The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

Although she had to be almost forty, she wore her hair in pigtails.

“Weather’s unpredictable up here. Some years June is spring, July is summer, August is autumn, and everything else is winter.”

Alaska - Fast paced in moments and painfully long in others. It’s built around survival and not comfort.

You can’t count on anyone to save you and your children. You have to be willing to save yourselves. And you have to learn fast. In Alaska you can make one mistake. One. The second one will kill you.”

How many times now?!?!

Leni might not know much about fashion, but these were definitely boy’s pants, and the sweater … she didn’t think it had been in style in any year of her life.

Dad doesn’t know her very well. Poor guy tried and failed miserably.

Mama came forward with a metal Winnie the Pooh lunch box. “Thelma thought you’d like this.” And with that, Leni’s social fate was sealed, but there was nothing she could do about it.

¡Pero mira la otra! Que madre titubea con la posibilidad de causarle bullying a su hija. Esta mujer… mira dile no gracias!

“Where are you from?” he asked. Leni never knew how to answer that question. It implied a permanence, a Before that had never existed for her. She’d never thought of any place as home.

She can’t even say home is wherever the family is. How sad.

“And Herbert.” “Dune was amazing. ‘Fear is the mind-killer.’ It’s so true, man.”

Do we need to read Dune or what?

“This is what the world should be, Red. People helping each other instead of killing their mothers for a little bread.”

A brutal place where people betray even those closest to them.

“No social-suicide issues with the clothes or the lunch box? No girls making fun of you?”

Oseeeaaaaaa gracias a Dios q la nena tuya tiene mente. Porque la tuya es de pollo!

“That was different. The guy tried to cheat him.” That wasn’t how Leni remembered it. They’d been having a good time at the State Fair until her dad started drinking beer. Then some guy had flirted with Mama (and she had flirted back) and Dad had gone ballistic. He shoved the man hard enough to crack his head into the tent pole at the BeerHaus and started yelling.

Aha! There it is. She had flirted back.

I’VE BEEN FISHING SO LONG I’M A MASTER BAITER.

I can relate.

She could never tell him how it felt to live with a dad who scared you sometimes and a mother who loved him too much and made him prove how much he loved her in dangerous ways.

“I guess you’re my little carpenter.” “I thought I was your librarian. Or your bookworm.” “Your mama says you can be anything. Some shit about a fish and a bicycle.”

“Did you see the way he shoved our noses in his money? I can loan you my tractor, Ernt, or Do you need a ride to town? He looked down at me, Red.”

“I like this place, Dad,” Leni said, realizing suddenly the truth of her words. She already felt more at home in Alaska than she ever had in Seattle. “We’re happy here. I see how happy you are.

The admission was more than she’d ever said aloud before and it felt disloyal. Maybe even dangerous.

She would never want to make waves or get her dad in trouble.

“This is Alaska. We live and let live. I don’t care if your dad hates my dad. You’re the one who matters, Leni.”

Leni felt light enough to float right out of the canoe. She had told him one of her darkest, most terrible secrets, and he liked her anyway.

“Great,” Mama said. “Now the plants can kill us, too.” Dad laughed. “That’s great, Leni. Finally, a teacher who is teaching what matters.”

Dad blew his temper and Mama somehow encouraged it. Like maybe she needed to know how much he loved her all the time.

It hurt even more that he didn’t care about how much it hurt.

“You want to be a victim or a survivor, Lenora?”

I need to know you can protect your mom and save yourself.”

“Rookie mistake,” Leni said, almost proud of her injury. It meant she was becoming an Alaskan.

And they mate for life. I wonder what Ricky would do if something happened to Lucy.

no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.

Mama loved to talk about Before, about who they’d been in the beginning. The words were like a much-loved fairy tale.

“They were not the kind of people who could understand a girl like me. They hated my clothes and my music and I hated their rules. At sixteen, I thought I knew everything, and I told them so.

“Your dad came into my life like a rogue wave, knocking me over. Everything he said upended my conventional world and changed who I was. I stopped knowing how to breathe without him. He told me I didn’t need school. I believed everything he said. Your dad and I were too in love to be careful,

I didn’t know what to do, where to go, how to live without him. I ran out of money and moved back home with my parents, but I couldn’t stand it there.

Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices.

“You always said bad weather made him worse.”

Summer ended as quickly as it had begun. Autumn in Alaska was less a season and more an instant, a transition. Rain started to fall and didn’t stop, turning the ground to mud, drowning the peninsula, falling in curtains of gray. Rivers rose to splash over their crumbling banks, tearing big chunks away, changing course.

😔

“If there are ten smart guys in a room and one crackpot, you can bet who your dad will like best.”

Don’t do it, Mama, Leni thought. Don’t say anything. “I don’t like all of this end-of-the-world rhetoric, Ernt. And there’s Leni to consider. She—” Dad slammed his fist down on the table so hard everything rattled. “Damn it, Cora, can’t you ever just support me?”

Leni saw a wildness in him, barely contained emotion rising hard and fast.

Dad was the center of attention, and he drank it up.

“What?” Mad Earl stared up at Dad as if he’d just seen God. “He’ll come here, banging on our doors, begging for help from us, the people he thought he was better than.”