Lara
Six Months Later...
My grandmother has claimed the good chair.
The good chair is the one inside by the woodstove, the one with the worn armrest, and she found it on her first evening, and that was that. Shaw moved his field notebooks off the side table without being asked, and put her tea there every morning. He hasn't said a word about it.
My grandmother approves of people who don't make a fuss.
She and my cousin drove up from Prince George on Tuesday without telling me they were coming, which is exactly how my grandmother does things.
She arrived with a box of food: dried berries, smoked fish, a jar of something she put up in September that she refuses to name but which is extraordinary on toast, and looked at the cabin and the ridge and Shaw, in that order, with the same considering expression.
Then she sat down and stayed. She might stay indefinitely; I have yet to find out, but neither of us would mind.
In the afternoon, the three of us walk the lower trail.
My grandmother sets her own pace, which is slower than ours and more thorough.
She stops at things we would have walked past, like a bracket fungus on a fallen spruce, a place where the soil changes colour, a stand of birch that she stands in for a full minute without explaining why.
Shaw stops when she stops. Doesn't rush her. Doesn't fill the silences.
At one point, she and I walk ahead while she speaks quietly to me in Cree.
“He listens to land,” she says. “Not everyone does.”
I look back at him, standing where she'd stood in the birch, looking up at the canopy with the same quality of attention he gives everything worth looking at.
“I know,” I say.
She takes my arm.
“Good.” She smiles and then adds in English, “He’s a keeper.”
Dinner is all of us at the table, which is new for this cabin and doesn't feel new at all.
Afterward, my grandmother and Shaw sit on the porch in the dark for a while. I watch through the window. They don't appear to be talking. They're just sitting, the valley below going from purple to black, the first stars coming out above the ridge.
I wash the dishes and don't interrupt.
When I come out with tea, they make room for me. I sit between them and pull my jacket closed against the October air, and the three of us look at the valley and the dark outline of the trail above and the stars coming out one by one over the mountains.
My grandmother puts her hand over mine on the armrest.
The woodstove is warm behind the glass. The cabin light spills out onto the porch boards. Somewhere up in the trees, an owl calls once and goes quiet.
Shaw reaches over and tucks my collar up against the cold without saying anything.
I lean into him and close my eyes and listen to the ridge.
I am home. Completely, quietly, entirely home.