Epilogue
THE RIVER IS RUNNING high in late May, snowmelt off the Sawtooths pushing the gauge at Sunbeam past five thousand for the first time this spring. I check it from the dock at six a.m. while the coffee cools in my hand and the season gathers itself around me.
The lodge looks different this year. I rebuilt the website over the winter, hired a college kid from Boise to manage the social media, and brought on Deb’s niece part-time to handle bookings and front-desk work.
The corporate retreat clients stayed, most of them.
I lost two accounts that were Cody’s personal contacts and replaced them with three referrals from Dale’s network.
The guide community came through, and the second contract guide I hired for overflow season is starting next week.
Jim Fleming is on the books for July. He sent a card in March, handwritten, three sentences. He’s doing fine. He’s looking forward to the river. He’ll take the same cabin.
I read the card twice when it arrived and then pinned it to the board behind the front desk, next to the outfitter’s license and the photo of my father holding a bull trout on this dock thirty years ago.
The first guests of the season arrive on Friday.
I spent yesterday stocking the cabins, checking the mattresses, and restocking the bathroom supplies.
Cabin Four has new curtains. I picked them out in Ketchum in March, standing in a home goods store with one hand on my stomach and the other holding fabric samples up to the light.
I chose a dark blue that matches the river at dusk.
Gigi’s sunglasses are long gone from Cabin One.
So is every other trace of the life Cody tried to build on top of mine.
I cleaned it all out in September, and what’s left is the lodge I bought from Clint Emerson, the lodge my father guided from, and the lodge I rebuilt with my own hands. It’s more than enough.
Noah is in the kitchen making breakfast. He has his own place in Stanley, a rental cabin three miles up the road, but he’s been here more than there since he came back in April for the second year of the habitat study.
The university extended his grant. The cutthroat data from last summer’s side channel survey was significant enough to justify a multi-year project, and the side channel is now a protected research site with my name in the conservation filing.
The grant brought him back to Stanley. Everything else kept him here.
The relationship survived a winter of Noah in Boise and me in Stanley, of weekend drives through snow on Highway 21 and phone calls where we talked about water temperature data and what we were cooking for dinner and nothing that felt like performance.
The divorce finalized in February, quietly and uncontested.
By then, Noah had a toothbrush at the lodge and I had a drawer at his apartment in Boise.
That was more honest infrastructure than six years of marriage had produced.
It’s real in a way that doesn’t require constant proof, built on two people who like working near each other, talking at the end of the day, and sleeping in a bed that’s bigger than a cot.
We bought a new bed for the owner’s quarters in January. That felt like a commitment neither of us needed to explain.
I walk back up from the dock and into the kitchen. Noah is at the stove, scrambling eggs with one hand and reading a journal article on his phone with the other. He has that look he gets when the data contradicts his hypothesis, a small frown, his coffee forgotten beside him.
“The emergence timing is off,” he says. “By almost a week. Something changed in the substrate since last September.”
“Check the sediment load from the spring runoff,” I say. “We had a heavier melt than usual. It could have shifted the gravel composition in the upper spawning beds.”
He looks up at me. “That’s a good theory.”
“It’s not a theory. It’s twenty years of watching this river.”
He writes it down in his notebook. I pour myself a second cup of coffee, then remember and switch to tea instead. Noah catches the switch and his expression changes, softens into something private and warm.
“Appointment’s at two,” he says.
“I know.”
After a winter of doctor’s appointments and cautious, careful hope, the ultrasound at the clinic in Ketchum confirmed what the home test had already told us in March.
I’m twelve weeks along. The due date is November, which means I’ll finish the guiding season before anything changes enough to keep me off the water.
I stand at the kitchen counter with my tea and look out the window at the dock and the river and the mountains still carrying snow on their peaks.
My wader straps don’t fit as well as they did last season.
I let the adjustment out yesterday but didn’t tell Noah, because I wanted one more morning of it being mine before it became ours.
This lodge was mine before Cody, and it’s mine after him. The river was here before my father, and it’ll run after I’m gone. The baby is the only new thing in this equation, and it’s the thing I wanted most and nearly lost to a man who didn’t think I deserved to know the truth.
I finish my tea. Noah brings me a plate of eggs. Outside, the Salmon River pushes past the dock at five thousand cubic feet per second, same direction it’s always run. The season is starting, and my hands are full in a way that has nothing to do with work.