Chapter 2
Jace
The salmon isn’t going to catch itself, which is why I’m standing knee-deep in water at five in the morning instead of sleeping like a normal person.
Normal people sleep. Normal people don’t wake before dawn to check if the tenant survived, don’t talk themselves out of walking the trail, don’t redirect that restless energy into the river like it’s a problem fish can solve.
Jasper sits on the bank, watching me with the patient, slightly disappointed expression of a dog who has seen me do this exact thing a thousand times and still doesn’t understand why we can’t just eat kibble.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him.
He tilts his head. Looks at me exactly like that.
I wade deeper. The water’s cold enough to remind me that I’m alive, which is sometimes the only reason I come out here—the shock of it, the way the current pushes against my shins and says stay or don’t but make a decision. The Kenai Mountains are still holding the last blue light of what passes for night this time of year—in late June, Alaska doesn’t get dark so much as it gets dim, like someone turned the world’s brightness down to thirty percent and forgot to finish the job. The sky is silver. The water issilver. Everything is quiet except for the river and the wind and Jasper’s snoring, which is loud enough to scare fish if fish had ears.
I cast. Wait. Cast again.
The new tenant. Gabby. The lawyer’s voicemail had called her Gabriela. I’d stopped expecting anyone to show up. Two years of maintaining Edna’s place, patching the roof, keeping the generator fueled, clearing the trail—and I’d started to think the cabin would sit there, slowly folding back into the forest like everything does eventually.
Then the lawyer called, and a woman accepted the clause, and last night she appeared at midnight in heels and a sundress, holding a rolling pin like she was going to fight Morris with it.
Morris, who weighs nine hundred pounds and has eaten the porch railing of every building in Ashwood Falls at least once.
She was going to fight him. With a rolling pin.
The line tugs. I set the hook, reel in a red salmon—good size, firm—and toss it in the cooler on the bank. Jasper lifts his head, sniffs toward the cooler, and I give him the look that means not for you, and he gives me the look that means we’ll see about that.
I wade out, dry my hands on my jeans, and clean the fish on the flat rock. Same rock since I was twelve.. My grandfather taught me here. Hank. Same rock, same knife, same river. He’d stand behind me and correct my grip—”angle the blade, Jace, not your wrist”—and I’d get it wrong three times before I got it right, and he’d say nothing when I got it right, which was how I knew it was right.
Hank.
My chest tightens. The muscle remembers the loss before my brain does. Three years. Three years since I found him in the workshop, still in his chair, tools laid out on the bench like he’d planned to keep working but his body had other ideas. Peaceful, people said. He went peacefully. As if that’s supposed to help.
I finish the salmon. Wrap it in wax paper. I’ll leave it on the cabin porch—Edna’s porch, the new tenant’s porch now—because that’s what I did for Edna every week for the last five years of her life, and some habits don’t stop just because the person who started them is gone.
It’s not about the woman. It’s about the routine. About keeping a promise to a dead man who kept a promise to a dead woman, and if that sounds like I’m burying myself in obligation to avoid dealing with anything real, well---Jasper judges enough for both of us.
The trail between my cabin and Edna’s is about four hundred yards through spruce and birch. Short enough that sounds carry. Long enough that the walk gives me time to decide what face to wear when I get there.
This morning, my face is: neutral. Disinterested. Dropping off fish, checking the generator, leaving.
I set the wrapped salmon on the porch steps—new teeth marks on the railing from Morris, which means he came back after I shooed him away last night; typical Morris—and turn to go.
The cabin door opens.
She’s wearing clothes that don’t belong to her. An oversized flannel—one of Edna’s, from the closet—that hangs past her hands, and wool socks bunched at the ankles, and her hair is piled on top of her head like she fought with it and lost. No makeup. Eyes still swollen from what might have been sleep or might have been crying, and I don’t look long enough to tell because it’s not my business.
She sees me.
She sees the salmon.
She looks at the salmon like it’s a threat.
“What is that?” she says.
“Salmon.”
“On my porch.”