My Name Is Not Easy (18 page)

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 off at the bars on Two Street like most folks did.

People always pay a lot for beaded Indian slippers, and Ma’s are the best, with big blue and red beaded fl owers on the toes, worked in a way that made them look more interesting than some people’s. Th

at’s how she got the money to send me

to Sacred Heart School, too.

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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

“Because you’re gonna be a leader someday.” Th

at’s what

Ma said.

Old Anna never said it, but there was something in the way she nodded her head that time that let me know she agreed with Ma. I was gonna be a leader.

But now old Anna’s gone, and I’m all alone feeling like I didn’t do something I was supposed to do. Something important. Something I’ll never ever get to do again.

CHICKIE

—

I step off the plane and for a second I just stand there, sucking it all in: the smell of ocean and tundra and the sweep of sky.

It’s funny what you miss about a place. I missed seeing the ocean ice out there on the horizon, holding the wide-open world in place like a fence.

I don’t know the guy meeting the plane, and he doesn’t know me, either. From one of the villages, I fi gure.

“Where you going? Teacher’s place?” he asks.

I guess he thinks I’m one of the teachers’ kids.

“No. Th

e store.”

He looks at me funny, like he can’t fi gure out why a white girl would fl y all the way up here just to go to Swede’s dusty old store.

“Swede’s my dad,” I say.

He looks puzzled for a second, then smiles. “I’ll be darned.”

If I were smart-alecky, like Amiq, I’d say, “What the heck’s
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

that supposed to mean?” But I’m not. And anyhow, I already know what it means. It means he doesn’t think of Swede as having a family, especially not a young one.

“You could climb up into that truck, and I’ll run you over there,” he says. He’s looking at my freckles and trying to pretend he’s not. Measuring my freckles against Swede’s, probably. “Could see Swede in you all right,” he says.

I lift my chin and look right at him. “How’s Aaka Mae?”

He knows who Aaka Mae is—everybody knows Mae and

everyone calls her Aaka, too, like she is the whole world’s grandma, which she pretty much is.

“Aaka Mae? Th

ey take her to Fairbanks.”

Fairbanks? It gets hard to breathe all of a sudden. I watch wordlessly while he heaves my suitcase into the back of his truck. Clouds of dust rise up behind us as the truck bumps along the dirt road, taking us to Swede’s store. All I can think is:
Aaka Mae, gone.

LUKE

—

Th

e door swings open, and there’s Uncle Joe, holding his gun and grinning. Th

e sun shining behind his head looks like a

halo or something.

“So they gonna let you hunt down there?” he says.

Me and Bunna are suddenly tongue-tied staring at that gun, the one that never ever misses a shot.

“Sure,” I manage fi nally. “One moose or three caribou—

that’s one semester’s worth.”

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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
I don’t think Joe knows anything about semesters or tuition and I don’t think he cares, either. But I can tell by the way he looks down at his gun that he’s calculating moose and caribou to bullets.

Th

en he looks up—looks right at me, hard. “You take care of your brother, now, okay?”

I nod, looking at the gun, calculating the best way to angle the barrel, shooting through trees.

CHICKIE

—

Standing in the store, I suddenly realize that for some totally crazy reason, I actually missed the smell of Swede’s store, with its fox furs on the wall and cans of stove oil on the fl oor and its dusty shelves full of fl our and jam and coff ee and nails. Th ere’s

two ladies in the back of the store, one young and one old, debating about which fabric to buy, and this makes me realize, suddenly, that I missed hearing the sound of Iñupiaq, too.

And I especially missed the feel of Swede, crushing me up against his fl annel shirt without a word. We don’t need a lot of words, Swede and I, because that’s how we are. We always know what each other is going to say before we say it, so a lot of times we don’t even bother talking. Swede already knew about my fi rst question, for example. I can see it in his eyes when I pull away from his hug and look at his face.

He looks down, folding his arms across his chest like he’s trying to hug himself.

“Th

ey had to put her in a home.”

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Th

e way he says
home
makes it sound like it’s some new word, a word that has sharp, hissing edges and doesn’t have anything at all to do with family.

“Why?”

For a moment that word just sort of hangs there in the air between us like a hook.

“She needed to be there,” Swede says.