My Name Is Not Easy by Edwardson, Dahl (the reading list TXT) 📗

S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e Aapa pulled his parka from the hook that time and

shuffl

ed out the door without looking back, his voice soft as rain. “You boys ever gonna learn?” He came back later, holding out a brand-new broom for Aaka like a stiff bouquet, smiling.

I sit here, nodding at the memory: Yes, we learned. We learned how not to talk in Iñupiaq and how to eat strange food and watch, helpless, while they took our brother away.

Th

ere’s a clatter of sound as an empty coff ee cup rolls across the fl oor. Mom sighs and mutters, “Clumsy.” Th

en she scur-

ries across the room to retrieve it.

Mom isn’t talking to any of us, really, but when her eyes meet mine, there are tears there, tears that make her eyes look like they’ve turned to water.

“Why can’t we just go fi nd him?” I whisper.

Mom looks at me, her eyes full of hurt and something else, something that makes me feel protective, suddenly, like I’m the parent and she’s just a little kid.

SONNY

—

Old Anna is gone now—that’s the only thing I know, reading Ma’s letter, all alone at Sacred Heart School after most of the others have left for home.

Nobody here knew a thing about Anna, who died in her sleep, all alone.

Old Anna and her canned peas. Th

at’s what she and I used

to eat back home when I used to chop wood for her. Canned 67

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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

sweet peas. We ate them together, after the wood was piled, the two of us sitting at her table, a can of sweet peas between us. I sure miss the sound of that spruce wood crackling in the barrel stove on a day when it’s so cold outside, the river ice cracks like gunshots. Us two enjoying the smooth taste of those peas and the smell of smoke, fi relight fl ickering on the walls.

Best candy there ever was, those peas. Anna kept them hidden in a case beneath her bed, and I was the only one she ever shared them with. And she’d always talk with me while we ate them, too, the rasp of her voice mixing with the crackle of the fi re, like they were both part of the same thing.

“Your mom still sell slippers to white people?” Th

at’s what

she asked last time I saw her.

I nodded. Yeah, Mom was still selling her slippers.

Anna nodded, too, but I could tell she wasn’t thinking about white people or even slippers so much as she was agree-ing with the way Ma did things. Maybe she was even a little bit surprised at how Ma went to Fairbanks and came back practically the next day with sugar and fl our and new clothes for all us kids, never even stopping off at the bars on Two Street like most folks did.

People always pay a lot for beaded Indian slippers, and Ma’s are the best, with big blue and red beaded fl owers on the toes, worked in a way that made them look more interesting than some people’s. Th

at’s how she got the money to send me

to Sacred Heart School, too.

68

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T H E S I Z E O F T H I N G S B A C K H O M E / L u k e , S o n n y & C h i c k i e

“Because you’re gonna be a leader someday.” Th

at’s what

Ma said.

Old Anna never said it, but there was something in the way she nodded her head that time that let me know she agreed with Ma. I was gonna be a leader.

But now old Anna’s gone, and I’m all alone feeling like I didn’t do something I was supposed to do. Something important. Something I’ll never ever get to do again.

CHICKIE

—

I step off the plane and for a second I just stand there, sucking it all in: the smell of ocean and tundra and the sweep of sky.

It’s funny what you miss about a place. I missed seeing the ocean ice out there on the horizon, holding the wide-open world in place like a fence.

I don’t know the guy meeting the plane, and he doesn’t know me, either. From one of the villages, I fi gure.

“Where you going? Teacher’s place?” he asks.

I guess he thinks I’m one of the teachers’ kids.

“No. Th

e store.”

He looks at me funny, like he can’t fi gure out why a white girl would fl y all the way up here just to go to Swede’s dusty old store.

“Swede’s my dad,” I say.

He looks puzzled for a second, then smiles. “I’ll be darned.”

If I were smart-alecky, like Amiq, I’d say, “What the heck’s 69

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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

that supposed to mean?” But I’m not. And anyhow, I already know what it means. It means he doesn’t think of Swede as having a family, especially not a young one.

“You could climb up into that truck, and I’ll run you over there,” he says. He’s looking