AN EXCERPT:
I hear that when I came, I came early, not prematurely, but before you could count nine months from a wedding day. Great Gusty whispered this to me on my thirteenth birthday. “You get to know things now,” she said. I was drying a deep pot she passed me from the sink and my mother had just walked out of the room. Grandma Vee looked up from my cake with her brows furrowed, but Great Gusty shrugged at her and handed me a dripping lid.
I’ve taken over the dish washing now she’s dead. It’s in the kitchen that I feel Great Gusty at my back, even more than in my bedroom where the portraits are. She’s always just out of my vision tugging a drawer and telling me to tell her what’s going on. “What’s going on at school?” she’d say to me. “What’s going on this weekend,” and later, “What’s going on with the boys?” If I gave her “Nothing, Gusty,” she’d just push on with, “How about Gaelin? How’s that boy?” I’d say I didn’t know. He was just a boy. “What about that Ryan? What’s going on with him?” If I was lucky, Grandma Vee would come in and say “Mom, will you come get the slider open for me?” The sliding door tended to stick and Great Gusty prided herself on being old and bony and tougher than the rest of us. She was our jar opener, spider catcher, door budger, raccoon chaser, suspect food taster, and she did it all with subdued zeal. She relished being good at things others couldn’t be bothered about, but she liked best to do it all casually, as if without thought. My father could have done it, but he knew his place.
If I wasn’t lucky, Great Gusty would extract what she wanted from me. She’d get me to tell her that what was going on with Ryan was he’d made the baseball team and was pretty busy after school with practice and on the weekends with games, and that I didn’t get excited enough about baseball. She’d get me to tell her that he could see I didn’t care about baseball. Eventually, she’d even know that Suzanne loved baseball, and probably Ryan loved Suzanne for all I knew. “Who cares about him anyway,” she’d say. “Gaelin’s the one.” I’d tell her I was only sixteen, that no one was the one. “I didn’t say he was the one for you. Just that he’s one of them who’s worth it.” Great Gusty got what she wanted, and I could fill all the pots and pans and sinks and buckets all over this house brimful with admiration just for that one quality.
Selected for publication in the Winter/Spring 2017 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review
February 2017, Volume 33, No. 3 & 4
Editor, Ronald Spatz
Alaska Quarterly Review
In print for over 35 years, the AQR is a highly regarded literary review nationwide, ranked as on e of the top markets by Writer’s Digest. As noted on the Alaska Quarterly Review site, work from AQR appears in The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize: The Best of the Small Presses, The Best American Mystery Stories and The Beacon Best: Creative Writing by Women and Men of All Colors.