been sneaking out every night, hooking up with someone. In hindsight, the sneaking out was a lot better than bringing the guy home. I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw him. Nathan Hodges was short and squat, with stubby legs and Neanderthal arms, and fat sausage fingers. He gripped his beer can so tight, one hand could cover all but the last r in Budweiser. So, looks aren’t everything, but instead of words he grunted out commands that Mom jumped up to follow, and then he slapped her on the ass as she walked by. And it didn’t help that Nathan Hodges had some kind of grudge against Jack, which Mom seemed powerless to do anything about. How does someone go from being a decent mother and having a husband who treats her like a queen to bringing home the first mangy stray dog she finds on the street?
“You’re too young, Hank,” she said to me, the one time I asked her what the hell she was doing. “You wait until your whole world falls out from under you.”
“My world is falling out from under me,” I said.
“Your dad was a great guy, but he was never home. You boys have him on a pedestal because that’s what kids do around here. They all have these romantic notions of the mysterious dad out fishing, while the women stay home and do all the work. It’s easy to make a martyr out of the guy who goes and gets himself killed. I’m just another fishing widow, left with a bunch of mouths to feed.”
She was looking deep into her cup of Hills Bros. coffee. As if that cup of coffee was the only thing in the world that understood her now. At that moment, I kind of hated her for being the one who lived. I’m ashamed to admit it, but there you go.
“At least I got a guy who comes home every night,” she said, like she was a deflated balloon that had been flying around the room with a slow leak and was relieved to just finally land.
“Right,” I said, “because that seems to be working out real well for all of us.”
—
I pretty much avoided her after that, which wasn’t as hard as you might think. It hurt to hear her say my dad wasn’t what I’d thought he’d been. It nagged at me for days, like a splinter under the skin. So it was no surprise when I ended up in the garage going through my dad’s old boxes, trying to get a better picture of the man I couldn’t stop missing.
The boxes smelled like my dad’s aftershave, Old Spice. I thought maybe a bottle of it had gotten shoved in somewhere, underneath his old news clippings or the fishing magazines with huge glossy covers of rugged, bearded men holding up halibut as big as them. Dad was a news junkie and he saved everything. But no aftershave bottle.
There was stuff about the territorial governor and the statehood commission. I forgot that when we were born Alaska was still a territory. There was the headline from 1959—“We’re In”—and I could almost hear my dad’s voice saying sadly, “That’s sure going to change things.”
I wished I could ask him what he’d meant and if it was different now. But everything really was different now. I couldn’t blame statehood, but if there was a way, I’d consider it.
Jack had come in just then and said, “What’s that smell?”
“It’s Old Spice,” I said. Jack had been too young to remember what our father smelled like.
“It’s creepy,” Jack said. “Feels like someone’s in here.”
“Stop it, Jack.”
My brother has this really weird streak—like a sixth sense. Sometimes Sam and I will joke about it, but I didn’t find it funny just then with my dad’s stuff all around us and his very distinct smell lingering like a ghost. Jack raised an eyebrow at me and shrugged.
He knows more than any fourteen-year-old kid should know about people. It has the unfortunate effect of making me want to leap up and protect him all the time, because I don’t think the world knows what to do with people like Jack.
“I’ve been reading through the newspaper and cutting out stories,” he said. “You know, the way Dad used to.”
Jack picks up on things easily. He knew that Sam and I missed this seemingly insignificant detail about our dad—the way he saved news clippings—and so he’d try to do something about it. “Look at