Free My Name Is Not Easy by Debby Dahl Edwardson

ngers, letter by letter. Same as ever.
    Me and Bunna are sitting by the door, waiting for Uncle Joe, and I am looking out across the room, remembering how it used to be when we were little—not so long ago, when I think about it. But it feels like forever.
    We used to play cowboys and Indians here. Isaac was always the captive Indian—exploding out from underneath the bed, clawing his way across the plywood fl oor like a blind lemming and getting caught every time. I remember him bumping right into Aapa, once, making Aapa’s fi ngers slip from the typewriter keys. Making him type wrong.
    Th
    e words that came out of Aapa’s mouth that time were not good ones, not in any language. He reared up like a bear, raising his big old arm, ready to swat us. But before he could fi nish his swing, Aaka had her broom out, and Aapa stopped in midair, dropping his arm and bending his back with a little smile, like he was just waiting for Aaka to hit him. And she did, too—Aaka, hardly any bigger than us boys—she hit that broom so hard against Appa’s back, it cracked the handle right in half.
    It makes me smile, too, when I remember Aaka, waving her splintered broom in the air, spitting mad, scolding Aapa like an angry squirrel.
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    T H E S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e Aapa pulled his parka from the hook that time and
    shuffl
    ed out the door without looking back, his voice soft as rain. “You boys ever gonna learn?” He came back later, holding out a brand-new broom for Aaka like a stiff bouquet, smiling.
    I sit here, nodding at the memory: Yes, we learned. We learned how not to talk in Iñupiaq and how to eat strange food and watch, helpless, while they took our brother away.
    Th
    ere’s a clatter of sound as an empty coff ee cup rolls across the fl oor. Mom sighs and mutters, “Clumsy.” Th
    en she scur-
    ries across the room to retrieve it.
    Mom isn’t talking to any of us, really, but when her eyes meet mine, there are tears there, tears that make her eyes look like they’ve turned to water.
    “Why can’t we just go fi nd him?” I whisper.
    Mom looks at me, her eyes full of hurt and something else, something that makes me feel protective, suddenly, like I’m the parent and she’s just a little kid.
    SONNY
    —
    Old Anna is gone now—that’s the only thing I know, reading Ma’s letter, all alone at Sacred Heart School after most of the others have left for home.
    Nobody here knew a thing about Anna, who died in her sleep, all alone.
    Old Anna and her canned peas. Th
    at’s what she and I used
    to eat back home when I used to chop wood for her. Canned 67
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    M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
    sweet peas. We ate them together, after the wood was piled, the two of us sitting at her table, a can of sweet peas between us. I sure miss the sound of that spruce wood crackling in the barrel stove on a day when it’s so cold outside, the river ice cracks like gunshots. Us two enjoying the smooth taste of those peas and the smell of smoke, fi relight fl ickering on the walls.
    Best candy there ever was, those peas. Anna kept them hidden in a case beneath her bed, and I was the only one she ever shared them with. And she’d always talk with me while we ate them, too, the rasp of her voice mixing with the crackle of the fi re, like they were both part of the same thing.
    “Your mom still sell slippers to white people?” Th
    at’s what
    she asked last time I saw her.
    I nodded. Yeah, Mom was still selling her slippers.
    Anna nodded, too, but I could tell she wasn’t thinking about white people or even slippers so much as she was agree-ing with the way Ma did things. Maybe she was even a little bit surprised at how Ma went to Fairbanks and came back practically the next day with sugar and fl our and new clothes for all us kids, never even stopping