My Name Is Not Easy - By Debby Dahl Edwardson Page 0,23

gure out why a white girl would fl y all the way up here just to go to Swede’s dusty old store.

“Swede’s my dad,” I say.

He looks puzzled for a second, then smiles. “I’ll be darned.”

If I were smart-alecky, like Amiq, I’d say, “What the heck’s 69

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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

that supposed to mean?” But I’m not. And anyhow, I already know what it means. It means he doesn’t think of Swede as having a family, especially not a young one.

“You could climb up into that truck, and I’ll run you over there,” he says. He’s looking at my freckles and trying to pretend he’s not. Measuring my freckles against Swede’s, probably. “Could see Swede in you all right,” he says.

I lift my chin and look right at him. “How’s Aaka Mae?” He knows who Aaka Mae is—everybody knows Mae and everyone calls her Aaka, too, like she is the whole world’s grandma, which she pretty much is.

“Aaka Mae? Th

ey take her to Fairbanks.”

Fairbanks? It gets hard to breathe all of a sudden. I watch wordlessly while he heaves my suitcase into the back of his truck. Clouds of dust rise up behind us as the truck bumps along the dirt road, taking us to Swede’s store. All I can think is: Aaka Mae, gone.

LUKE

—

Th

e door swings open, and there’s Uncle Joe, holding his gun and grinning. Th

e sun shining behind his head looks like a halo or something.

“So they gonna let you hunt down there?” he says.

Me and Bunna are suddenly tongue-tied staring at that gun, the one that never ever misses a shot.

“Sure,” I manage fi nally. “One moose or three caribou—

that’s one semester’s worth.”

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T H E S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e I don’t think Joe knows anything about semesters or tuition and I don’t think he cares, either. But I can tell by the way he looks down at his gun that he’s calculating moose and caribou to bullets.

Th

en he looks up—looks right at me, hard. “You take care of your brother, now, okay?”

I nod, looking at the gun, calculating the best way to angle the barrel, shooting through trees.

CHICKIE

—

Standing in the store, I suddenly realize that for some totally crazy reason, I actually missed the smell of Swede’s store, with its fox furs on the wall and cans of stove oil on the fl oor and its dusty shelves full of fl our and jam and coff ee and nails. Th ere’s

two ladies in the back of the store, one young and one old, debating about which fabric to buy, and this makes me realize, suddenly, that I missed hearing the sound of Iñupiaq, too.

And I especially missed the feel of Swede, crushing me up against his fl annel shirt without a word. We don’t need a lot of words, Swede and I, because that’s how we are. We always know what each other is going to say before we say it, so a lot of times we don’t even bother talking. Swede already knew about my fi rst question, for example. I can see it in his eyes when I pull away from his hug and look at his face.

He looks down, folding his arms across his chest like he’s trying to hug himself.

“Th

ey had to put her in a home.”

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Th

e way he says home makes it sound like it’s some new word, a word that has sharp, hissing edges and doesn’t have anything at all to do with family.

“Why?”

For a moment that word just sort of hangs there in the air between us like a hook.

“She needed to be there,” Swede says.

One of the ladies shopping plops a bolt of fabric on the counter and says, “Th

ree yards.” Th

en she turns back to

the older woman and asks, in Iñupiaq, if that’s going to be enough.

I stand there watching Swede measure the material, thinking about how the English language makes me so mad sometimes. She needed to be there. How can a person use the word needed