Free The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger Page B

skin tanned and tagged and deeply lined.
    “Letter said you’d be here yesterday.”
    “Couldn’t be helped. They stopped the ferry because of the weather.”
    “Bah.” She swatted the air.
    He put one boot on the bottom step and crossed his arms casually over his knee. “Can I come in?”
    “I didn’t think you were going to show up. I’m in the middle of something now.” She wiped her nose with the back of her finger and went into the house, leaving the door open.
    Inside, the smell of something waxy—lanolin. And woodsmoke. A tepee of burning logs in the fireplace, pockmarks on the rug in front of the hearth. Watching her move about in her kitchen, setting a blackened copper kettle on the stove, spooning loose leaves into a mug, he’d forgotten how tall and broad she was. How she could fill a room entirely.
    “It is good to see you, Tom.”
    “Is it?”
    “Let’s not start things off this way, eh?” She lifted the kettle with a rag and filled the mug. She handed it to him as she passed and headed for the stairs. After a few steps up, she stopped. “You coming?”
    Elka’s old room. The walls were bare, the brown carpet grimy. Her bed was covered with clothes and cardboard boxes. More clothes, and dolls, and puzzle boxes split at the corners spilled out of the closet onto the floor. Bobbie sat heavily on the edge of the bed and exhaled what seemed to be her frustration with Tom, and with the whole world that stood against her. Tom, his hands firmly in the pockets of his jeans, leaned one shoulder against the wall by the window. In the backyard, one of the island’s wild sheep grazed, and where the shed used to be there was some fool-looking mud hut in the shape of a mushroom. There were the salal and blackberry bushes that bordered the edge of the land, and beyond that the bedrock and Douglas fir that rolled away down to the strait, nothing more than a misty gray band between this place and the dark coastal mountains on the mainland. Bobbie selected something from the pile on the bed and held it up. A child’s t-shirt. Other clothes were shaken out for inspection. Denim overalls, a raincoat, leotards. “Why didn’t you bring the children?”
    “Implication was I shouldn’t.”
    “Well.” She flipped through a shoe box of cassette tapes, her mouth turned down rigidly.
    “Come on, Bobbie. I’m sorry I was late. Nothing I could do about it.”
    “There never is.” She held up a green dress by its sleeves. “You want to take some of this stuff home for your girl? How old is she?”
    “Four.”
    “Of course she is.”
    “Bobbie, I’ve come all this way.”
    “You’ve come all this way.”
    “And I’d really like to know what happened.”
    She sighed and looked up at the ceiling, and puffed out her cheeks.
    “Did you know she was in Alberta?” he asked.
    “She left me as she left you.”
    “I guess I just thought in all this time she might have contacted you.”
    “Don’t you think I would have told you if she had?”
    He watched her fold and unfold a wool sweater. She tossed it aside and knelt on the floor, and pulled a wooden tray out from under the bed. It was full of shoes: one yellow rain boot, scuffed runners, leather sandals furry with dust.
    He lowered himself onto the floor and drew up his knees, and rested his arms across them, to allow her this power to stall. A twelve-year-old calendar was still pinned to the wall above the bed.
    “It’s amazing, really, that they were able to track me down at all, to let me know,” Bobbie began. “But there was a postcard. They found it in her bag, already stamped and addressed. It was evident from its condition that she’d been carrying it around for some time.”
    “She happen to mention my kids in that postcard?”
    “Well, no. It was meant for me. A message from a daughter to her mother.”
    “She had a daughter too.”
    Bobbie clasped her hands together and smiled sadly, as if all this had been ordained. As if no one need be