The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,50
Sam says adamantly, “Hank never would have turned himself in. Never.”
The word Fairbanks echoes inside my head, like it’s bouncing off the wheelhouse walls. They’ve been sent to my hometown?
Sam opens the wheelhouse door. “You didn’t tell them about me,” he says to my dad.
“It’s not my secret to tell,” Dad says, not at all surprised to see us. “I’d check with you first.”
My dad is staring out the window. My mom left him because she said he wasn’t capable of caring about people, just boats and engines and killing things. But she is wrong. I imagine rebuilding an engine is a hell of a lot easier than making decisions that affect other people’s lives. And then it hits me: Dad’s doing this for Sam because he knows I care about Sam. He’s doing it for me.
“Do you want to go north and find your brothers?” he finally asks.
Sam just nods.
“We’ll go to town tomorrow, then,” Dad says. “You’ve worked hard enough to earn a plane ticket.”
There’s another interminably long pause as I think about Sam leaving. When Dad starts talking again, I can barely follow what he’s saying.
“Alyce needs to get back to Fairbanks anyway, if she’s going to make that audition. You two can fly north together.”
“Dad?” But he’s still looking out the window, not at me. I walk over and lean my head against his shoulder. His green raincoat is wet and smooth and stinky, like an orca’s nose. He smells of salt and wind and more love for me than I probably deserve. He pats my hair and, as if he’s talking to the ocean, says, “You should have just asked.”
“But how will you fish without me?” I whisper.
Uncle Gorky coughs loudly from the day bench. “I’m not totally useless,” he says.
It’s all too much for my dad, especially since I’m squeezing him so tight around the neck now that he can barely breathe.
I remember my dad saying that sometimes you can be inserted into another person’s life just by witnessing something you were never really supposed to be a part of. I think about the chicken lady and how she may be the only person who saw what happened to Sam. It linked her to us in a weird way, even though she couldn’t tell us anything.
Maybe that’s happened with the pregnant girl that ran out of the mercantile, too—she was looking at me and then she just fell apart. Did I get inserted somehow into her story?
Isabelle is looking at the dent in the door of her beloved Datsun. “Being pregnant can make people very emotional,” she says. “Not that I would know firsthand; that’s just what they say.”
She bends over and scratches some green paint off the yellow door with her key. “I don’t think we can drive it like this.” She tries to shut it, but it hangs crooked, refusing to latch. “Well, at least we’re still in Canada. It’s cheaper to fix it here. You don’t mind, do you? One more day?”
I barely hear what Isabelle is saying. I’m too distracted thinking about that girl. I’ve never seen someone my age pregnant before. She looked young, anyway, running out the door with her blond ponytail bobbing behind her. On the ground right where the truck was is the red ribbon I noticed in her hair as she left.
I pick it up and stash it in my pocket. Isabelle keeps talking. “Maybe they have their babies young in this part of the world.” She doesn’t sound like a social worker. Aren’t they supposed to care about things like teen mothers?
Jack raises an eyebrow, but grins just the same. Isabelle has grown on him, I can tell. He slips something square and heavy into my hand and then hops into the backseat of the car. PERPETUAL SORROW SOAP, the label says. It smells flowery.
“I’m going to look up a number for a mechanic,” says Isabelle, heading over to the pay phone that’s hanging askew on the outside wall of the mercantile. It doesn’t look long for this world; she’d better hurry. I lean into the open window and whisper to Jack, “Are you saying I should wash with this for an uplifting experience?”
“That’s what she and the nun were delivering in the store. They had boxes of those soaps. Read the back.”
Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow is an order of Roman Catholic nuns whose main purpose is to live a simple life of worship and devotion to God through prayer, chastity, and solitude.