Authors: Marata Eros
I can hear a running clank and don’t turn, my fist rising above my head.
“Chance!” Brooke screams and I turn to look at her, black braids streaming behind her, lavender eyes wide.
Then a fist smashes into my temple and the world spins.
I stumble and as I got down, I kick my leg out and take out the knee of the one who hit me. With a howling wail he goes down beside me.
I’ve never hit a client in my life.
Lucas moves in to take me on, my vision in trembling triplicate while his pal bellows and holds his knee.
“I’m here . . .” I hear Brooke say as the fish cart acts like a barrier of sorts and she moves behind me. Too close to not get hurt. “Step back,” I slur and meet Lucas with my fists as Brooke shouts, “Help!”
I watch Tuck come out of nowhere and take the wrestler by the scruff of the neck and toss him about five feet.
Hell, he’s Johnny-on-the-spot
, I think.
“Little trouble, Taylor?” he asks, turning to meet the bull as he charges.
“Just a spot!” I say with a cackle, spitting out some blood. That bash to the head wasn’t dead center, but my teeth feel like they’re floating.
“Chance!” Brooke says at my elbow.
“I’m sorry . . .” she whispers.
I pull her against me as Sam staggers to his feet. “I’ll sue your ass . . . You fucking dislocated my knee!”
“Uh-huh,” I nod, tucking Brooke against me. “Just as soon as you explain that cheap sucker punch you threw.”
We look at each other for a drowning moment of slow-moving hell and he sighs, planting his hands on his hips. Stalemate.
We glance at Tuck and Lucas. Lucas is maybe five feet eight inches and 170; Tucker towers over him, but it’s not enough.
He’s trying to take Tucker to the ground. He’ll lose, they’re just that good.
“Tuck!” I yell and he steps back, avoiding a flying fist.
“Yup!”
“Call it off,” I tell Sam in a low voice.
“Lucas!” Sam says, looking at me, his words for Lucas.
Lucas and Tucker look at Sam, glance warily at each other, and back away.
I watch their chests heave with exertion as I thank Tucker.
“Don’t mention it,” Tucker says, keeping his distance, his short beard catching the sweat from the fight.
“Take your fish and get the fuck out of here,” I say to Sam, my eyes sliding to Lucas to include him.
I’ve never cursed at a client before.
Lots of firsts today
, I note.
“Chance,” Brooke whispers.
“Shush,” I say. “You didn’t hear what they said about you.”
Sam turns accusing eyes on Brooke. “Should’ve told us you were doing Taylor. We wouldn’t have asked you out . . .” He says it like it’s obvious.
It’s not. Brooke pulls away, turning her own accusation on me, misunderstanding the universe. A female talent, that.
“You told them
that
? Your clients?” Her expression of shock and betrayal make my stomach drop.
“Fuck no!” I yell, coming toward her, and she shakes her head, clearly miserable.
She looks at Sam and Lucas, then at Tucker. Regret and outrage laced with hurt cross her face like a rainbow of emotion and I want to die. They’ve made a leap of logic and now Brooke
assumes the worst. I can’t say anything to correct it without burying myself further.
I just unintentionally screwed myself six ways to Sunday.
“God!” Brooke says, turning wounded eyes to mine. “I trusted you.” Her voice sounds so raw with regret I flinch from the sound of it. “And it never mattered to you, did it?” Turning on her heel, she strides off, leaving me with two enraged clients, a dead fish, and a friendly acquaintance with handy-ass timing.
I watch her stalk off and exhale loudly.
“Nice, Taylor,” Tuck comments.
Shit yes
. “Yeah,” I agree in misery.
“You could’ve just told us you were bagging her,” Lucas says.
Dick. Head. I turn to glare at him. I can totally go again. This I know.
Tucker glares at him and he throws up his hands, palms out. “Hey big guy, I don’t want to go again.”
“Fuck. Off,” I say. And I’m not one bit charitable. I mean it from the bottom of my boots.
“Right, yeah. Thanks for that great trip, Taylor,” Sam says, putting his hands on the cold bars of the fish cart. “Let’s roll, Lucas. Leave these fucktards in hicksville.”
I snort. They wouldn’t survive a minute here. They’ve got the wrong attitude. Clearly it’s all take, no survival, no teamwork where they’re from. It’s like they’ve taken a pass on learning how to work with others. Goal oriented without compassion. Hope their plane crashes on the way to Arizona.
Tucker chuckles, breaking my dark mental fantasy. Palming his beard as his cheek swells he says, “Well . . . that was fun.”
I make a sound inside my throat partway between a grunt and a snort. “Brooke hates my steaming guts, I beat up a client, and you call that fun?” I begin to walk away. “Fuck me,” I mutter.
“Hey, Taylor . . . hold up,” Tucker says, his checkered wool flannel button-up a solid blanket of material over his girth. He’s one of those guys who wants to be fat but that layer can’t negate the muscle underneath.
“Yeah?” I ask, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun off the water.
“You’re welcome, dumbass.”
I pause and a reluctant grin breaks over my face. “Thanks.”
“Did you Google Brooke?” he asks suddenly.
I shake my head. “Just spit it out, for Christ’s sake.” I put my hands on my vinyl bibs and frown at him.
He shakes his head. “Make it a priority, pal.” Tucker walks off and I look after him as I had Brooke.
I brush angry tears out of my eyes and tear open the bus’s door. Realizing my gear is fish gutty and reeking, I take the suspender straps off my shoulders and carefully roll it down my body. I give an angry kick as it reaches the end and it flies like a discarded orange carpet.
“Hey now, missy,” a voice from behind me says.
I gasp, hand to my chest as my heartbeat tries to burst out the open hole of my mouth.
“You again,” I say with a hoarse sort of shout. “You . . . scared the hell out of me.”
The old man gives a real smile, his cheeks cracking with it. “Nice that I didn’t scare it into ya,” he says, taking a puff of his pipe. His observant eyes quietly study me.
I blink.
“I didn’t take ya for a dull tool in the drawer, darlin’.”
Right
. I wake up. “No . . . you’re just like a—” I roll my eyes skyward, thinking—“like a jack-in-the-box or something.”
He slaps his knee, laughing. At my expense, I’m sure. I sigh, picking up my fishing bibs and head around to the back of the bus to stow them inside the vinyl tote in the bus’s “trunk” above the engine. I close the hatchback and peek around the bus and he leans to look back at me from the front.
“What?” I ask, disconcerted.
“Looks like you could use a friend. Or a word or two of advice.”
Holy . . . no. Just no. I don’t even know his name and I raise my brows at him like,
go away
.
But he’s not a subtle guy, the old codger.
“It’s Kashirin, Jake.” He holds out his knobby hand, the pipe clamped between flattened lips.
He waits and I come forward. Slowly, against my express will, I give the old man my hand.
It’s dry and warm and I feel my throat seize up, the day boiling up inside me, threatening to overflow. His unexpected kindness threatens to break the carefully constructed dam that is holding back a torrent of outrage and grief.
I won’t cry. I won’t break down.
But then I do. In the middle of the Homer parking lot in the company of a 105-year-old man.
“There now, honey.” He pats my head as he holds me awkwardly in his skinny old arms, somehow smoking that pipe as it juts out to the side of our embrace like a twig on a tree.
He pulls away, his eyes pale and wise.
“You got some talkin’ to do, don’tcha?”
I nod, the wetness on my face like the ocean I just came from.
He gives a chin jerk to another little shanty.
The sign reads: Jake’s Treasure and Other Trash.
He walks away from me like I’ll follow him.
And . . . I do.
Jake pushes open the door to his little shop with a hip and holds it open for me. I pass through the dim interior, a lone window letting in the light. But the view!
I walk to the middle of the shop, stacks of everything a person can imagine in every corner and piles six feet high in every direction. It smells like old books and tobacco with the faint hint of wood.
The most surprising feature on his small scarred desk is a sleek Mac laptop. What’s an old guy doing with a laptop?
I turn and watch Jake turn the little sign on the front door to Closed.
“Take your pack off, Brooke.”
My brows rise.
He nods as he studies my expression. “I know who ya are,” he says, nodding some more as he relights his pipe with a cupped hand and an expert pull and puff. The fragrant smoke fills the room and it makes my heart heavy again.
“No more waterworks,” he says in such a serious way it’s like scaring a hiccup into silence.
“Right,” I say softly, thinking I should go. What am I doing here in this musty shop with an old guy I don’t know?
“Talk first. Then go. But not before we make our acquaintance.”
I smile at his antiquated speech. He speaks so differently from anyone I’ve ever heard. It’s sorta charming.
I sit and he circles me, then runs a finger along his tiny desk, tapping a chapped and red finger on his silver laptop.
“Chance Taylor doesn’t know who he hired for his sidekick, does he?”
I stare at him, my eyes skipping to the laptop under his finger.
“Does he?” Jake repeats. “Brooke Elizabeth Starr.”
Oh my God
.
I can see it in his eyes.
That dreadful knowledge. They all have it, that look. I’m normal until they know what’s happened. I stagger to my feet like a reanimated corpse, my arm striking out and connecting painfully with a huge stack of books.
“No,” Jake says with low authority.
“What?” I croak.
“Stop running.”
“Who . . . who are you?” I ask, my breath a dry wisp of oxygen in my throat. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough.
A swollen few moments of silence beat the air between us. Then, “I was your aunt Milli’s . . . lover.”
I flop back into the chair with an unladylike drop, my ass
bones protesting against the solid oak chair. But I’m beyond caring.
Aunt Milli
.
I swallow hard and stare at Jake Kashirin.
“Ya stayin’?”
I nod slowly. I’m too shell-shocked to contemplate moving.
“It was a different time then . . . a wild time,” he says in a matter-of-fact way. His pipe smolders as his gaze burns through the glass of the window to the ocean beyond.
“Back in the forties you couldn’t just date whoever ya wanted. Caucasians stayed with their own, Natives and Russians could intermarry . . . hell, that’d been happening since the Russians took Alaska.” His eyes met mine. “But a mixed-breed Russian Native? With a Caucasian woman? Never,” he says. The last word is a bitter drop in the potion of his tale.
“She was beautiful, my Milli,” he says so softly I strain to hear. He turns those pale bright eyes to mine and I fight not to squirm under their piercing scrutiny. “I knew you were hers before I verified it here,” he says, tapping the Mac again.
My heart is thumping, I can barely hear his words over the roar of the blood in my ears, the drumbeat of my heart.
“Tell me . . . tell me what happened, Brooke.”
I’m halting at first but it pours out of me in the end. I choke on the last words, this old man the priest to my confessional. “They took my mom out in a body bag that wasn’t properly zipped and her hand . . . her hand was just there with her wedding ring.”
I close my eyes and the winking gold is an image behind my eyes I can’t erase. I can’t.
I dissolve into tears and Jake stands in front of me silently, his hand on my shoulder, letting me cry it out. It doesn’t feel anticlimactic and unnecessary like I think it will. Sharing the memories brings the greatest relief I’ve ever known. The weight of my family’s death has been crushing me . . . and now, it doesn’t. I don’t break apart with the telling. Instead, I feel like I’m finally moving toward being whole again.
Finally Jake sits in front of me and says, “You need to face this mess head-on or it’ll never leave ya.”
I search his eyes, wiping my own with the back of my hand. “Speaking from experience?” I ask quietly.
He gives me serious eyes back. “I am.” He takes another puff from his pipe.
We’re quiet for several moments and it’s a comfortable silence, not awkward.
“She gave you the gift of music, Brooke,” he says like a statement and I nod.
“You still tickling the ivories?”
I shake my head and say, “Twice.” Chance as my audience, I remember.
He smiles, his yellowed teeth large in his mouth. It’s infectious, and I grin back. “Did ya find the grand down in that daylight basement?”
I nod. “I did. It’s wonderful, but how does it stay in tune? It plays so beautifully . . .” I catch his eyes and he winks.
“You?” I ask and he nods.
“Yes, ma’am. It’s me. I’ve been tuning that old girl for years.”
It’s like Milli’s ghost caused us to meet. I open my mouth, then close it.
“Do you believe in chance, Brooke?”
I startle slightly at him using Chance’s name as a noun.
“Destiny? Fate? Coincidence?” he elaborates.
Oh
. “I don’t know . . . I guess.” It’s sort of creepy, the double meaning.
Jake nods like he knows I’m not all there with his thought process.
“Well . . . you better, because it’s one and the same.”
“What?” I ask, my eyes roaming his features, trying to pick up clues.
He raises his brows. “Do you think you’re here by luck? That coincidentally you just happen to be in Alaska?”
I guess not. I elected to come here. It’s a choice. Now that I’ve been here almost a month, I can’t imagine someone coming to Alaska by accident. They’d have to be purposeful in the decision. . . . not be led around by a random ring in their nose.