The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow Page B

and on the olfactory evidence Kate was willing to bet that he hadn't bathed in longer. “Where's Margaret?” she said. She looked around, noticing for the first time how quiet it was in the Int-Hout homestead. Since Ethan had moved back the year before with his family, a jolly, zaftig, redheaded wife and a set of rambunctious and equally redheaded ten-year-old twins, one boy, one girl, she would bet it was never quiet.
    “Margaret's not here,” he said, squinting down the barrel of the BB gun, seeming to debate whether or not to take another shot. He did. “Damn,” he said, “missed him,” and lowered the gun again.
    “Where are the kids?”
    “She took 'em.” He leaned the gun up against the greenhouse wall and stood up, towering a foot and a half over Kate. Johnny's eyes widened. “Come on, I'll make some coffee.”
    The kitchen was a mess, the sink filled with dirty dishes, the top of the cooking stove encrusted with blackened grease. Ethan didn't apologize, and he didn't try to stop Kate when she started in on the dishes while they waited for the kettle to boil.
    The coffee was instant. Kate hid a wince and loaded in the creamer. Johnny's cocoa was instant, too, but the marshmallows, though stale, melted in a satisfactory manner. After Ethan cleared the chairs around the kitchen table of unopened mail, dog-eared catalogues, a Shooter's Bible , and a stack of Aviation Week magazines, they sat down, still in silence.
    Usually, Kate was comfortable with silence. It was why she lived alone on a homestead in the middle of a twenty-million-acre federal park, twenty-five miles away from the nearest village over a road that was impassable to anything but snow machines in the winter and to anything but the sturdiest trucks in the summer.
    Ethan's silence was palpable. He was angry, but he wasn't sulking over it. She decided there was nothing for it but to wade in. “I need a favor, Ethan,” she said. She wasn't happy asking and, although she tried hard not to let it show, Ethan, when he bothered to look up, could see it in her face. For the first time that day he smiled.
    He'd always been able to read her, from the day they shared what was her first kiss at the top of Widow's Peak after an hour's hike one hot day the summer she was sixteen. He was back from his freshman year of college and they were both working for his father, tending the dogs and the farm while Abel was out setnetting with Old Sam Dementieff and Mary Balashoff on Alaganik Bay. They'd spent the morning clearing alders off the airstrip and the afternoon hilling potatoes, and when Ethan suggested a picnic as a reward, Kate had been all for it.
    Ethan was the second of Abel's four sons and the closest to her in age. A three-year difference at five and eight or ten and thirteen might as well be thirty, but at sixteen and nineteen the distance had suddenly narrowed. Ethan came home and for the first time Kate noticed how attractive his smile was, how smart and funny his conversation, how capably he shouldered the business of the homestead. Ethan came home and for the first time noticed that Kate had breasts and a figure to go with them, and a smile that, when she bothered to use it, melted him right down to the marrow in his bones. His marrow had been melted before, of course; he was self-aware enough to realize that his looks and his talent at center on the basketball team would get him most of the girls he wanted without too much effort. The girls at UAF did nothing to disabuse him of this notion, especially the girls in the Wickersham Dorm, for whom the jocks of Lathrop Dorm (basement, basketball; first floor, hockey; second floor, swim team) were a specialty.
    So when Ethan looked at Kate when he returned home from school that June, it was with the eye of a newborn connoisseur. She was aware of him. He could tell that from the sidelong glances, the occasional soft blush, the not-so-accidental bumpingsof arms and hips, but he made no move until his