Her Birthday Celebration Was My Exit novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Breakup

"Pop," I said. "You hate the cold."

"I hate the Bears. The cold I can take."

"There's no Italian bakery in Anchorage."

"There will be. I'm bringing the recipes."

Ryder had sat up in the blanket beside me. He was trying very hard not to listen and failing completely.

"Put the captain on," Pop said.

I held out the phone.

Ryder took it.

"Sir."

"You still burning the pie?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. I'll be there in three weeks. Don't touch my daughter's oven."

He hung up.

Ryder handed the phone back and looked at me.

"Your father's moving to Alaska."

"I know."

"To cook for me."

"I know."

He lay back down and put his arm over his eyes.

His shoulders started shaking, and I couldn't tell if he was laughing or something else.

It was both.

Pop drove the Buick.

He refused to ship it.

He drove it up the Alaska Highway at fifty-five miles an hour, alone.

He had a cooler of Italian sausage on the passenger seat and a box of Mom's recipe cards in the trunk.

It took him nine days.

He called every night from a different motel.

Fort St.

John.

Watson Lake.

A town in the Yukon with one gas station and, he said, the best pie he'd ever eaten.

"Don't tell Tommy," he said.

He pulled into the crew house drive on the twentieth of April with the Buick caked in mud to the windows.

Sunny was waiting on the porch in her flight jacket.

She ran down the steps and he picked her up.

"You came!"

"I said I'd come." He set her down and looked up at the crooked blue house. "This is it?"

"It leans," Sunny said. "You get used to it."

The landlady came out on the porch at five o'clock exactly with her one cigarette.

She looked at Pop. Pop looked at her.

"You're the one who drives a hard bargain," he said.

"You're the one who taught her to make hospital corners," she said. "Room's off the kitchen. It's got a window and a bad radiator."

"I'll fix the radiator."

"I know you will. That's why you got the room."

By the first of May the crew house was full.

Pop in the room off the kitchen.

Tommy upstairs.

Me across the hall from Tommy, though I slept at the small blue house more nights than not.

Pilots and mechanics coming and going at every hour, and all of them eating.

Pop cooked like the whole Bering Freight hangar was his family, which by the second week it was.

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