spaceships.
“Those were from my ‘How far can I really get from Alaska?’ phase,” Jo stared at them blankly.
“I would say that culturally, you succeeded.”
“I don’t know,” she kept staring at the curling posters. “Ketchikan doesn’t look quite so bad as an adult. You couldn’t pay me to live here,” she threw up her hands, normally so quiet, in a very Italian gesture as if to block the possibility of such a thought. “But there is community. There are good people here. They’re just not my people. When I was a kid, I swore that I would never again set foot on Alaskan soil for as long as I lived.”
Where Dreams Reside Page 18