Finding West

1

KAT



"My bum leg says it's gonna storm. Snow. And a lot of it." The old woman picked up a chipped ceramic mug and brought it to her lips while her husband looked out at the darkening sky through the diner window.

"You may be right," he said, nodding his head of white hair. "I've been stopped up for three days."

I watched the couple from where I sat a few tables down, wondering how long it took for two people to become so comfortable with each other that the mention of their bowels was no longer even a point of embarrassment but a typical topic over dinner. It wasn't likely I'd ever have that kind of intimacy with anyone and it was just as well. I really didn't want to know about someone's ass timetable anyway.

"So are you ready for the storm?" the sole waitress of the diner-aptly named The Diner as it was the only eating establishment in town-asked as she stood by my table with the coffee carafe in hand. "It's going to be bad, apparently."

I covered my mug with a hand and shook my head. "I'm not too worried." Hell, it had been snowing since October. A few more feet or ten were nothing to write home about.

"Well, if you need anything, you just let me know," she said, reached in her apron, and handed me my change. She bent down and stroked the white fur of my German Shepherd, Josie, who was laying by my boots. "Mama and I just live a few miles from your place. Even if you just need someone to watch this sweet pup for you."

For the life of me, I couldn't remember the waitress' name. She was in her twenties, pretty in a tired kind of way, and was always friendly whenever I came in to eat. She and I were the only two women in our twenties in this tiny Alaskan town called Ayashe, so I think she felt like she needed to befriend me. When I first moved into town, she started off suggesting that we go shopping in Anchorage together, do the things normal girlfriends do. I wasn't exactly a mani-pedi kind of girl, so I always said I was busy.

By now she knew better, knew why people around here called me The Hermit from Sommers Lane. Once someone substituted the word hermit for bitch, and he ended up flat on his back with an imprint of my fist on his face. So yeah, maybe I earned both titles, but that was fine with me too.

Large snowflakes were already falling by the time I exited the post office with package in hand and made my way back to my Jeep, my boots crunching the snow underfoot. Josie didn't even lift her head when I jumped in the vehicle; she just lay on the passenger seat, her head on her paws and a look of boredom on her all-white face.

"What?" I asked her, starting the engine. "The line to the window was long."

Josie let out a long-suffering sigh and I could swear she rolled her canine eyes.

"Sometimes I wonder if you're just a teenage human trapped in a dog's body," I muttered as I pulled out onto Main Street and away from the post office in this podunk town with its two hundred some-odd residents. Ayashe was in the middle of nowhere, nearly an hour away from Anchorage and civilization, and had a town center that consisted of a grocery store, police station, post office, and diner. Everything else was... well, we either did without or drove a half hour down the Glenn Highway toward the only-slightly larger town of Cormack. Ayashe was isolated and quiet and just the place in which a girl like me could disappear.

The back tires of the Jeep slid a little as I turned off Main Street and onto Sommers Lane, which was three miles of road with nothing but frost-covered trees and vegetation on either side. A mile and three-fifths in, I turned right onto an unmarked dirt road, the end of which ended at my tan and brown mobile home. In my former life, I lived in a grand log and stone house in an affluent neighborhood in South Anchorage, with six bedrooms and five bathrooms, a pool (so unnecessary in a place that had nearly nine months of winter) and an entire room dedicated to watching movies. As fancy as the house had been, I hadn't felt comfortable there, not quite myself.