I shrugged. “Complicated.”
Her eyes searching mine were sharp and penetrating. “Does it have to do with the way you hesitated over Lena’s name?”
I scoffed. “You are a damn sight too smart, Liv.”
She just smirked. “I think you think you’re harder to read than you are.” She hesitated. “So, you took the blame more for Lena than your brother.”
I nodded. “Yeah. ’Course, I got somethin’ out of it from Liam, you can bet. He had to do my chores for a week.”
“What kind of chores did you guys have to do? Where did you grow up?”
“Grew up on a spread out near Ward Creek, not far from Ward Lake. Due north of here a ways.”
“Oh. So you grew up in Alaska? Bill mentioned he knew your dad, didn’t he? I’d forgotten.”
“Yep, born and raised on that spread. It wasn’t more’n a little log cabin in the woods, built by my great-grandpa. Dad was born there, Liam and I were born there.” I paused to demolish half of my burger in a few bites. “Chores were chopping wood, checking the traplines, hunting, bringing in water from the creek. Things like that.”
“Bill mentioned bringing you electricity?”
I nodded. “Yep. That’d be, oh…late fifties. Bill woulda been just a young fella, his dad and our dad helping Gramps. They had to run a trench, since there was no way to get posts into the ground through the brush. I don’t even know how far they ran it, to be honest, I just know it was a hell of a job, but it got us lights and a radio.”
“Did you have plumbing?”
“Hell nah,” I said. “Outhouse and a well, babe. Old school.”
“And…traplines?”
“We trapped for rabbits, foxes, coyotes, martens, otter, things like that. Fur and meat. We’d eat the meat and sell the fur down in town.” I anticipated her next question. “Hunting was for subsistence, too. If we didn’t bag a deer, we’d go hungry.”
She tilted her head to one side, thinking. “Why did you live up here, off the grid like that?”
I shrugged. “Hell if I know. Gramps was in the Great War, Pops was in World War Two, and Liam and I only missed going to Vietnam because we lived way the fuck out in the boonies like we did, without a mailing address or birth certificates or nothing, so Uncle Sam didn’t even know we existed to be able to draft us.” I glance at the ceiling. “I know Great-Gramps had Gramps late in life. I think Great-Gramps fought in the Civil War.”
She blinked. “Really?”
I nodded. “Yep. I mean, I was born in fifty-seven, and Pops was thirty-two when he had us—late as hell for that period of time. So Pops woulda been born in twenty-five. Figure Gramps was, what—twenty-two?—when he had Pops, and that would have meant Gramps had been born in 1898, or thereabouts? So Great-Gramps coulda fought in the Civil War and had a kid late in life. I know he lived to be over a hundred—he died in…oh god—fifty-five? Fifty-three? A couple years before I was born.” I pause again, finishing the burger. “I think after the war ended, Great-Gramps was sorta just through with folks, wanted to be left alone. Then Gramps fought in the Great War, and he had a similar feeling. Like, people suck, you know? You seen the worst humanity can do to itself, you just kinda wanna get shut of pretty much everyone. Pops, too. He was a grumpy, surly, mean old cuss, my pops. Teetotaler, and just plain ol’ mean. Came back from fighting in Belgium with a heart full of hurt and anger and just…cold-bloodedness. So he didn’t want to be around nobody neither. Which means Liam and I grew up half feral in the Alaskan wilderness—Mom passed on from some kinda cancer or somethin’ when Liam and I were just little tykes, leavin' Pops and Gramps to raise us alone. I was huntin’ squirrels when I was barely big enough to carry my own BB gun, and I could pop ’em through the eyeball from fifty yards with a .22 by the time I was six, and so could Liam. We ran through the woods wearing shit-all but boots and old shorts, giggin’ frogs, bagging squirrels and deer.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t imagine that life.”
“No?”
She shakes her head again, stabbing at her salad with her fork. “Not at all. I’m from the East Coast originally. Grew up in Connecticut, upper middle class as a kid, and then firmly upper class after Darren and I got married.”
I looked her over again. “Rich kid, huh?”
She frowned. “I don’t like that label. Yes, growing up we had money, but I didn’t get driven around in limousines or anything like that.”
I laughed. “So just rich, instead’a super-rich?”
She frowned. “I can’t tell if you’re teasing me, or if you’re serious and just being a jerk.”
I huffed. “Eh, probably a little bit of both. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelin’s.”
She rolled a shoulder as she chased the last few bits of salad around the plate. “You didn’t hurt my feelings, more just…annoyed me. I mean, I literally just said I don’t like being pigeonholed as a rich girl, and you went and did it again, just differently.”
I winced. “Hey, now. I wasn’t pigeonholing you as anything. People fit in boxes, Liv—loosely, at least. We ain’t always the person in the box we fit in. I mean, sure, I’m a country redneck through and through. I’m more comfortable in a trailer in a holler than I am in an apartment in the city. I don’t know shit about crap like Wi-Fi and computers and all that nonsense. I know woods and huntin’, and trucks and I’ve eaten roadkill.”
She squinted at me. “You have not.”
