Free This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud Page B

When, later, my mother made the meals at home and they did not taste the same as they had at mygrandmother’s place, she blamed the store-bought food and spices. “Things taste better that have been grown outdoors,” she said. “That’s why we moved to Alberta, to grow things outdoors. And now all we have in the yard is a Caterpillar and a taken-down house.”
    â€œDon’t lose sight,” she told me, “of the things in your life, in this way.”
    THE MEAL IS VENISON, and potatoes, and my aunt’s fruit bread, which is so hard it needs to be wet down with water to eat. It’s okay to say that the fruit bread is hard.
    â€œThat’s the way it should be,” my aunt Emira says. “It won’t last if it’s soft.”
    My father recovers himself somewhat and sits up again, and smiles, but doesn’t speak until he’s finished his beer. I think it’s his last.
    Then he says, “Tell your father what you need,” and looks at my brother and me.
    I say, “Don’t worry about us.”
    Emira says, “You’re happy, then?” She nods and nods her head, up and down. “Things are going well for you, in town?”
    â€œYes,” I say. My brother nods, too. Just once: yes.
    Aunt Emira clasps her hands at her chest and says, “Isn’t that a blessing. Sasa, isn’t that a blessing. You have two children—nothing to show for yourself, except that—and even when they come, three months late, for Christmas”—her voice rises in the way that it rises when she prays outloud in the yard—“and you’ve nothing to give them to take home to town—”
    I didn’t know that my aunt Emira got drunk, but now she is not making sense, and my father looks strange. I wish that I could stop things, and put them back. It is difficult to say now what will happen next, or if it should matter.
    â€œNeither,” my aunt continues, “do they—either of them— need a thing in the world. We should all be so lucky. Make mistakes like you, brother. Of such little consequence.”
    WHEN WE GET OUT of the train the light is beginning to fall, from the sky to the long shoulders of the track by the road. Everything looks bright and clean as if no one had touched anything. The track—stretching here one way, here another—cuts the hill in such a way that it appears to be the very limit of things.
    After that there is only the sky, a dull and nearly absent blue.
    My brother makes a small sound as though he is dreaming, but he is awake now; I believe he is happy.
    In a little while, the light, too, will disappear, I tell my brother. And when it goes, then so too the track. Then so too the train and the grass (which is now just bare of snow, though not yet, I say, completely). But I and our father (I tell my brother so that he will not worry) will remain, unsleeping.
    The sun, beginning to settle, startles itself on the grass,and jumps from dull blade to blade, and stays finally nowhere.
    WHEN WE LEAVE MY father’s house, my aunt gives each of us, my brother and me, a loaf of the heavy fruit bread to take home to my mother.
    â€œShe will have missed this stuff, too,” my aunt says. “They make everything soft in the store.”
    My father is back in the den, with the TV’s sound on now. “Say goodbye to him,” we say to Aunt Emira. Then we scrunch our eyes shut when she hugs us, and go out to the car.
    When we’re in the car, I am very precise about putting it into gear. I spin the wheel in several firm rotations. I like to drive. I feel grown-up. I imagine my aunt and my father watching. Not saying anything to each other, but watching, each from a different vantage point of the windowed house, and thinking: It’s true. Their lives have come together, in the way that they planned.
    I do not think it’s likely they’re watching, but still I imagine that they