Chapter Six
They came through the door and immediately smelled the cigarette smoke. Kit rolled her eyes, made a resigned face, ran up the stairs, and slammed the door to her room. Broker took the long view and accepted it as the exhausted breath of insomnia that inhabited the house. Along with the TV blaring in the kitchen.
Part of the healing process.
He made a signal of shutting the front door forcefully behind him, telegraphing their arrival. Then, methodically, he removed his coat in the living room.
Give her some time…
Didn’t matter. She barely noticed him come into the kitchen; still in her robe and slippers, one of his old T- shirts she’d slept in. Hair askew, her face puffy with backed-up caffeine, nicotine, and fatigue; she slumped at the kitchen island, worrying at her cigarette with her thumb. She stared at the TV he’d installed in the corner above their one houseplant, a hardened snake plant that thrived on her erratic watering regimen of dumping cold coffee cups, many containing soggy cigarette butts.
The television screen flashed an image of military vehicles coated in that signature third-world red dust. Some breathless embedded reporter riding in a Bradley, yelling about taking small-arms fire…
Day two of the War in the Box.
“How’re the Crusades going?” Broker nodded toward the TV.
Nina slowly shook her head, and a spark of interest sputtered in her eyes. “Looks cool on the tube. Road race to Baghdad. But I got a feeling they shoulda listened to Shinseki, going in light like this. Those Army kids are going to wind up taking up the slack for the politicians again.”
Broker nodded. “Let’s hope the fix is in.” She saw the war as inevitable. He thought it was a mistake. They agreed on one point; during the run-up to the invasion they’d assumed that the Iraqi generals had been bought off, that they’d resist symbolically to preserve their honor, then turn over Saddam and his inner circle. So far that hadn’t happened. Any other plan was just too dumb, given Iraq’s history and ethnic composition.
“Nina,” he said softly, “give it a break.” Did she really miss it? Want it more than being with him and Kit? Did she feel left out, flawed because she’d been left behind? He found the remote among the unwashed breakfast dishes and thumbed off the TV. He faced her and said, “The thing at school-Kit got into a fight. This kid wouldn’t stop pushing her, so she punched him. One-day suspension. There’s a readmission conference tomorrow.”
Nina stared at him, and he could almost see his words methodically crawl over her face, searching for a way to get inside. Finally she focused and said, “Did she get hurt?”
Broker shook his head. “Skinned her knuckles. But the boy she hit wound up with a bloody nose.”
Slowly she nodded. Then she dropped her cigarette into the sink. “I’ll go up and talk to her.” The words had no force, seeping out like a last puff of smoke.
“Let’s wait, do it over supper. Maybe, ah, you should take a shower and try a nap,” Broker said gently.
Nina slowly raised her right arm and touched her fingers to her right temple in a smirk of a salute. She let the arm fall back to her side and walked from the kitchen.
Broker smiled. Two months ago she would be wincing with the effort when she hit the painful range of motion at shoulder level. Would be trembling by the time she got her hand up to her forehead. The ROM therapy had made slow but steady progress rebuilding the shoulder. She was healing. The shoulder faster than the rest of her. But healing.
He turned the exhaust fan on over the stove. Then he opened the patio door to the deck and the side windows and turned on the ceiling fan. To air the place out.
Next he emptied the dishwasher, put the plates, glasses, cups, and bowls away. Then he rinsed off the dishes in the sink and started loading the washer.
Kit came down the stairs and into the kitchen carrying her school backpack. “Mom’s taking a nap,” she said.
“How’s your hand?”
Kit looked at her raw knuckle. “Don’t think I need a Band-Aid anymore. Mom put some hydrogen peroxide on it.”
“Stung, didn’t it?”
“A little.” She held up her hand so he could see the white residue of disinfectant etched into her knuckle. Then she stared at him.
So he debated whether to address the unsaid question hanging over her. Should he do it now, or wait? Whatever he said would be tempered by the fact that he’d knocked the kid’s dad down. “We’ll talk about the fight at dinner,” he decided. “Put on your stuff. We’ll go outside so we don’t wake her. Maybe you could put some wax on the skis.”
Kit brightened when he said that, walked to the patio door, and studied the thermometer fastened to the deck rail. “Twenty-two degrees. Purple wax.”
“Sounds about right,” Broker said.
As Kit worked with the skis in the garage, he took a white package of venison round steak from the freezer and set it on the counter to thaw. Then he checked the pantry and the refrigerator to make sure he had all the ingredients he’d need. Satisfied, he put on his coat and went outside.
As he pulled on his cap and gloves, he checked the overcast sky and the surrounding woods. Griffin bought this parcel of land with frontage on the west shore of Glacier Lake twenty years ago, when it was cheap and the lake was almost totally uninhabited. Broker had spent part of a summer helping him put the kitchen addition on the gutted house. Not much older then than Nina was now, not long out of his own war.
Broker returned to his maul and chopping block, knocked apart a few armloads of kindling, took it into the kitchen, and stacked it in the wood box next to the Franklin stove. When he came back out, he saw Kit come out of the garage, lean the skis against the side of the building, and use a cork to smooth out the long stripes of wax she’d applied. His were the long skinny Nordic racers. Hers were shorter, combos for both Nordic and skating.
Kit came back with the ski poles. Lined everything up, then turned to him and held up her hands, palms up, in a question. In addition to being quiet, the west end of Glacier was only a couple hundred yards from fifty winding kilometers of some of the best cross-country ski trails in the state.
“After lunch,” he said. She went inside, and he went back to his wood.
As the maul rose and fell and his woodpile grew, he went back over the morning. The tiff on the playground didn’t concern him that much, and his first impression was that the principal and that chubby kid’s mom were overreacting. Kids had to learn how to work out problems for themselves. Should think about that, though. How maybe his approach was too old-fashioned for the current social climate.
More to the point was the fact that he had to keep explaining to an eight-year-old that, as a family, they didn’t need to draw extra attention to themselves right now. Explain it in a way to make it stick.
After a fast grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup, and a glass of milk, they changed into long underwear and wind pants and laced on their ski boots. During the three months they’d been on the lake, the quarter Norwegian in Kit’s blood had taken to the skinny skis with a single-minded intensity some people might find scary in a kid her age.
They’d hit the ski trail a lot. What Kit had this winter instead of friends.
Back outside, he watched her toe into her ski bindings, grab her long skating poles, and power off into the woods on the connecting route they’d blazed to the groomed trail. He stayed a few yards behind her in parallel tracks as she swept left and right in the athletic skating technique that he, the die-hard purist, rejected. She’d learned the rudiments last year, when she was living with her mom in Italy. And now her initial clumsiness had
