Authors: Dana Stabenow
"Oh." The anger dissipated, and the scowl eased into a slow smile. "No."
"I appreciate your honesty," she said gravely.
"Thank you."
She strolled over and began unbuttoning his shirt. "Now, when was it you said Johnny gets home?" They were still upstairs when the kitchen door slammed. Kate shot out of bed and into the bathroom. Jack pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and went downstairs to find his son and heir juggling a loaf of bread, a package of cheese slices and a jar of mayonnaise under Mutt's interested eye. There was a can of Coke tucked between chin and chest and a package of shrink-wrapped bologna in his teeth. "Hi, Dad," he mumbled around the bologna. "Kate here yet?" Can and sandwich makings tumbled into a heap on the kitchen counter and he caught the Coke just before it hit the floor. He ripped open the package of bologna to toss Mutt a slice.
"Yeah, she's upstairs, taking a shower. Don't open that Coke!"
Of course he did, and of course it sprayed all over Jack and the kitchen, and of course mostly Jack since Johnny was holding the can.
Clearly the only thing to do was retaliate, and Kate arrived on the scene to find Jack blasting Johnny with the sink sprayer, the cold water on full bore and puddles gathering all over the floor. Mutt stalked from the carnage, the expression of disgust on her face somewhat marred by the water dripping from her muzzle. Johnny tried cowering behind the refrigerator door, and when that didn't work charged his father with a chair, legs extended at shoulder arms. The sprayer changed hands, there was a half suppressed yelp of laughter from Jack, an exuberant whoop from Johnny, and the battle raged around the stove, up the trash compactor and down the dishwasher. Kate stood in the doorway, safely out of range, until the battle was fought to a draw and a truce was declared.
Johnny mopped his face and saw her. He grinned, his softer, smoother face a youthful echo of the craggier one opposite. He had his father's blue eyes and his mother's tow-colored hair. "Hi, Kate."
"Hi, Johnny."
He hooked a thumb at his father. "You still hanging with this guy?"
She shrugged. "Looks like."
He shook his head. "I guess love really is blind." Kate laughed, and Jack cleared his throat and changed the subject before things got any more out of hand. "How's your mother?"
"Still nutty as a fruitcake, how do you think?" Johnny's reply was cheerful and not ridden with any angst that Kate could detect. By the expression in Jack's eyes, he couldn't either, and the tense set of the big shoulders relaxed. "How was basketball practice?"
"Good," Johnny said. He finished mopping up a puddle and tossed the dishtowel into the sink where it fell with a sodden splat. He got another Coke out of the refrigerator, drank half of it down in a single gulp and burped. "Excuse me. Coach says I need to work on my free throw." "Free throws win ball games," Kate said.
"That's what Coach Stewman says. How'd you know?"
"All coaches say that."
"Oh." Johnny assembled bread, mayonnaise, bologna and cheese slices and paused, giving the result a critical frown. He went back to the refrigerator and found an onion. A thick slab went into the sandwich, followed by a sliced dill pickle, half a tomato, most of a head of lettuce and the remainder of a round of caribou sausage he dug out of the meat drawer. At that point the refrigerator ran out of ingredients, and he picked up the sandwich and actually managed to squeeze one corner of it into his mouth. "Urn." It was a grunt of pure ecstasy. He opened his eyes and saw the two of them watching. "What?" he said thickly.
"Oh, nothing," Jack said.
"Nothing at all," Kate said. "Don't nil up, we're going out for dinner."
Johnny brightened. "Just a snack," he assured her.
Mama Nicco's was a restaurant in Huffman Business Park, a collection of flat-roofed buildings at the intersection of Huffman and the New Seward Highway that were much of a much ness in architecture, and if they had been connected would have been called a mall. The restaurant was a long, rectangular room filled with tables, presided over by a tall, strong-featured man with a full head of iron-gray hair and a rare, charming smile. Tall-hatted chefs cooked on an open grill behind a counter, their waitress was friendly and efficient, and after his first sip of the house Chianti Jack pronounced dinner an unqualified success.
"We haven't even ordered yet, Dad," Johnny said, hunched over the menu.
"What's cioppino?" "Garlic with seafood," Jack said.
"Oh. What's pasta alia parma?"
"Garlic with pasta."
When the waitress returned Johnny ordered both or tried to, Jack ordered veal scallop ini Kate ordered pasta al pesto, and Ekaterina ordered lasagna. The waitress brought out two more bowls of bread, setting one in front of Johnny, who had accounted for most of the first bowl, another glass of Chianti for Jack and one for Ekaterina, a Coke for Johnny, and a Perrier with a twist of lemon for Kate. Johnny looked at her from the corner of one eye and said softly, "Yubbie." Kate looked at him and said, just as softly, "Yubbie." Suspicious but unable to refrain from asking, he said, "Yubbie? What's that?"
"The real thing. A young urban brat." Jack laughed. Even Ekaterina smiled, which made Johnny, who was a little afraid of her, relax. The old woman unbent even further, enough to say, "Jack, the Raven Corporation is having a party Wednesday night at the Captain Cook. Will you come?"
"A party?" Kate said. "What party?" Ekaterina smiled down upon her, very benign, and every self-protective hair on the back of Kate's neck stood straight up in alarm. "Just a little get-together for the friends of Raven. All the Niniltna and other tribal corporation shareholders will be there. It'll be fun."
Kate opened her mouth to decline with thanks but Jack kicked her under the table. She gave him an indignant glare, which slid right off him, and he said to Ekaterina, smooth as silk in spite of the fact that he was a little afraid of her, too, "It sounds like fun, Ekaterina. What time?"
"Seven o'clock." Ekaterina smiled, this time a real one. "There will be food." He grinned. "I'll be there."
Ekaterina looked at Kate, who knew there was something else going on here, she just hadn't figured out what. The food arrived and she left the problem for another time. Ekaterina exclaimed over the lasagna, Jack went into raptures over the veal, Johnny was up to his eyebrows in fettucine and the lure of basil and pine nuts proved irresistible for Kate. Everyone was on their best behavior, there was much talk and more laughter and the evening looked as if it were going to be a social occasion of the first water.
Until the arrival of the people who had reserved the table next to them.
One of them was John King. The other two men made Ekaterina stiffen in her chair and Kate swear beneath her breath. Jack observed both reactions with a sense of impending doom and began cutting his remaining veal into very large pieces. "Dad," Johnny said, shocked, "slow down, you're being a pig." Jack said around a mouthful of veal, "Eat fast, kid, or you might not get to eat at all."
Harvey Meganack saw Ekaterina at the same time she saw him and paused in the act of pulling out a chair for the trophy blonde who was definitely not his wife. A sheepish smile spread across his broad, brown face, a look not to be confused with the fierce expressions on the two solid gold rams' heads on either side of the gold nugget watch weighing down his wrist. "Ekaterina. Hello."
Ekaterina inclined her head in a frigid, infinitesimal bow. "Harvey."
The third man looked up and said ebulliently, "Ekaterina!" He was thin and fiftyish, with sparse fair hair standing straight up from the crown of his head. He bustled around the table and grabbed Ekaterina's reluctant hand in both of his, pumping it up and down with enthusiasm.
"How the hell are you! Ha HAH!" His laugh was automatic, like a spasm or a tic, used to punctuate. He sounded like Woody Woodpecker.
Kate held her breath but Ekaterina only recovered her hand and nodded again, twice as frostily this time. "Mr.--" She hesitated for so long that he rushed to supply the rest. "Mathisen, Lew Mathisen," he said,
"ha HAH!"
A third thin smile, as frosty as the first two. "Of course. Mr.
Samithen."
It was a Force 10 Arctic gale, impossible to mistake. Johnny's eyes widened. Jack ate faster. Kate waited, fatalistic, for Mathisen to dig himself in even deeper.
He was smart enough not to correct Ekaterina. Instead, he assumed an expression of deep concern, and said, "Say, it's a damn shame about Sarah, isn't it? Harvey just told me, and I can't say how sorry I am. I know how much you're going to miss her." He smiled again, showing off six thousand dollars' worth of dental work in the upper incisors alone, and managed to restrain the laugh this time.
At that Kate thought Ekaterina would say something and she braced for it, but just then John King looked over and saw Jack. "Morgan," he growled. His eyes traveled past Jack to Kate. "Shugak." He was square-headed, thickset and blond, wearing the same mustard-yellow, silver-toed cowboy boots Kate had seen in March. He looked exactly what he was, a roughneck who had started out throwing the chain on a rig floor in Louisiana and ended up, to his own and everyone else's bewilderment, not to say consternation, at the head of the board room of Royal Petroleum Company, throwing his weight around.
"Hello, King," Kate said, leaping into Ekaterina's frozen silence with foolhardy abandon. "You get that wellhead off Tode Point yet?"
Johnny looked puzzled. Jack choked on his veal and had recourse to his Chianti. Ekaterina looked on Kate with what might actually have been approval.
King's scowl deepened. Without answering he seated his date, a brunette with a face so artificially smooth you could skate on it and eyes so opaque it was hard to tell their color. There was a wide gold band on her left hand, the only thing about her that surprised Kate. The oil man sat down next to the brunette without introducing her, folded thick arms across his chest and glowered at Lew Mathisen beneath lowered brows.
"And Kate, too, by God," Lew Mathisen said, "how'd we get so lucky, ha HAH!" He reached out and Kate gave him a bright smile across a full fork, thereby occupying both hand and mouth so she would have to neither shake his hand nor reply.
"Hello, emaa," Axenia said from behind him, her smile containing only a trifle less wattage. "Sorry we're late. Hi, Kate." "Axenia," Kate said,
"hi. I didn't know you were coming." "I called her this afternoon,"
Ekaterina said.
"Hey, babe," Lew said, and gave Axenia an exuberant kiss. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm meeting my grandmother for dinner." She put her arm around his neck and kissed him back with interest, when she was done looking a clear challenge first at her grandmother, then at her cousin. Kate thought if Ekaterina stiffened any more she might snap in half where she sat.
A short, stout man with a moon face and shiny black hair beamed over Axenia's shoulder. "It's my fault, Ekaterina. Axenia said I'd get a free meal if I tagged along, so I made her wait for me. Hi, Kate."
"Hello, Billy." Billy Mike had succeeded Ekaterina in the position of tribal chief of the Niniltna Native Association only because Ekaterina had refused to run for a fourth five year term. He was also one of the four surviving Niniltna board members. Ekaterina, then Harvey, now Billy. Kate wondered when Enakenty was going to show up.
"And Billy, too, great to see you again!" Mathisen smacked his hands together. "Well, isn't this great, ha HAH! Can we buy you nice folks a drink? Honey, bring my good friends here a bottle of whatever they're drinking. And another one for us while you're at it." As if the idea had just occurred to him, he said, "Say, why don't we push our tables together? Make a party of it, ha HAH!"
"No, thank you," Ekaterina said clearly.
Johnny, who had inherited his brains from his father, began shovelling in pasta in a manner reminiscent of a steam shovel excavating a gravel pit.
"Oh, hey, Lew," Jack said, "ah, we're already halfway through our dinners here, let's save it for another time, okay?"
"Well, hell, you can drink, can't you, ha HAH? Honey, can we slide these tables together, what do you think? Ha HAH!"
Kate leaned over to whisper in Ekaterina's ear. "Would you like to leave?"
Ekaterina, straight-backed in her chair, looking neither to the left nor to the right, conveyed a healthy portion of lasagna to her mouth without replying.
"Since they're almost done," Axenia said, "maybe Billy and I should join you instead."
"Well, if you're sure," Mathisen said, disappointed. "Honey? Honey?
Could we have a couple more chairs and place settings here? Fine! Well, great to see you, Ekaterina, we'll be seeing you all at the convention, ha HAH!" He waved a hand at Ekaterina's table and went back to his own.
Billy, smarter than Axenia, or perhaps just less in need of proving a point, declined the invitation to join Mathisen's party and pulled up a chair between Ekaterina and Kate.
The waitress arrived with two bottles of Chianti. Behind her came the couple who would be taking the table on the other side of Jack's party.
"Oh fuck," said Jack under his breath.
"Oh fuck," said Johnny, way under his.
"Hello, Jane," said Kate, and wondered why very thin people always looked so peevish. Probably hunger.
The tall towhead's skin matched the color of her hair. The lids of her blue eyes were weighed down beneath thick layers of shadow, liner and mascara, only emphasizing the malevolent expression in them. She responded to Kate's greeting by snapping at Jack, "Is she staying with you?"
Jack, more relaxed now that the attack was directed his way, gave an equable nod, his face displaying nothing more than a polite disinterest in Jane's next words. Next to Kate, Johnny was strung as tight as a wire, and she couldn't resist a brief touch of his shoulder. "Relax," she mouthed. "Everything's okay."
Jane's eyes narrowed. "Get your hands off my son!"
"Jane." Jack's voice was deep and hard. "Back off."
Kate gave Jane her sweetest and most dangerous smile.