Three Rivers Read Free

graceful. He belonged to this place, and Obi had no regrets about taking him from that other life. That woman from Social Services might even be impressed by how much Liam had grown.
    Obi sliced through the joints of the deer’s back legs and cut away the rump steaks. Most of the meat he cut into bite-sized pieces for stew, peeling away the tendons and connective tissue. He sliced the hams into strips and buried them in a pile of kosher salt. He filled his largest stew pot half full with water from the fresh stream and built two fires: one from coal and soft woods that sent up licks of flame and boiled the water in the pot, the other smoky and dry, a bed of coals topped with oak chips. Over the dry fire, Obi set up a crisscrossing frame of branches and stretched salted strips of meat across the wood. The smell of the smoke mingled with the fresh game and wafted out along the banks of the river.
    Obi used the side mirror on his truck to examine the cut beneath his eye. The gash was deep and swollen. Obi dipped a cloth in a bit of river water and ran it along the wound. He scraped out the dried blood and the dirt and pressed to staunch the flow of fresh blood. It stung. Liam stood beside him, took the bloody cloth from him, and handed him a fresh one. When the blood coagulated, Obi smeared the antiseptic cream into the wound and covered it with a bandage. It needed stitches, but he didn’t have the guts to stick a needle so close to his eye.
    â€œI’m hungry,” Liam said.
    Obi touched the boy’s hair. “Let’s make some breakfast.”
    â€œCan we eat the deer?”
    â€œNot yet,” Obi said. “Tonight we’ll have a feast.” He rummaged around in the back of the truck, searching through their supplies. “How about pancakes? We still have some of those blueberries we picked.”
    Liam pulled out the skillet and held it up like an offering. “Pancakes it is.”

 
    Chapter Three
    Geneva lay still and let the heat and shifting colors of the sauna wash over and through her. Guilt and obligation seeped from her pores, the flop sweat of family dysfunction. She itched to wipe her eyes and shake out her hair, but she resisted. The sweat, the poison, would evaporate at its own pace.
    Some of the other women in the room moaned or cried out. One seemed to be performing a solo drum concert on her thighs. The slapping sound wasn’t quite loud enough to drown out the nagging voice of Geneva’s own weak conscience. Oh, shut the hell up, she told the voice. She knew damn well what people thought of her. No need to condemn herself.
    These were the judgments against her: mad as a loon, unbelievably selfish, a bad mother, and a terrible wife. Fact is, Geneva’s life was one long string of tragedy and yet she went right on living, getting stronger and more powerful in spite of it. People with ordinary problems believed they knew suffering. They thought they had a right to judge her. They had no right.
    The moist cedar scent of the room mixed with the body odor from so many women sweating together. The air was thick and blood rich. She’d been away too long, allowed the anemia of her daily life to drag her down. Between deep breaths, her naked body filled with color. She forgot everything she ever knew. She remembered things she’d never known before. Her soul went blue, a deep cool blue like the color of the sky in springtime, her favorite turquoise bracelet, her grandmother’s Spode china. Just when she was good and settled into the blue, it deepened. Purple gathered in her belly and spread out in a sensual, pulsing rhythm. She shuddered with pleasure. When she was wrung out and weak, red took over. It rushed through her like a wildfire, burned her skin and brain, then seemed to double back and tighten into a small, hot fist. Red gathered up all her anger into a tight mass at the base of her spine. It grew hotter until she feared she’d burst into