Driving down Appleton’s College Avenue, it is as I remember the street best—lit up for the Christmas season, tinsel laced across the avenue, and lights climbing the street lamps. Between Walnut and State Streets, I pass what used to be Sarge’s Bar and is now an upscale martini lounge. I think of Heimo there, before he left for Alaska, when the crowd was of a very different sort, and he was trying to drown boredom in booze, all the while dreaming of a life that would one day transport him far from the five-day-a-week drunks and the dead-end existence that were laid out before him as straight as a section line road.
In an odd twist of fate, Rhonda has called Appleton home for the last four months. The place where Heimo felt that he was squandering his life is the same place where Rhonda dreams of making something of hers. Tonight her sophomore choir group from Appleton East High School is performing at the Lawrence University Chapel. Rhonda has been excited about the concert since September, calling me every other week to remind me to put down the date on my calendar. I’ve promised not to miss it.
My four-year-old daughter, Aidan, and I arrive at the chapel late. The concert is already in progress. Most of the seats are taken, so we sit in the back. Aidan immediately scans the stage for Rhonda. I spot her sitting in one of the front rows, off to the right. Her group is not singing yet. As if sensing us, she turns. I wave to her and pull Aidan onto my lap so that she, too, can see. Rhonda waves for nearly half a minute before Aidan finally notices her. Then Aidan waves excitedly, as if she’s spotted a celebrity. The truth is that in her eyes Rhonda is something of a celebrity. She regards Rhonda with the awe that a young girl might feel for an older sister. Rhonda indulges her, calling her at least once a week. The phone conversations make Aidan feel important, grown up, but they are not entirely one-sided. For Rhonda, they serve a purpose, too. Their weekly talks make up for a lack of connection with her own family, helping to dispel the loneliness. Both of them say “I love you” before hanging up.
We listen to four choirs before Rhonda’s group finally takes the stage. Thinner than when I saw her last, she looks quite beautiful in her white and black gown with her hair pulled back. She smiles at one of her friends—that amiable, sideways grin of hers—as they align themselves on the risers. Then the choir director nods, lifts her baton, and the song begins.
Rhonda’s group performs several songs and then the other choirs ascend the stage to join hers for a farewell medley. When the concert is over, Rhonda comes to the back of the chapel. Aidan runs to her, and Rhonda sweeps her up into her arms and introduces Aidan to two of her girlfriends. Then she walks over to me.
“You look lovely,” I tell her. She shrugs like a typical high-school student. “Thanks for the invitation,” I continue. “We really enjoyed the singing.”
Rhonda pulls the corner of her choir gown up to her waist and checks a lime-green beeper attached to her belt. Then she returns her attention to me. “My uncle doesn’t want me anymore,” she says. “I blew it. He says he can’t trust me.” Rhonda tells me the story, holding Aidan as she talks. She had skipped school, calling in sick. Though she was already grounded, she was caught by her uncle later that day riding in her boyfriend’s car. Her boyfriend is nineteen and that was already a sore spot between them. For her uncle, it was the last straw. There’d been too many deceptions, too many broken promises.
Though I knew that there were problems, this sudden revelation catches me by surprise.
“What’s going to happen?” I ask her. “What are you going to do?” Again, she shrugs her shoulders. By now, her friends want to go. Cake and refreshments are being served, and one of the girls mentions that she is hungry. Rhonda puts Aidan down. “I love you,” she says, ignoring my question. “I love you, too,” Aidan replies.
Then Rhonda pulls back the sleeve of her gown and shows me her gold bracelet. “It’s gonna kill him,” she says.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“My boyfriend,” she replies. “He gave me this bracelet, and he doesn’t know yet that anything is wrong. If I have to leave, it’s going to be hard on him. We’re close. He really cares about me, you know. He’s been a complete gentleman. He opens and closes my car door for me. Isn’t it pretty?” she says, pulling the bracelet from her wrist and placing it in the palm of her hand delicately, as if it were a robin’s egg that had fallen from its nest.
“It is,” I say, admiring it. “He must think a lot of you.”
“I guess,” she says, returning it to her wrist. “Anyway, I gotta go.” She gives me a hug and then hugs Aidan again. Aidan waves to her as she walks away. “Daddy, am I going to get to see Rhonda again?” she asks.
As Rhonda walks down the aisle, chatting with her friends, with one hand still wrapped around the thick gold bracelet, I remember Roger Kaye’s story. Rhonda was three, and she couldn’t take her eyes off him. To this day he remains struck by that image—a child who hadn’t seen another person outside of her father and mother in six months.
I have my own indelible image of Rhonda—30.30 in hand, trudging across the tundra toward Rundown Mountain and her trapline, braving the cold ache of the north wind, which had whipped the tundra into small, giddy whirlwinds of powder-dry snow. We were walking in the direction of the setting moon, which was large and lopsided, and the hardened snow popped under our snowshoes. To the southeast, the sun had barely clambered above the horizon, washing the land in a lean and faded light. Rhonda stopped to adjust her backpack. “Okay?” she asked, turning toward me. I nodded. Her face had been windburned a bright red, but she turned and continued on, leaning into the wind.
Only when Rhonda has disappeared with her friends does Aidan agree that it is time for us to go. Later that evening I stop in at my parents’ house before driving home. “Should we take her?” my dad asks me. “She needs to stay and get an education,” my mother chimes in.
“I’d love for her to be able to stay, too,” I say, “but it’s too much of a responsibility for you.”
“We could do it,” my mother says. “We’re not that old.”
“That may be,” I say. “But it wouldn’t be easy.”
Ultimately the decision is made for us. On the afternoon of Thursday, December 26, Heimo calls me from Fairbanks. He makes small talk at first. It has been warm and the rivers froze up late, but the trapping season has been good. He’s caught nine wolverine, seventy-eight marten, one lynx, one otter, three mink, and five wolves. Then he pauses, and I can hear him breathe in deeply. “Rhonda’s coming home,” he says quietly. “She doesn’t know it yet, but I’m flying down to get her on Saturday. Edna and I made the decision that she should come back and that I should go and get her.” Heimo’s voice trembles. “She’s really let us down.”
The plans have been made. Rhonda is leaving Appleton just two weeks short of completing her fall semester. The comparisons to Heimo are inevitable. Heimo left high school prematurely, only two months before graduating. But this is where the comparisons end. Heimo left Wisconsin to pursue a dream. Rhonda, on the other hand, will return to Alaska reluctantly, regretfully maybe, having failed to realize hers. Failure, though, is perhaps too strong a word.
Rhonda’s situation was an almost untenable one. Not only was she cut off from her parents and Krin—connected by satellite phone for five minutes once or twice a month—and the emotional balance that a family can provide, she was also trying to adjust to a new place and a very different culture. She was so intent on fitting in that she forgot her personal style; she forgot who she was. She wanted to act and dress like the kids and the stars—Lauryn Hill, Lil’ Kim—she admired. At school, the students were split into cliques. There were the preps, the punks, the geeks, and the hip-hop crowd. It was the hip-hop crowd where Rhonda found her niche. Half Eskimo in a largely white high school, Rhonda felt more comfortable with this multicultural group of African-Americans, Hispanics, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and white kids, too. She wore baggy pants, tight shirts, braids in her hair. The hip-hop crowd was more inclusive than the other groups, but the lines were well drawn.
People liked Rhonda. She was friendly, but tough, too, no-nonsense, and kids were drawn to her. Teachers were, too. “The teachers loved her,” Joe Lamers, a guidance counselor at Appleton East says. “They weren’t surprised to see her go—she confided in some of them about the problems she was having—but they were saddened by it. One teacher told me that if she didn’t have four of her own kids at home, she would have opened her house to Rhonda. It was a real tribute to Rhonda, I think. I can’t imagine the changes she had to go through coming from where she did.”
Joe Lamers was one of the few who knew much about how Rhonda had grown up. When others asked her where she was from, she simply said “Alaska,” never bothering to mention the bush or the Coleen River or the Old Crow. You could dress street, but the key was always to look like you came from money, and you couldn’t be the daughter of a hunter-trapper and live in a one-room cabin and claim that you came from money.
Rhonda was trying on a new identity, and the details of her former life didn’t fit the picture. Besides, how could she have made them understand? These were suburban kids. Most of them had never hauled water or ice, split wood, studied by kerosene latern, checked a trapline, skinned a marten and tacked the pelt to a stretching board, gutted and butchered a caribou, much less bathed in a tin washbasin, using water heated on a woodstove.
Rhonda was also carrying a huge psychological burden. All of Heimo’s hopes for the future, hers, and the family’s, too, depended on whether or not she suceeded. She had the power to legitimize the choices he’d made in life. If it worked out with Rhonda, he could remain in the bush and still see to it that his girls got a proper education. He could straddle two worlds. No one could accuse him of not doing right by his children. If she succeeded, Krin would probably come out, too. If Rhonda failed, the deal was off.
It was all too much for her: the freedom—it was the first time in her life that she was away from home for more than a few days, and she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes, after talking with her on the phone, when she would confess her indiscretions, it struck me that she was trying to sabotage her experience, trying to force her father’s hand, test his love. Daddy says he wants to die in the bush, but would he leave the place and life he loves for me?
A day after informing me that he was coming down to get Rhonda, Heimo calls me again. “It’s all been very emotional,” he says, whispering, his voice barely audible. “I called Rhonda last night to tell her that I was coming to get her. She’s at Lisa’s [Heimo’s sister] now. She was really bawling, and I could hear Lisa in the background crying, too. Lisa’s going to have a good-bye party for her, so she can see her friends one last time.” Heimo pauses. I wait, thinking that he’s dropped the phone. Then he blurts it out. “We’re leaving the … bush.” He tries to say it as matter-of-factly as possible, but he can barely get out the last word.
I catch my breath. “Leaving?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Edna and I talked it over. There’s no other way. We’re going to rent a cabin in Central or Fairbanks. We’re leaning toward Central. There’s a school there. But nothing’s for sure now. We may end up in Fairbanks. I don’t know how we’ll do it moneywise; it’s going to be hard. We’ll keep the cabin in Fort Yukon, but I don’t want the kids going to school there—too many problems. I’ll be flying back and forth between the cabin and town, if I can swing it. I’ll spend three or four weeks on the river and two weeks in town. Then, after Krin graduates and goes to college, Edna and I will move back out. That’s the plan, at least for now.” By the time Heimo finishes telling me, his mood has improved, as if by uttering the words “We’re leaving,” he is one step closer to accepting the reality of his decision, however painful it may be.
“Are you okay with it?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess. I don’t like it, but it’s the only way. The girls need to know how much I love them, that I’m willing to do anything for them, even if that means leaving the bush. This is my dream, not theirs.”
* * *
A month later I meet Heimo in Fairbanks. He has come to town to sell his fur, buy supplies, and call Appleton East High School to find out if there’s any way Rhonda can get credit for her fall term. Despite the problems she had, she got good grades. “It would be a shame for her to lose that,” Heimo says. He has four days in which to do all this, and then he has to be back at the cabin for Edna’s forty-ninth birthday.
It is 9:30 A.M. Dawn is on the way. The waning moon is silhouetted against a pale blue sky, which is now tinged with neon oranges and combustible reds.
“Remember last year out at the cabin?” Heimo asks. “How we waited for the sun? This year the sky was clear, no clouds. We saw it on January thirteenth for almost two hours. Now the sun’s out for more than three hours. We’re already gaining seven minutes a day. By March or so, it’ll be ten minutes a day.”
I haven’t talked with Heimo since he called me to announce that he and the rest of the family were leaving the bush, but he is his old self again, smiling, animated, full of stories, flying around Fairbanks in his used Ford Escort, which he bought three years ago for running errands when he came to town. The car smells faintly of fur, and Heimo is apologetic. On the car’s back bumper, he’s plastered a sticker he’s particularly proud of: “Wear Wolf—Eat Moose!” “This is how I am when I come to town,” he says, cutting in front of a Chevy Suburban, seemingly daring it to hit us. “My mind races. I don’t slow down till I get back out to the cabin. I’ve been in town now twice in the last month, once to get Rhonda and now. I don’t mind coming to town once in a while, but that’s way too much.”
“How is Rhonda?” I ask, as he turns a corner and momentarily spins out and then fishtails on the icy street.
“She’s good,” he says, unalarmed. “She seems happy to be home, though she says she likes Wisconsin better than Alaska. She spends lots of time writing in her journal. She says she has to get her feelings out. Krin has finally managed to forgive her for ‘blowing’ it and ruining her chances of ever going down there, too.” We both laugh at this, since Krin is known to carry a grudge longer than most. “Krinny still has her nose in books all the time. She just finished The Hobbit and now she’s on the second Lord of the Rings book.”
Heimo hands me a sealed envelope. “A letter,” he says. “Rhonda never got to say good-bye. She made me promise I wouldn’t read it, but I think I already know what’s in it. She’s glad to be home, but I think being at the cabin is harder than ever for her now that she’s seen Wisconsin. She liked the lifestyle and she misses her friends. Coming back was kind of a rude awakening for her. Did I tell you about the snowmachine breaking down?”
By the time I answer, Heimo has already begun the story.
He and Rhonda were checking traps downriver, seven miles south of the lower cabin, when the snowmachine broke down. Heimo struggled to start it, but there was no spark, and it didn’t take him long to realize that he and Rhonda would have to abandon the machine, walk to the lower cabin, overnight there, and then cover the remaining distance the following day. It was 20 below and 2:00 P.M. when they set out. An hour into the hike, Heimo knew they’d have to split up. The wind had drifted over the trail, slowing them down. “At this speed,” Heimo told Rhonda, “we won’t make the cabin until early evening. We’ll be tired and sweaty and the cabin won’t be much good because it will be as cold inside as it is outside. I’ll go on ahead,” he told her. “I’ll break trail, and as soon as I reach the cabin, I’ll build a fire.”
Heimo hustled and made the cabin by 5:00 P.M and immediately started a fire in the woodstove. Then he went to the river and brought back a bucket of water. When Rhonda arrived in the dark two hours later, she was tired, cold, hungry, and dehydrated. The cabin hadn’t even begun to heat up, so she sat as close to the woodstove as she could without singeing her clothes and drank cup after cup of river water. She threw up most of the water, but she knew her body needed fluids, so she kept drinking. Heimo searched the fifty-five-gallon drums that were outside the cabin and found two foam sleeping pads and five sheets. He was hoping to find some extra blankets, but the sheets would have to do. Rhonda was still chilled, so Heimo prepared two of the four packets of Mountain House freeze-dried food that he kept in his backpack for emergencies, and they ate, back-to-back, wrapped in the sheets. Rhonda was warmer now, but she had trouble holding the food down, and decided to save most of her share for the following morning.
At the upper cabin, Edna was worried. What’s happened? Are they okay? Overflow, she thought, and then she couldn’t get the idea out of her head—they’d gotten caught in overflow. She tried not to panic. It was 20 below, but at least Rhonda wasn’t alone; she was with Heimo. Whatever the problem, Heimo would know what to do.
Heimo and Rhonda huddled together and slept as best they could. They woke early the next morning, but didn’t linger. Heimo heated water for the freeze-dried food. They ate and were on the trail by 8:00 A.M . The plan was for Heimo to walk ahead. He’d reach the cabin and then he’d get the Polaris and drive back and pick up Rhonda. Fortunately, the wind hadn’t drifted this section of the trail. It was still hard-packed, and the walking was easy.
Heimo was five miles north of the lower cabin when he heard the sound of a snowmachine. Edna had come to look for them. When Edna saw him walking alone, her heart sank. She stopped the snowmachine and watched, fighting off the dread she felt. “Heimo,” she cried. Heimo ran to her. “No,” he said, trying to calm her. “Rhonda’s okay. Everything’s okay.” Then he hugged Edna and explained what had happened. He was sweating and he knew that he couldn’t stop for long. “Go get Rhonda,” he said. “Take her home and then send Krin to get me.”
“Quite a homecoming for Rhonda, wasn’t it?” he says, sliding through a yellow traffic light at the corner of University and Airport Way. “I felt bad for her, but that’s life out here. You learn to accept stuff like that. It happens and you can’t do jack shit to change it. Her first week back, her and I were checking a line. We had to go east across the tundra. The wind had wiped out my trail. I couldn’t even find it. Rhonda had to walk in front of the snowmachine and make a trail so I wouldn’t get stuck. We switched, but the machine was too heavy for her to handle. She was crying and carrying on, saying she hated it out here. I felt for her. In bed that night I was thinking about it, and I felt cruel for keeping the girls out here for so long. After that I was convinced that moving to town was the right thing. Rhonda will never want to live like this; I know that now. She says that when she leaves home she’ll come back for a visit. But that’s it! Once I guess I hoped that she or Krin might live out here after we are gone. But I don’t kid myself about that anymore.”
Heimo drops me off at the hotel where I’ve rented a room for us. Since Heimo stays with friends when he comes to town, he seems excited about staying in the hotel. “It says they have a pool, a spa, and an exercise room,” he says, stopping in front of the lobby. “I’m going to do a hard workout later today and then soak in the whirlpool.” I shut the car door and Heimo rushes off.
When I get to the room, I open Rhonda’s letter.
“I think I liked it better in Appleton,” she writes, “because I didn’t have to crawl into a stupid sleeping bag every night, go outside to go to the bathroom, carry water, put wood on the stove, heat water for dishes, 4 a bath. It gets old after a while. Wisconsin was different. I would like to live in a small city instead of in the middle of nowhere because it’s easier in many ways. It’s nice to call a friend and hang out, watch TV, do something fun. Out here you just have moose and caribou, and wolf, wolverine and fox tracks.” “And snowmachine breakdowns,” I say out loud.
“I liked school,” she continues. “No, that is an understatement. I loved school. I loved having friends. We’ve never had friends before. And I loved the freedom. At home it’s always compromise and cooperation. That’s part of living in the bush and living in a small cabin.” Then the letter turns reflective. “I couldn’t make it because I made some really bad choices,” she writes. “I loved the freedom, but I couldn’t handle it. It was exciting but it scared me, too, and I chose to do things, stupid things.” What those “stupid things” were, she doesn’t say, but it isn’t hard to read between the lines. The temptations were there, and like a lot of other high school kids, she found them hard to resist.
The letter continues: “I joined the choir because I love singing. It was fun rehearsing and even more fun performing. I want to be a performer when I grow up. Ever since I was 7 years old I wanted to sing and act. After our Christmas program, I decided that I loved the stage. Though I screwed up, my time there was so worth it.”
* * *
Heimo and I have just finished dinner. On the way back to the hotel, we stop in at Fred Meyer, Fairbanks’s superstore, and Heimo buys a pint of Häagen-Dazs chocolate sorbet. “I eat one of these almost every night when I come to town,” he says. “Three things I look forward to when I come in—soda, a hot shower, and sorbet. Only 480 calories and no fat, so it’s easy on my arteries.
“Look at all these people,” Heimo continues. “That’s town. People everywhere. Don’t get me wrong; I like people. After six years alone, you realize how important people are. It’s nice for a while, seeing folks that you know and visiting. And it’s easier. Living like we do is hard work, both mentally and physically. Sometimes I get tired and think it might be nice to give up trapping, maybe even live in town. But then I come to Fairbanks and see the reality of it, how most people live their lives, and I can’t wait to get back to the cabin and start checking my lines again. I like town, but being in the woods, you might say that I find it …”
We’re standing in the checkout line, and he pauses, considering his words. “You might say I find it healing.”
When we get back to the hotel, Heimo sits at the edge of his bed. “Did I tell you I was at Richard and Shannon Hayden’s today.” The Haydens once lived year-round on the Sheenjek River, seventy miles southwest of the Korths by air. They raised all five of their kids in the bush, but now they live in Fairbanks for much of the year. “Shannon went to fish something out of the back room and then she comes and gives me this picture. It turned out to be a picture of Edna and Coleen.” Heimo is silent for a moment. “Edna was holding Coleen in her arms, smiling from ear to ear. Coleen was a little girl, and Edna looked so young and happy. That was almost twenty years ago, but I remember it so clear. Just like that, I started crying. I had to turn my head. When I turned back I saw that Shannon had tears in her eyes, too. When Shannon saw that I was crying, she apologized for upsetting me. ‘Apologize,’ I said to her, wiping my eyes. ‘I love it. Edna’s going to love it, too.’ ”
It is Heimo’s last night in Fairbanks. Tomorrow he will drive to Central, spend the night, and fly home with his friend Gene Hume. He’s eager to get back out to the cabin. He has lots of fur to work on. Skinning, fleshing, stretching, drying, he rarely gets a break in winter. He starts as soon as supper ends, and he doesn’t stop until Edna turns on Trapline Chatter. Heimo’s plan for the rest of the year is to move the whole family to the lower cabin on April 1 and finish out the trapping season there, where the beaver and muskrats are plentiful. Then, in late May, he will go to Fort Yukon, to watch over the cabin, and Edna and the girls will go to Fairbanks or Central, find a place to rent. But before any of that happens, he has to bring Rhonda and Krin into Fairbanks so that they can take their state benchmark exams. The trip is scheduled for early March, and the girls are excited about coming to town. They’ll sleep in and take hot showers every morning, and after their tests, they’ll spend a day or two mall-walking. Heimo is less than excited—too many flights and too much of town. He worries about their money holding out, too. Edna isn’t looking forward to it either. She’ll be alone for almost a week. As much as she loves the cabin, she hates being alone. When the girls and Heimo are home, the cabin is full of activity. Heimo jokes, teases, instructs, irritates, and pontificates. The girls laugh, fight, dance, sing, and rap. Though Edna can’t stand the rapping, it’s better than silence. It’s the silence that scares her, particularly at the upper cabin. It is said that a mother never recovers from the death of a child. Though Coleen has been gone now for almost twenty years, June 3 still haunts Edna. It is a memory she is able to hold at a safe distance when daily life is swirling around her. But when she’s alone, she has too much time to think, and the images of that day replay themselves involuntarily. Especially at night.
“Bull-riding,” Heimo says, sitting at the edge of his bed, remote control in hand. “I love bull-riding. Those guys are nuts.” He watches three riders get tossed from their bulls, then he pulls off the lid from a pint of chocolate sorbet. We watch two more riders, and then he flips through the channels. Suddenly he turns off the television. “I miss Edna,” he blurts. “Did I tell you we’re trapping together again?”
In early January, Edna and Heimo were upriver setting traps for beaver. Edna set one side of the beaver house and Heimo set the other. When he finished, he waited for her at the snowmachine. Edna came back and she was smiling from ear to ear. “I love this,” she said. “I love today, just you and me out on the trapline.” She gave Heimo a hug. “Town’s gonna be hard. I’m gonna be lonely without you, and I’m gonna miss it out here, too. You gotta promise me we’ll come out here in July, though, for a month before the girls start school to shoot caribou and make drymeat. The girls and me will pick berries, and we’ll make lots of jam. And we gotta remember to bring back a few gallons of Coleen River water when we go back to town. I hate town water.”
Heimo finishes his pint of Häagen-Dazs and licks the back of the spoon. “You know, when Edna and me go back out in three years, we’re going to live out of a tent and really cover country,” Heimo says, sounding as if he is still an eighteen-year-old dreamer. “Whoever you talk to, just make sure you let ’em know that we’re going back out. You gotta promise me that. It’s what me and Edna love. We’re going to die out there.”
Though I believe Heimo when he says that he and Edna have every intention of going back, I can’t shake the feeling that this is it, that it’s over. The irony of the situation is that of all the things that might have forced him out of the bush, of all the things he’s feared, it is love that has brought an end—if only temporarily—to his twenty-eight years in the Alaskan wilderness. But the truth is that in coming out of the bush, Heimo will be more representative of the modern Alaskan experience. People no longer come into the country—that era is gone—and the few who are there rarely stay. They leave with their memories, never to return. For most of them, the memories are enough. Heimo and Edna, however, may be the exception. Their good friends say not to doubt their resolve.
“Supper,” Edna calls out.
Outside Heimo shuffles his feet, cleaning the snow from his boots, and ducks in through the door.
“Moose pockets!” he exclaims.
Edna wraps her arms around herself and shivers. “No dinner for you unless you put the blanket over the door. Hurry up; it’s cold out there.”
“Thirty-three below,” Heimo answers. “I just did the weather.” He sticks a log in the stove and shuts the door. The damper squeaks in the stovepipe when he adjusts it.
Krin puts down her pencil, folds and tucks a sketch into her diary. Then she grabs a mirror and fluffs up her hair. Rhonda has been listening and rhyming softly to a Nas CD. She clicks off the player. Heimo mixes a glass of powdered milk for himself, and Edna dishes out four plates of moose pockets and smothers them in gravy.
Twenty minutes later, dinner is finished. “Don’t forget to do the dishes,” Heimo says to the girls, putting on his parka. “Mom and me are gonna take a walk.”
Before they are even out the door, Rhonda puts a cassette into the boom box and turns up the volume. Krin is already dancing.
“Ugh,” Edna grumbles. “Rap.”
Heimo and Edna wind their way through the woods. Above them the cold black sky is glossy with stars. The frozen snow pops under their boots. At the riverbank, they sit on their bench, holding hands, looking down on the Coleen.
“You and me belong out here, don’t we, Mom?” Heimo says.
“Yup.”