Chapter Two
THE UPPER SECTION ABOVE Rough Creek is running too fast for what I had in mind.
I’d come out to scout it for a client float later in the week, but snowmelt from the higher elevations pushed the flow up overnight, and the water is moving hard enough to turn a good day into a rescue call.
I pull the drift boat to the bank and wade downstream to check the gradient.
It’s too steep and too choked with debris to run safely.
I’ll come back in ten days when the runoff settles.
I trailer the boat at the pullout and drive back toward the lodge on the gravel road along the north side of the valley. I’m running through alternative sections for the client float when Cody’s truck appears in a pullout ahead, parked at the trailhead for the old Hanson Creek path.
This is a locals-only access with no maintained trail and no signage. It leads to a meadow along the creek where my father used to eat lunch during long guide days. I showed Cody this spot our first summer together. There’s no reason for anyone from the lodge to be out here on a Tuesday afternoon.
Cody told me this morning he was making a supply run to Ketchum. His truck is here, forty minutes in the wrong direction.
I pull off the road fifty yards past the pullout and sit with the engine idling.
Then I turn it off and start walking up the trail with my water bottle.
The path is narrow, overgrown with lupine and bitterbrush, and it takes about ten minutes to reach the meadow.
The creek is loud enough to cover my footsteps.
The meadow opens up around a bend in the trail, and they’re sitting in the grass near the water.
Gigi is leaning back against Cody’s chest, her legs stretched out in front of her.
She’s wearing his flannel, the green-and-gray one I washed two days ago and hung on the hook by the lodge door.
They’re sharing food from the lodge kitchen, sandwiches on the sourdough bread I bought at the Sawtooth Market last weekend, wrapped in aluminum foil from the drawer below the coffee maker.
A bottle of wine sits open between them, the same label Cody put in Cabin Four for Gigi’s arrival.
They’re not frantic or watchful. They’re not checking phones or glancing toward the trail.
They’re settled, comfortable, two people deep into something that has its own rhythms and its own shorthand.
Gigi says something I can’t make out, and Cody laughs and presses his mouth to her hair, and she tips her head back against his shoulder, settling into him, comfortable and unhurried.
This is not new, and it’s not a mistake. It’s a routine.
I stand behind a Douglas fir about forty yards from the meadow, maybe a minute, long enough to understand what I’m looking at and to stop searching for another explanation. Then I turn around and walk back to my truck.
I don’t cry on the drive back to the lodge, don’t pull over, hit the steering wheel, or call anyone.
Somewhere past the Sunbeam turnoff, my hands start aching from the grip on the wheel, and I have to force them open one finger at a time.
I drive forty minutes on the gravel road thinking about the flannel I washed, the bread I bought, and the wine I watched Cody carry to Gigi’s cabin three days ago while Jim walked toward the river with his fly rod.
I’m back at the lodge by noon. I eat a sandwich sitting at the kitchen island, check the client board, and change into clean waders. By the time I’ve rigged the fourteen-footer and loaded the cooler, it’s almost one-thirty.
Dave and Linda Marsh arrive at two, a couple from Oregon here for their anniversary.
They’re returning guests. Dave ties his own flies, and Linda is a better angler than he is but never mentions it.
I like them. They don’t need narration or hand-holding on the water.
They just need someone to put the boat in the right place at the right time, and that’s the one thing I’m certain I can still do today.
I check the anchor one more time, grab the lunches I packed this morning before dawn, before the pregnancy test, or any of this. We push off the bank at two-fifteen.
The river asks specific questions. Where is the current breaking?
What’s the depth at the seam line? Is that riffle holding fish or pushing them downstream?
If I don’t answer correctly, someone goes in the water or misses a catch.
For three and a half hours, I answer every question the Salmon puts to me.
I put Dave on a rainbow at the first bend below the put-in, a fat fourteen-incher that takes his dry fly on the first drift.
He whoops and plays it carefully. I net it and hold it in the current while he admires the coloring, the pink stripe bright against the silver.
Linda watches with her rod tucked under her arm and a look of patient amusement that tells me she’s waiting for her turn with the confidence of a woman who knows it’s coming.
It comes an hour later. A twenty-inch cutthroat takes her size sixteen elk hair caddis on a dead-drift through a seam I almost missed because I was thinking about a green-and-gray flannel shirt, and Linda sets the hook with a wrist snap that makes Dave say, “Dang,” under his breath.
I net the fish and hold it up and she grins as Dave tells her she’s the best angler he’s ever fished with.
For about thirty seconds, the world narrows to a woman with a trout, a husband who loves watching her catch them, and a river that runs regardless of what’s happening on its banks.
I don’t think about my husband for more than ten seconds at a time. The river won’t let me. Every drift, every read, and every correction of the boat’s angle in the current demands a specific answer, and I give specific answers for three and a half hours. The work holds me together.
The float ends at five-thirty. I drop Dave and Linda at the lodge with their fish stories and their sunburned noses, and I clean the boat alone in the equipment shed while the afternoon cools into evening.
The recalibration has been running underneath the guiding all day.
The picture is assembling from details I never questioned.
Gigi is here for a third summer. Cody volunteered to handle the Flemings’ check-in personally and has been disappearing for two or three hours at a time.
He’d say he was making a supply run, or checking trail conditions, or driving to Sunbeam to look at the gauge when I could have told him the reading from my phone.
The lodge goes quiet by ten. Jim and Gigi are in Cabin Four. Dave and Linda turned in early in Cabin One. The other guests, a father and his teenage son here for a three-day trip, are dark in Cabin Two.
I lock the office door, sit down at the desk, and open Cody’s laptop. His password is the same one he’s used for years, the name of the dog he had in college and his graduation year. I’ve known it since our first year together.
I type Gigi’s name into the email search bar.
Three years of messages fill the screen. I screenshot the search results page and send the image to my own email.
Then I start reading.