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I sigh and give her a hard look. She shrugs, and I go back to eating.
“Just making conversation,” Seri says. “I’m not trying to pry.”
We finish our meal in silence, but she keeps looking over at me. I know she’s going to keep asking questions if I don’t say something, and I figure Margot is a benign enough topic.
“I lived with a girlfriend,” I finally tell her.
“Oh.” Seri looks down and shuffles scrambled eggs around her plate. “What happened?”
“Broke up.”
“Is that why you live alone now?”
“No.” I stand and reach out for her empty plate.
“I can do the dishes,” Seri says.
“You cooked.” I raise an eyebrow, but she doesn’t make me remind her about how she did the dishes when I cooked. She hands me her plate and cup with a wry smile.
“So, why are you alone now?” she asks. “I thought maybe you had just always been a hermit.”
I glare at her, but she’s smiling playfully. I shake my head, still not knowing what to make of her.
“We broke up because I was moving out here,” I tell her. She sits quietly eyeing me and waiting for more. I dunk the dishes in the water and start to scrub. “She didn’t want me to live alone, but I was a shitty boyfriend, and we both knew it.”
“You don’t seem all that bad,” she says quietly. “A little moody, maybe.”
“I’m moody?” I laugh. “You’re one to talk.”
“I am a little out of my element here,” Seri says in her defense. “Being trapped in a snowstorm wasn’t exactly in my travel plans.”
“How did you get here anyway?” I ask. The best offense is a good defense, and turning the questions back on her might just keep them away from me for a while.
“I’m still trying to figure that one out myself,” she says with a nervous chuckle. “I was never the adventurous type. I moved to Montana for a while, thinking it was a good place to get away from it all. I heard a bunch of the fishermen there talking about making a trip to Canada, and it seems liked a good idea at the time. Once I crossed the border, I just kept heading north. I needed to get away from everything, and up here seemed like a good place for that.”
“It is.”
“I certainly wasn’t thinking about how inhospitable the weather is. It’s not like I was going all the way to Alaska. I thought the weather here would be more like Calgary.”
“We’re a long way from Calgary.” Her story doesn’t make a lot of sense. Traveling to Calgary, or even Edmonton, I could understand. They were both good-sized cities with a lot to offer, but once people leave Alberta, they usually change their minds and head back south.
“I get that now. I should have thought about it more or done more research. I wasn’t thinking though, not about that, anyway. Considering the consequences of my lack of planning wasn’t the main thing on my mind.”
She pauses for a long moment before laughing loudly.
“’If you keep that up, you’ll be just like her.’ That’s what my dad always said.”
“Just like who?”
“My older sister.” Seri’s voice drops in tone and volume. “She’s dead now.”
“Sorry,” I mutter. I never know what to say when people drop a bombshell like that. Margot was pretty good about saying all the right things when some friend of hers was going through a crisis, but I never picked up the skill.
“It was a while ago,” she says. “Two years this spring.”
I wait for her to go on, but she’s just staring at her hands and rubbing at the nail of her thumb.
“How did she die?”
