Given the dismal predictions for this year‘s salmon run, it was probably more than he‘d make on the Freya

But money wasn‘t his only consideration, and maybe not even his first consideration. Kate watched Johnny and Van exchange another glance, and the un spoken thought was mutual and obvious. If they both got jobs at the mine, they could be together over the summer. Kate wondered how good an idea that was.

Well, at some point, you had to trust that you‘d raised them right, and if she had little confidence in her own embryonic parenting skills she had a great deal of faith in Annie Mike‘s. Nevertheless, she saw no harm in letting them sell her on the idea. Kate also had great faith in the child-rearing instincts of Lazarus Long, who had famously said, Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy. They‘re going to hire the Grosdidier brothers to teach an EMT class so we can respond to emergencies, Van said.

And the culinary union is going to send in chefs from Anchorage to teach institutional cooking, Johnny said.

And we get paid to take the classes, Van said. It‘d be part of our job. GHRI going after the next generation with a vengeance. Still, Kate couldn‘t detect a flaw in the offer of free education. She pulled into Annie Mike‘s driveway and they trooped inside. Annie had coffee and lemon sugar cookies waiting.

Annie already knew about Auntie Vi selling the B and B, so Kate favored her with a description of her heroic disruption of the knife fight in the Riverside Café, and Annie retaliated with an eyewitness account of Bonnie Jeppsen and Suzy Moonin bitchslapping each other around the post office, as near as anyone could make out just for the fun of it.

Well, at least that won‘t be Suulutaq related, Kate said. Annie, you hear about these summer jobs the mine‘s offering the kids?

Annie nodded, her face placid and calm as ever. A short, plump woman with straight brown hair that fell in ordered strands from a side part to a pudgy chin and brown eyes that remained bland in expression no matter what the provocation, Annie dressed in Jelly Belly–colored polyester pantsuits that Dinah Clark freely speculated she had bought a gross of straight off the rack at JCPenney in 1963. No one disagreed, and besides, Annie‘s rainbow figure was a welcome sight in the middle of a dark Alaskan winter. Her style, however retro, most decidedly did not make her a figure of fun.

Kate thought of Annie Mike as an auntie-in-waiting, although given recent history she wasn‘t altogether sure Annie would be flattered at the comparison. Annie Mike was half Athabascan and half Aleut, with some Swedish thrown in from a Cordova connection and a rumor of African-American on her mother‘s side. This was attributed to Hell Roaring Mike Healy, who had scattered enough seed up and down the Alaskan coast in his time to have been the progenitor of all the residents of Ahtna, with maybe Fairbanks thrown in for good measure. It was indisputable that Annie was the granddaughter of one tribal chief and the widow of another, and she had served as secretary-treasurer of the Niniltna Native Association since its creation. Kate, less than nine months in office after succeeding Billy Mike as the chairman of the board of directors, had come to regard Annie as her lodestone. She relied on her for Annie‘s institutional knowledge, which was second to the knowledge of no other shareholder. That bland expression and that blinding rainbow attire were misdirection, camouflage to distract attention from the sharp intelligence, the acute perception, and the unshakeable integrity that was the woman beneath. If Annie said something was okay, Kate had learned that it indisputably was.