Glaciers by Alexis Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

conversation is dead, he starts again.
    It wasn’t just animals, now that I think about it.
    Isabel, mouth full of rice, cocks her head to the side and gives him a confused look. Spoke takes another bite and swallows.
    We used to pick up junk off the side of the road—not actual trash, but dumped stuff. Washing machines and lamps and bicycles. We’d haul them back to my grandpa’s shop and work on them till they were fixed—that’s how I learned to fix things. If he didn’t know how to fix it, he would send away for manuals and we would figure it out together. He just . . . wanted everything to last, or at least be given a chance.
    Sounds like someone I would get along with, Isabel says.
    She smiles at Spoke, but he just nods and looks seriously back at his lunch. The waitress
brings the little plastic tray with the bill and two fortune cookies.
    Take your time, she says. I wish I could, Spoke says mostly to Isabel.
    Isabel looks up, surprised. He reaches for the bill.
    I’ll get yours, he says.
    Thanks, she reaches for her wallet. But you don’t need to do that.
    I know I don’t. But I want to, okay?
    She gives him a questioning look, but he looks away.
    Okay, she says softly.
    He gets up and puts his sweater over his arm. His lips are red from the spicy pickle.
    They have the best fortunes here, he says, picking a cookie from the tray.
    Really? she says. She has never thought so.
    They look at each other. She notices the buttons on his shirt again, pearly red buttons.

    I’d better get back, he says, resolved. I have a meeting to get to.
    She manages a small wave.
    She sits by herself, unable to eat. She pours the last of the tea from the metal pot and sips. It is lukewarm, now, and she holds it in her mouth and lets it roll over her tongue. She cracks her fortune cookie and thinks of buttons. Small, pearly shirt buttons. The way they feel between your fingertips, against fingernails, slipping through cloth.

Life in a Northern Town
    Isabel wanted new things for a brief time, the spring after her tenth birthday. It was during her parents’ divorce, but before she and Agnes knew that their mother was moving to New Mexico with a man named Steve, and that their father was applying for drafting jobs in Seattle and Portland.
    It was a long division, Isabel would realize later. After he lost his job on the North Slope, their father started taking college classes on the weekends in Anchorage, and his band played in bars at night to make money. Their mother took a photography class at the community college on a lark , she
said, to stay sane . When her parents were together, they had little to say to each other. The fissures in their family grew until the most important parts broke free and began to float away.
    Agnes and Isabel felt the separation abruptly. One day, they were driving home from Pizza Paradiso in their dad’s Chevy, the taste of root beer and oregano still on their lips, and the next they were dividing everything between their little house by woods and the apartment in town their mother had rented.
    On packing day, Isabel and Agnes wandered around their room, choosing this toy and that book and a favorite dress or two. They dropped them into cardboard boxes onto which their mother had written, in purple magic marker, each of their names. Isabel found herself staring into her box at her belongings, noticing how different they looked, like they had suddenly lost the context of her life.

    Agnes talked about going to the mall in town to meet her friends, and for once Isabel wanted to tag along. Agnes occasionally skulked into the kitchen to whine at their mother, who insisted they stay home and pack. Isabel and Agnes had never fought much, but they were so different, in looks and in personality, that they rarely found reasons to bond. But that day Isabel felt the urge to join in her sister’s crusade.
    Please, Mom, they said. We’re nearly done. How much longer