All the Winters After Read Online Free PDF Page A

the moon would show up full or a sliver, waxing or waning. Yes, he knew the DIY Network lineup by heart, but he’d lost track of the night sky long ago. He reached under the seat for the flashlight he figured Snag would have stowed there and set it next to him. Plenty of gas—he’d filled it that afternoon—so he’d make it out and back with some to spare.
    Keeping an eye out for moose, he drove the first part of the road, the paved part, fast. Here the houses stood close enough to see one another, all facing south to take advantage of the view—the jagged horizon of mountains marooned across twenty-four miles of Kachemak Bay.
    Kachemak. A difficult name to have in this town, the kids teasing him in his first years at school by adding Bay when the teacher let his full name slip out during roll call instead of the shortened version he’d insisted on—pronounced simply catch . Then in high school, the girls blushing and calling him What a Kache , asking him if he would write a song for them. Or the boys throwing balls of any type his way and saying Here, Kache! followed by You can’t, Kache! , which was absolutely correct.
    At first, his mom told him they named him for the bay because it was the most beautiful bay she’d ever seen and he was the most beautiful baby she’d ever laid eyes on. Whenever Denny protested, she’d laugh and say, “Den, I won’t lie to you. You had the sweetest little squished-up turnip face. Fortunately, you grew into your dashingly handsome self.”
    Later, when Kache was sixteen and his father decided he was old enough to be let in on a secret, he told Kache that was all true, but there was more. Kache was conceived, his father said, grinning, in the fishing boat on the bay. The sun had been warm and the fishing slow—both rarities for Alaska. “Proved to be a fruitful combination, heh?” He had slapped Kache on the back so hard it had about knocked him over. “Denny, of course, was conceived on a camping trip to Denali.” Kache had told his dad that he didn’t need quite that much information, thank you very much.
    He hit a pothole, and mud splattered on the hood and windshield. Kache knew the house was probably too far out of the way and too well hidden for anyone to stumble upon. Old Believers wouldn’t want anything to do with a house outside their village, and the deepest cut of canyon on the whole peninsula added an uncrossable deterrent. Nobody with a brain would descend that canyon. The one other access besides their five-mile private road was by the beach, and only during the lowest tides.
    Most likely, the house stood its ground against the snow and rain and wind until the chinking filled like sponges, the roof turned to cheesecloth, the furniture rotted with moss, all his mother’s books… All those books. His mom’s paintings and her quilts and the photographs. The photographs that he’d never wanted, now he wanted them—even the blurry black-and-white ones he’d taken when he was five, when he’d snapped a whole roll of film with Denny’s new camera and Denny had threatened to strangle him.
    Damn it, Aunt Snag.
    Where you been? Where you been?
    Damn it yourself, Winkel. He hit the steering wheel, pulled on the lights, and leaned forward as if that would make him get there faster.
    The road turned to dirt—mud this time of year. A plastic bottle of Advil lodged between the seats rattled on and on. This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time, the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it.
    No turning around now; the pull grew stronger, magnetic.
    He wasn’t the first one to leave and get pulled back. In the midsixties, even his dad couldn’t wait to get away, had gone off to Vietnam in a huff of rebellion mixed with a desperation to see someone other than the all-too-familiar