All the Winters After by Seré Prince Halverson Page B

battery and starter. She would offer chickens, a goat, whatever they wanted. But the downshift of a distant truck would send her into the bushes for cover. In her mind, Vladimir sat behind the wheel, and that was enough to put another end to her plans. By the time she retraced her steps, his face had faded, and she saw instead her father’s kind face, heading to buy parts for his truck, and then her mother’s, her sisters’, her brothers’ faces—all so much younger than they were now. But she had no way of knowing what the years had done to their faces. The guilt pushed her back into the Winkel house, back into bed until hunger would force her out of her self-pity, out to work the garden or to set the fishing nets and traps.
    She walked down the stairs into the empty living room. Even with Leo at her heels, the emptiness had spread since Kache left. She took the dog’s face in her hands. “I should not have shut him out like that, you say?” She tugged his ear. “But wasn’t it so difficult? His asking these questions we do not know how to answer?”
    Leo harrumphed and lay down next to the woodstove.
    â€œYou want him to come back? Like Lettie?”
    Like Lettie.
    â€¢ • •
    All those years ago, Nadia had stayed in the house through the first spring without a sign of anyone. She’d lived off fish and clams and mussels and the plants she’d foraged—sea lettuce and nori from the bay, lovage, goose tongue, and yellow monkey flower greens from the land. She snared plenty of rabbits.
    One day, she hunted for morels after a week of rain, her mouth watering as she thought of sautéing them in some of the wine she’d found in the cellar, along with wild garlic and a bit of fat from the spruce hen she’d shot the day before. But she sensed, as she walked toward the house with her basket of mushrooms, that someone was there, and she slipped behind the old outhouse to hide. Her heart seemed to beat through her back, thumping the wooden siding she leaned against.
    A woman’s voice called out from the front porch. “Well, whoever you are, you’re trespassing on my property, but I’m not gonna shoot you. You might as well show your face.”
    Nadia pressed harder against the building. It must be the owner. Nadia had thought it possible they would never come back. When she’d first found the house, she saw that no one had been there for months. Strangest were the signs that no one had lived there for more than a decade. The calendars, the newspapers, the magazines—everything stopped after May 1985.
    â€œCome on now. Contrary to what you might think, I’m glad you’re here,” the voice called. “You seem to be taking good care of the place. I’m going to fix us something to eat. I hope you’ll join me in the kitchen.”
    Eventually, Nadia did get hungry and cold. She smelled something meaty and sweet and delicious, along with smoke from the woodstove. Because she could not afford to pause to consider the consequences, she traversed the yard and climbed the steps to the front door without hesitation. She knocked on the door, which felt odd, and when an old woman with a white braid answered, Nadia held out the basket of morels like the neighbors attending a holy day feast back in the village. The woman smiled, her wrinkles a map of her long life. Repositioning her braid so it lay behind her shoulder, she thanked Nadia and took the basket.
    She said, “You poor, sweet girl. I hope you like homemade beef vegetable soup and bread and chocolate chip cookies.”
    Nadia had nodded, pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes.
    â€œDon’t you worry now, you hear me? I’ll tell you what. No one’s going to badger you or make you go anywhere.”
    And Lettie had stuck to her word.
    â€¢ • •
    If only Kachemak took after his grandmother. It seemed evident that “my nonmeddling