Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers Read Free Book Online

both adhesive ends. Then he stepped back and assessed his work. He was satisfied, and now Ana was calm enough to speak.
    She asked for a meal.
    “You want a meal?” Josie asked. “You haven’t finished your breakfast.”
    “No!” Ana roared. “I want a
meal
.”
    “A meal?” Josie was lost.
    “No, a meal!”
    Paul tilted his head, as if he was on the verge of understanding.
    “Are you hungry or not?” Josie asked.
    “No!” Ana yelled, now about to cry again.
    Paul looked to Ana, his eyes probing. “Is there another way you could say it?”
    “I want to see it!” Ana wailed, and immediately Paul understood.
    “She wants a
mirror,
not a
meal,
” he told his mother, a flash of delight in his ice-priest eyes. Ana nodded vigorously, and a smile overtook Paul’s face. This was treasure to him, this was joy. All he wanted was to know his sister better than anyone else.
    Josie lifted her so she could face the small mirror hung high over the sink. She showed Ana the wound, fearing she’d wail again, shocked by the bandage overtaking her chin. But Ana only grinned, touching it lovingly, her eyes alight.
    —
    They got back on the road, heading south toward the Kenai Peninsula, with an eye toward Seward, about which Josie knew nothing. The kids sat at the banquette in back, Josie unsure exactly how that was safe, given the walls of the Chateau were dangerously thin and the benches of the banquette had seatbelts as old as herself. But the kids were loving it. Ana couldn’t believe she didn’t have to be in a car seat. She felt like she was getting away with some fantastic heist.
    Ana yelled something from the back. It sounded like a question, but Josie couldn’t hear anything. “What’s that?” Josie yelled.
    “She asked if you ever lived here,” Paul yelled.
    “In Alaska? No,” Josie yelled over her shoulder.
    Ana thought her mother had lived everywhere. It was Josie’s fault; she’d made the mistake of mentioning her travels before their births, her many addresses. Her kids were too young for this, both of them were, but she found on too many occasions that she couldn’t help it. When they’d heard mention of Panama in a documentary about the canal, she told them she’d lived there for two years, explaining the Peace Corps, the village on a hill where she and two others with no particular training in mountainside irrigation tried to help the residents with mountainside irrigation. She couldn’t help herself, and assumed her kids would forget it all. Ana forgot most things, but Paul forgot nothing, and as if to thwart her efforts to write the past in disappearing ink, he made his own copy, like some tiny deranged monk. They knew that after the Peace Corps and before dentistry school she’d gone to school, briefly, to train seeing-eye dogs (she dropped out after a month but the prospect held great fascination for them). They knew about Walla Walla and Iron Mountain, two of the four places she’d lived as a child. She thought it too soon to tell them about how she’d emancipated herself at seventeen, about Sunny, the woman who supported that insurgency and took her in. They occasionally wondered about Josie’s parents, where they were, why they didn’t have biological grandparents, why they only had Luisa, Carl’s mother, living in Key West. They knew something about London, the four months in Spain—that period of whiplash moves, driven by whim and calamity. Why was it important to her that they know she’d been somewhere, had done more than dentistry? Was it wonderful to have changed so many times? She suspected it was not wonderful.
    Now Paul was talking, but he was quieter than Ana, and Josie heard little more than wisps of consonants and vowels.
    “I can’t hear you!” Josie yelled.
    “What?” Paul yelled back to her.
    The Chateau was rattling and heaving and drowned all voices. By its nature a recreational vehicle carried along all manner of kitchen items—in this case, secondhand