CHAPTER 98

NANA MAMA WAS brOWNING chicken at the stove and Ali was on his iPad when I walked in.

“Dad!” Ali cried and rushed to hug me. “You made it!”

“By the skin of my whatever,” I said, laughing and hugging him back. “Thanks for telling Ned that Willow’s Jiobit had gone off.”

“But why only for a few seconds every twelve hours?”

My grandmother put a lid on the skillet and came toward me. I said, “I’ll explain that later. Right now, Nana Mama needs some love.”

“I do,” she said and slipped into my arms. “When we heard you’d all gone missing in the Arctic, I thought I’d never see you again.”

“It wasn’t the Arctic,” Ali said.

“It was close,” I said. “Coldest I’ve ever been, anyway. Way below zero.”

She shivered, then pulled back and looked up at me. “No frostbite?”

“Miraculously, no.”

Ali said, “The news reports out of Canada said there was a Mountie with you who crashed a snowmobile into a canyon and survived.”

I nodded. “That’s true. Officer Fagan went off the edge and fell thirty feet, but she got free of the sled, and she and the machine landed in ten feet of snow on a ledge. We both had serious survival gear in the snowmobiles. She got to her sled, put up the double-wall tent, and stayed in it through the worst of the storms.”

Bree walked in, a towel around her hair. “I still don’t know how she survived and how she charged her satellite phone with the emergency solar panel even though the sun was hardly ever out.”

“She got just enough juice to send an emergency text giving her coordinates.”

“And John?” my grandmother asked. “Have you talked to him?”

“Thanks for reminding me,” I said. I called Rebecca Cantrell, who answered on the second ring.

“Alex!” she said in the most excited tone I’d ever heard from her. “We were just talking about the Cross family! Let me put the phone on speaker so John and Willow can hear.”

“I’ll do the same,” I said. “Bree, Ali, and Nana are here too.”

“John?” my grandmother said. “How are you?”

In a raspy whisper, Sampson said, “Sore, strong as a kitten, and never happier, Nana Mama.”

Before any of us could respond, Willow giggled and said, “Daddy and Rebecca are going to get married!”

We all started cheering and clapping. Bree said, “When did he ask?”

“I asked,” Rebecca said. “Just a few minutes ago. Willow said I should, so I did!”

“And I said yes!” Sampson laughed a little, then groaned.

Rebecca said, “It hurts when he laughs. Can we call you back? The doctor’s here.”

“You call when you’re up to it, and congratulations again!” I said.

When I hung up, we were all grinning like fools.

Bree said, “I needed that. A little pure joy for once, you know?”

I hugged her and said, “I do know.”

Jannie came by for dinner a few minutes later. We called Damon and talked with him before Nana Mama served chicken marengo, which tasted even better than the last time she’d made it.

After dinner, we watched some of the coverage of the presidential balls, and Ali made us check out a Korean reality-television show that put the hundred strongest people in that country through a winner-take-all series of tough physical challenges. It wasn’t my grandmother’s cup of tea. She went to bed shortly after it started.

Bree fell asleep on my shoulder before the end of the first challenge: who could hold on the longest to a bar suspended above deep water. I made it long enough to say good night to Ali but nodded off during the late news.