Marie averts her gaze, staring intently at a cheap, framed poster print of Denali National Park that I haven’t yet taken down. Is it to give us privacy? Or is it to avoid the inevitable sting that comes with watching someone you care about being intimate with someone else? Jonah may be oblivious, but I’m not. I’m also not naive. You can’t just turn off feelings for someone because they love someone else, as much as most people would like to.
What if our roles were reversed? What if Jonah and I were “just friends” and I had to stand idly by and watch him fall in love with another woman?
A sharp prick of sympathy stabs my chest at that thought.
“To be continued later,” I whisper, giving him a knowing look as I slip my hands over his, squeezing them until they stall.
Jonah steals one last kiss from my neck before stepping away. “You got big plans for today, Marie?”
She refocuses her attention on him. “I didn’t, but I just got called for an emergency as I was pulling in here. I have to head back to take care of a sick cat. Otherwise I would have offered to help you guys.”
“Run. Save yourself while you can!” I moan.
Jonah playfully swats my backside. “Got time for a quick tour?”
“A really quick one?”
“That works. I need to get this hellion out of here before she burns the entire place down.” He cups the back of my neck, giving it another rub. “What do you think? Drive into Wasilla to check out some new furniture?”
“A couch?” I ask, excitement stirring in my sore limbs.
He smirks. “Sure.”
My hopes for finding something suitable are not high but the idea of going somewhere—anywhere—has me saying goodbye to Marie and rushing upstairs to shower in our dingy, dark bathroom with newfound energy.
* * *
“Calla, wake up.” A gentle hand jostles my shoulder.
I whimper. Every muscle in my body aches.
“Come on. You gotta see this.”
“Is it the northern lights again?”
He chuckles. “It’s almost nine. The sun’s already coming up. Come on.”
I crack my eyelids to find Jonah already dressed and holding the red terry-cloth robe I bought at the Wasilla Target the other day.
“This better be worth it.” With a shiver, I pull myself out of bed and trail Jonah downstairs. The gentle gurgle of my father’s coffeemaker brewing a fresh pot carries through our empty main floor. Seven days in and everything of Phil’s that we’ve decided not to keep is gone, to the dump or the thrift shop, or charred to ash. Even the animal heads have found a temporary home in the workshop because I couldn’t handle them watching me anymore. And after three days of spelling out all the disgusting things that have likely spilled into the moss-green sisal rug, Jonah finally agreed to roll it up and drag it outside. He’s left it next to the old couch that I also made him remove, in preparation of our new one arriving Friday from a warehouse in Anchorage.
I wasn’t expecting to find anything in the furniture shop in Wasilla when we went that day but, lo and behold, they had the perfect midcentury modern sectional in a dark briar-gray tweed material. Of course, Jonah balked at the price tag. It took two days of whittling him down until I threw it on my credit card and told him he needs to get on board. I am far more excited than I ever thought I could be about a couch.
All that’s left in the house are piles of things I need to clean and organize, furniture that we’ll use until we can replace with new purchases, and a thousand repairs and improvements to make—wood floors to refinish, bathrooms to remodel, nail holes to fill, cracked outlet covers to swap out, door handles to tighten, hinges to oil, appliances to replace. The list goes on and it’s daunting at times, but we have time. Most importantly, though, this log cabin is finally starting to feel like ours and not Phil’s.
I turn toward the kitchen and coffeemaker, but Jonah loops an arm around my waist and pulls me in the opposite direction, past the crackling fire in the stone hearth, and toward the living room bay window.
“Oh, wow …” Two moose stand at the edge of the frozen lake no more than thirty feet away, grazing on dead foliage. The entire vista before me is awe-inspiring—the vast expanse of freshly fallen, crisp snow, the sun that has been hiding behind cloud cover for days on end visible and climbing, its yellow glow bouncing off the stark, white landscape blinding in its intensity. Not until we moved in did I truly appreciate our house’s location—on a peninsula of sorts, where we get the morning sunrise from the east and the evening sunset from the west.
?
??They’re probably gonna disappear the second I start the tractor to clear the snow,” he murmurs low in my ear, as if they can hear us. And maybe they can.
“That one on the left is huge.” I’ve only ever seen moose from the air, flying above.
“Yeah. She’s probably nine hundred … maybe a thousand pounds. The males can weigh up to eighteen hundred.”
“How do you know it’s a she? I mean …” I tip my head to the side, but I can’t see anything from this angle.