Read Online The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow - Free Book Online Page A

wasn't going to let it go.
    That evening, Abel flew Kate to a one-man placer goldmining operation near Nizina. Seth Partridge was the miner, and Micah Int-Hout, Abel's third oldest boy, barely thirteen and no competition for Ethan, was already apprenticed to him for the summer. Seth agreed to take Kate on, too. She spent the rest of July and most of August pining for Ethan and the astonishing feelings he had coaxed from her body, and learning how to alter the course of a creek with a D-5 Caterpillar tractor. When she got back to the homestead, Ethan was already back in Fairbanks. The next summer, Abel found him a job in Anchorage.
    Two years later, upon graduation from high school and at the insistence of her grandmother, Kate went to Fairbanks and joined Ethan in the ranks of the student body. Ethan knocked on her dorm room door on the day after she arrived. “Hi,” he said, and smiled, and she toppled over the same edge she had been teetering on two summers before. She wanted him, she wanted him so much her teeth ached. It seemed that he wanted her, too, and only the fact that they both had roommates kept them out of each others' beds for as long as it did. They necked a lot, squirming together on a chair in a dark corner of the Student Union Building, taking time out up against a tree in the middle of running the Equinox Marathon, in the back row of the campus theater during a showing of Psycho. “I think it's going to fall off before I get the chance to use it again,” he groaned one evening in the Lathrop lounge, when they were interrupted by a horde trouping in to watch Dallas.
    He must have taken steps to see that it wouldn't happen, because a week later she caught him with another girl, and that was the end of that. Disloyalty was the one sin Kate Shugak would not, could not forgive.
    At Thanksgiving break, Abel, not usually so slow, woke up to the fact that the UAF campus wasn't all that large and that his son the junior and his foster-daughter the freshman were both living on it. In December Ethan transferred to the University of Washington, ostensibly because the wildlife-management curriculum was larger and with better teachers, and would round out his degree. There he met Margaret, and married her the month after he graduated.
    Kate, left alone at UAF, went into hibernation, emerging only at the invitation of an inspired English teacher, who taught her how to read recreationally. From that point on, she had never been lonely. She had seen Ethan perhaps a dozen times for brief periods since. She was always civil. He was always courteous. They might have been strangers, instead of almost lovers. Since he had moved back to the Park, family in tow, to start a fly-in bed-and-breakfast on Abel's homestead, she had seen him perhaps half a dozen times, at the Int-Hout homestead when Mandy had wanted to stop in and say “Hi,” at the post office in Niniltna, and at the Roadhouse. She was still civil. He was still courteous.
    It was obvious by the gleam in his eye that Ethan was remembering a lot of the same things she was. Johnny looked suspiciously from one adult to the other. When Kate looked at him, he sneered, and she could imagine his thoughts. “My dad not dead a year, and you're ready to jump in bed with somebody else.” She thought of July in Bering and Jim Chopin, and then she did not. “I need a favor, Ethan,” she said again.
    “You said that,” he replied.
    “Yeah,” she said, “sorry.” She nodded at Johnny. “Johnny's—” She hesitated. “Johnny's staying with me for a while, but I'm going to be in and out for most of the next month or two. I don't want him to stay at the homestead alone, so I was wondering if he could park here for the duration.”
    Ethan looked at Johnny, who met his gaze with a sullen expression. “He looks like he wants to move over here, all right.”
    Kate kicked Johnny beneath the table.
    Johnny kicked her back, hard enough to make her jump and swear.
    Ethan