Cold Heart by Chandler McGrew

enough to fly into Anchorage by herself. She didn't need to be chaperoned on a yearly shopping trip. She could stay with her pen pal, Judith.
    That was all Terry needed to hear. She blew up. Just as Dawn was afraid that she would.
    But for Terry a blowup wasn't like a temper tantrum for the normal parent. Terry didn't scream or throw things. She didn't stomp around their cabin and slap her hands against her sides or sit and slowly heat up like a tea kettle.
    Terry
cleaned.
    She swept the floor until bristles snapped off the broom.
    Then she mopped.
    She slopped scalding water onto the bare floorboards and swung the mop like it was a hockey stick until soap suds clung to the walls.
    She pulled every plate and pot out of the cupboards and dusted them
and
the cabinets.
    She polished the inside of their two windows until Dawn was sure she'd wipe the glass right out of the frames. Then she went outside and scrubbed the other side of the windows.
    And then she started washing clothes.
    She hauled bucket after bucket up from the North Fork, heating them over the glowing woodstove that made it too uncomfortable to stay inside the cabin. She kept two buckets heating on the stove as she beat piece after piece of clothing and linens to death against the washboard.
    But Dawn knew that Terry was cooling off now. Pretty soon the spring inside her that was all wound up would wind down, and then she'd be able to talk almost like a normal human being again.
    Terry wiped her forehead with the damp sleeve of her calico shirt. Her shoulders sagged. When she dropped back onto her haunches and rested her hands on the tub, Dawn approached her quietly.
    “I'm sorry, Mom,” she said.
    Terry turned slowly and looked up into her daughter's dark eyes. Dawn stood motionless under her mother's inspection. There was love on Terry's face.
    Love.
    Anguish.
    Fear.
    And something else.
    Something too terrifying for Dawn to want to try to understand.
    Terry stood and wiped her hands on her jeans. They were chapped, worn hands. But the fingers were long and delicate. She was still a beautiful woman and Dawn had inherited her good looks from both sides of the family. A winning smile and lanky build from her father. High cheekbones and dark hair from her mother.
    “You don't know what it's like out there, honey,” said Terry. “They killed your father.”
    Dawn didn't want to fight the same old battle. There was no argument that would convince her mother that there was no
they.
That her father had been killed by a crazy act of violence. He'd been an innocent bystander, shot in a holdup. It could have happened to anyone.
    “When I'm eighteen I'm going to leave,” said Dawn.
    “I can't stop you.”
    “But you won't come,” said Dawn. She didn't want to leave her mother. She just wanted to get the hell out of McRay.
    “No,” said Terry, looking around the small clearing, at the high peaks, at the azure sky that had no match anywhere else in the world. “No. This is where I live.”
    “You can't hide from the world, Mom,” said Dawn.
    “Yes, you can.” Terry bent to heave the soapy water outonto the ground. Dawn watched it form a rivulet then seep into the soggy soil, like blood into a bandage.
    “People die out here, too,” said Dawn. But she had no proof of that. No one had died in McRay in her lifetime.
    A jay leaped from its perch in a dead spruce and screamed away, angry. Terry and Dawn watched it go. Boots crunched on the trail that led along the creek and Dawn knew immediately who it was. El Hoskins.
    She turned away, acting as though she hadn't heard, and slipped behind the cabin. She didn't like El and didn't want to have to be polite to him. Terry had told her on numerous occasions that she needed to act friendlier. El was their neighbor and he had always treated both of them with respect. But there was just something about El that always gave Dawn the creeps. The way he insisted on being called
Eldred
for one thing even though everyone in