Steal the North: A Novel Read Free Page A

beloved Palouse hills. When her father noticed, he let the preacher condemn his daughter from the pulpit, call her a whore. She had to drop out of school. Kate swore to her father that the baby wasn’t Jamie’s. She said she’d committed adultery with a bunch of public school boys she barely knew.
    Why had Mom protected Jamie like that? Was it love? Too much love? Was it pride? The same pride that kept us alone all these years in this apartment? Had Jamie really chosen the endangered land over Mom? Or was it actually his youth that felt eroded?
    Every day Kate’s father yelled at her, spitting Bible verses in her face about harlots. Bethany swore the baby in her sister’s belly was a gift from God, and her father had better accept it as such. He would not, so meek Bethany took charge. She and Matt got married. His parents weren’t thrilled, but they conceded and even lent Matt the money to buy a trailer and give those two girls a home. Matt got a job at the potato factory. After Kate gave birth, she too got a job, waitressing at a truck stop café outside town by the interstate. By that time, she heard, Jamie Kagen had started college at WSU. Still, she expected any day for him to show up at the café, even after the first snowstorm had obliterated the highway.
    When he didn’t, she began living hard, which at first just meant wearing jeans and mascara. Then drinking. Bethany took care of the baby—sewed little dresses and blankets. Kate sank further. She had to get out of the area come spring. It would devastate Bethany to lose the baby, but Kate reasoned her sister could have her own babies soon. Kate couldn’t take another day at the café, staring out the windows at the plowed highway, dropping ketchup bottles or spilling coffee when she spotted a pickup similar to Jamie’s. Bethany went to their father and demanded the money their mother’s family had left for the girls when they turned eighteen. It wasn’t a lot, but Bethany gave both halves to her older sister. Kate owed her life and the life of her daughter to Bethany and Matt.
    Now, sixteen years later, Kate had just found out that Bethany never had any babies of her own. In those long years, Kate’s little sister hadn’t once been able to carry a baby to term. She’d lost them all. Kate couldn’t even imagine how Bethany had suffered. If only she’d known. So how could Kate possibly tell her sister no, that she wouldn’t allow her daughter to fly north to spend the summer and to participate in a faith healing for Bethany, who was pregnant for what she feared was the last time? How could Kate say no, even though she didn’t believe in faith healings, even though she found them, in fact, total bullshit? Even though she’d hoped after all these years that her sister would’ve left that backward church? There was a new young preacher at the church, and he suggested a virgin lay hands on Bethany’s belly to help heal her womb. A virgin who was also a relative would be ideal. How excited Bethany was when Matt found Kate’s number at the library on the World Wide Web and then again when she learned from Kate that her precious niece was, in fact, still a virgin. How could Kate possibly say no to this request even if it went against everything she believed in, or didn’t believe in? Everything she’d worked so hard to get the hell away from?
    “I owe Beth,” Kate said to her daughter. “And the only gift I can give her is you.”
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    “You’re shitting me, right?” asked Connor. “The whole summer? What am I supposed to do?” We were in his bedroom. It was Monday after school.
    “Isn’t your family going to Hawaii?”
    “Hawaii’s boring. How fucking suburban.” Connor hated the suburbs, found them stifling and unimaginative. I found his house mammoth and beautiful, even if it
did
look just like the other houses on the street with palm trees and Spanish tile and a multiple-car garage. “Besides,” he said, “I mean the rest of the