North of Hope by Shannon Polson

my favorite striped Esprit outfit, which wasn’t supposed to be put in the dryer. That’s when I started doing my own laundry.
    Having to put Tampax on the shopping list for Dad in silent mortification, which became exponentially worse when he brought home the wrong kind.
    I remember the insidious financial strain as Dad navigated a divorce and ran a small law practice that, like the rest of the Alaskan economy, was utterly dependent on oil revenues and staggered under the oil crash of 1986 and the crippling state recession that followed. I remember Dad showing up to our swim practices exhausted from work and sitting in the bleachers, his shoulders sagging with fatigue. I remember asking Dad why he was doing so much with the swim team board and at church when he was so tired and working so hard. “‘To whom much is given, much is expected,’” he quoted with a tiredness that ran deeper than I could comprehend. I always knew him, throughout his life, to volunteer in meaningful and behind-the-scenes ways, and he did so with joy, his manner and execution learned from his parents before him. I remember putting together a party for Dad, trying to imitate what we had seen grown-ups do in earlier years, wanting somehow to acknowledge his Herculean efforts. I hung a sign in the kitchen that said “We love you Dad!” and cut up carrots on a platter served next to a bowl of ranch dressing.
    I learned quickly, as kids do, how to adapt, constructing a facade of success that I wielded like a shield. In high school I was president of the debate team, captain of the swim team, and editor of the literary magazine, which we laid out with paper and glue. I figured out what I needed to do to get mostly A’s in honors classes at my large public high school, and didn’t do more. I learned that if I kept busy by doing a lot of things and doing them well, I didn’t have to think about anything I wanted to avoid; I could get the attention a first child craves, and be excused from things I wantednothing to do with, like family counseling. If I performed, I was left alone. As soon as I had my driver’s license at sixteen, I moved my small stash of things from my mom’s house, where we spent every other week, back up to Dad’s house on a day when he was in Kodiak for business.
    Five years after the divorce, Dad met and married Kathy, an elementary school teacher only a couple of years younger than he was with a quick smile and an easy laugh, light-blue eyes, and rosy cheeks. They married the summer I left for college. I regarded my new stepmom with considerable wariness. I went along when she scheduled a color assessment for me, coaxing me beyond my tomboyish ways. I wore the clothes she bought. She treated me as a daughter at times and a friend at others. I welcomed and resisted both. Though craving maternal affection, I didn’t want to recognize the shift in dynamics in our household. We weren’t any of us so different from the bull moose that wandered across our lawn. We sparred to establish dominance—my father as parent, me as teenager growing into an adult; my stepmother defining her new role, me resisting change to the precarious settlement of earlier family brokenness. We left a few antler prongs on the ground. Once focused exclusively on us kids, Dad found happiness with his new wife. I was too self-absorbed to worry about parental satisfaction. My one aim in life had been to please my father. I didn’t know what to do if he was no longer as interested. The dynamic of women in a household could chafe through civility at times to reveal a hardness as sharp as the shale on the Chugach behind our home.
    Despite the challenges, Kathy brought a beauty and an elegance to our lives that I loved, even as she managed our home with a fastidiousness beyond my tolerance. She and Dad remodeled the entire house soon after they were married, making it their own, and rules changed to maintain its shiny newness. I grumbled during each visit