Free The Alaskan Laundry by Brendan Jones Page A

like.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œHappy day.”
    â€œYou too.”
    She looked back down at her letter.
    Â 
PS. If you see my father tell me how he is. I’m assuming he’s figured out where I am by now, if he even cares. If I call I know he’s just going to hang up.
Oh. And if I had to pick one word now—empty. Not in a bad way.
    Â 
    After mailing the letter she returned to her studio and set to baking. Chilling the butter until it was hard to the touch. Folding pads of it into the flour. Halving, seeding, roasting the squash three pieces at a time in her undersized oven. She rolled out the dough, kneaded a shred between her fingers to test the consistency. Dripping in ice water, salt. In her head she heard the tune of a Sicilian folk song she couldn’t name. One her mother hummed when she was baking. Her father would recognize it. She remembered him sometimes humming along, even singing the Italian lyrics in a soft, wavering voice.
    She watched her hands as she built the crust, working slowly around the rim of the pie pan, pressing down with her thumbs with just the right amount of force, careful not to thin the dough, which needed more butter. She stopped, her hands gripping the pie. Tensing her stomach, trying not to move, for fear of starting to cry, and not being able to stop.

16
    FRITZ AND HIS WIFE, FRAN, lived in a cabin built on piers over the water just down from the library. The kitchen was already bustling when Tara arrived, people opening ovens, pouring cream and splashes of orange juice into sweet potatoes, crumbling seaweed and shreds of king crab into stuffing. Fran smelled of patchouli, and wore a hooded Baja shirt and fleece pants with burn holes in the fabric. After hugging Tara, she set the pie on the counter. “This looks delicious—Fritz mentioned something about you working in a bakery. Wine? Beer?”
    â€œBeer is great.”
    Tara froze when she saw the back of a woman working over the stove. It was the set of her shoulders, her head bent over a pot. Just like her mother.
    The woman set down a potato masher, reached for a carton of milk, gave a generous pour. Fran handed Tara a beer.
    â€œYou gotta hold the darn thing tight if you want this to work,” the woman said, turning. She was reedy, with a smoker’s body and straight, graying hair—nothing like her mother. Tara held tight as she wrenched off the cap. “Laney,” she said, clinking Tara’s bottle with a glass of white wine.
    â€œTara.”
    She had polished skin and wide-set eyes traced with black liner. Beneath her apron was a red shawl. Laney sliced a lemon, squeezed, then motioned to Tara for another one.
    â€œYou work with that lunatic Newt?”
    Tara took a slow sip of beer. “I don’t think he’s a lunatic.”
    â€œHe didn’t tell you the story?”
    â€œWhat story?”
    Laney walked the line of being obnoxious. And yet her straightforward manner made Tara feel at home.
    â€œThe story of him hiding on my tug and getting dragged off by the police.”
    Her heart thumped. So this was the woman who was walking away from the tug.
    Fritz yelled her name from another room. “The lion tamer calls,” Laney said, giving a coy smile.
    He was in the den off the kitchen, watching football with a can of beer balanced on his stomach, his fur-lined slippers perched on an ottoman. “Have a seat.”
    The room was wood-paneled, its walls hung with a black and red Tlingit quilt and ink prints of rockfish. “Cowgirls,” she mumbled, dropping into the couch. The Dallas Cowboys were playing Tennessee.
    He closed one eye and looked at her, as if measuring what she meant. The exchange with Laney had made her bold—or maybe it was the day off, and writing the last letter to Connor. She also felt she had earned this respite from the hatchery, the right to sit down with a beer and watch her least favorite team in the world lose.