My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850)
Read My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) Online
Authors: Sharon Short
A PLUME BOOK
SHARON SHORT
is the recipient of a 2011 Montgomery County (Ohio) Arts & Cultural District Literary Artist Fellowship and a 2012 Ohio Arts Council individual artist’s grant. She is “Literary Life” columnist for the
Dayton Daily News
and directs the renowned Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Short lives in Ohio with her husband and is the mother of two daughters in college. Visit her at www.sharonshort.com.
My One Square
Inch of Alaska
A NOVEL
Sharon Short
A PLUME BOOK
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, February 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Sharon Short, 2013
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Short, Sharon Gwyn.
My one square inch of Alaska : a novel / Sharon Short.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-60285-0
1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Families—Ohio—Fiction.
3. Sick children—Fiction. 4. Alaska—History—1867-1959—Fiction.
5. Road fiction. 6. Bildungsromans. I. Title.
PS3569.H594M9 2013
813’.54—dc23
2012032249
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Janson Text LT Std
Designed by Leonard Telesca
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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| ALWAYS LEARNING | PEARSON |
To David, the love of my life
My One Square
Inch of Alaska
Chapter 1
L
ater, MayJune would say that the biggest turns in life come when you’re paying the least attention, making small choices you don’t yet know will change everything.
MayJune was always saying things like that—corny and peculiar and true, all at once.
But, of course, I hadn’t met her when I found Mama’s clothes stuffed in suitcases with mothballs and made my first small choice: Instead of snapping the suitcases shut and forgetting my discovery like I knew I should, I counted the pieces.
Thirty-eight.
Dresses, skirts, blouses, pants, but mostly dresses—fine dresses, afternoon-tea dresses, party dresses, even costumey dresses with feathers and sequins. But not life-in-Groverton dresses.
Mama’s wedding dress, a white satin and lace and mother-of-pearl-button confection, filled one suitcase all by itself.
There were also hats and shoes and a few purses, but I didn’t count them.
It was October 1946 when I found Mama’s clothes. I was
ten years old. Making my first trip to the forbidden basement, I cradled armloads of home-canned green beans and corn and tomatoes, fall harvest gifts from neighbor women who, even with the war over, still had victory gardens and made it their business to worry about us.
Fearful of slipping and dropping the jars, I stared past my arms at each step mottled with dull blue paint, remembering Mama’s warning that it was too dark and dirty down there for Will and me. Fear crept in when the wobbly bottom step threw me off balance. In that moment between almost falling and not falling, I saw the suitcases lined up against the wall, in the shadowy corner behind the Singer sewing machine.
I didn’t fall.
My hands trembled as I opened the big trunk first. The Mama we knew dressed in dowdy housedresses or bathrobes, occasionally some denim pants and a loose blouse, or a simple dress.
Nothing with even the tiniest downy feather or hint of sparkle.
But these clothes had to be Mama’s. Underlying the mothball smell was a hint of rose and jasmine—Mama’s scent. I scooped an armful of clothing up to my face and breathed, as if by inhaling deeply enough I’d bring Mama back.
I wondered where Mama might have gotten these clothes. Definitely not from Miss Bettina—even though she had been Mama’s best friend—who owned her own dress shop in downtown Groverton and lived next door to us on Elmwood Street. The dresses Miss Bettina wore and sold were dark hued, proper. These, other than the white wedding
dress, were all bright colors—azure, scarlet, tangerine, emerald—and featured plunging necklines, side slits, even backless designs.
I put Mama’s clothes back in the suitcases. Then I went to find Babs Wickham,
my
best friend, and told her she had to come over. I showed her the clothes—all except the wedding dress—a treasure trove for dress-up.
But Babs proclaimed dress-up as babyish, and whispered that she had taken something
really
special from her own mama—a Max Factor Red-Red lipstick. Giggling at each other in my dresser mirror, we assured one another that our red lips made us, finally, grown-up.
And a grown-up would know, instinctively, that asking Daddy about those clothes would take us into territory far too dangerous. So I never mentioned Mama’s mysterious clothes, never looked at them again. But I thought about them, for seven years, until I secretly began remaking those clothes, one by one, into outfits of my own creation.
Such a small choice, I thought.
In September 1953, it was the fourth day of my senior year of high school and Will’s fifth grade. That morning I became so absorbed in sketching a design for a dress—sleeveless, slim lines, just right for one of Mama’s old yellow prints—that I didn’t notice the toast burning and the stove clock ticking, until my little brother, Will, tried to talk with his mouth full of Marvel Puffs and instead spit a gob of cereal in my ear.
I started to snap at Will about table manners. But he stared at me with his wide blue eyes and his cheeks so ridiculously
bulged with cereal that I had to laugh. Softly, of course. Daddy’s bedroom was just on the other side of the kitchen wall.
Will finally swallowed and said, “Your toast is burning.”
I jumped up from our kitchen table and ran to the toaster, forcing up its stuck lever. The whiff of burned toast soured my stomach. I hated that bitter smell, and the sound of removing the char, but I pulled open the utensil drawer—the one that took two tugs to get past its sticking spot—got out a knife, and started scraping away.