Chapter 12
Dillon had been awake since four, but it wasn’t an emergency that had him staring at the dark ceiling. It was a woman’s fingertips on his arm and the way she’d shed a tear when an old man said, you’re one of us, and meant it.
He drank coffee at the sink until the sun came up. By six-thirty he was in his truck headed for Fern’s farm, because Thursday was Chairman Meow’s glucose draw, and he was not, absolutely not, going there for any other reason.
Arlo was waiting for him when he pulled up the gravel drive. Not at the fence line, where Arlo usually positioned himself to deliver cryptic bulletins for Tessa to decode, but on her porch. Brown Dog stretched out at his feet and Arlo held a thermos in both hands.
Tessa stepped out onto the porch in jeans and a flannel shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a loose braid, and she had a mug in each hand. She walked down the steps and held one out to him without a word.
“Morning,” he said, accepting the steaming coffee.
“Morning.” She had dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there Monday. Yesterday had taken a pound of flesh out of her. “Chairman’s in the rafters, refusing to let me catch him.”
“I’ll bring him down.”
“Brave man.” She added under her breath, “Or foolish.”
His lips twitched, but in case she hadn’t meant for him to hear that last part, he didn’t smile.
“Arlo wants to see you when you’re done.” She gave him a look he couldn’t read. “He wouldn’t say about what. He just walked over at six, sat down in Fern’s chair, and started pouring himself coffee.”
Dillon glanced toward the porch. Arlo lifted the thermos lid/cup in greeting.
“Huh,” Dillon said.
“My thoughts exactly.”
Chairman Meow was as meek as a lamb for Dillon, and she scowled as she held the cat for Dillon to draw blood.
The cat’s blood sugar was perfect. He checked the rest of the menagerie, and everyone was doing fine.
Tessa reported that the donkey ate a tarp Tessa had used to cover the chicken feed, and he told her that was what donkeys did.
Other than her manure having blue strands of plastic in it for a few days, Loretta would be fine.
He dropped his bag off in his truck, and spied Arlo, now standing by the workshop door. He headed toward the old man.
The workshop was set back from the house behind a row of apple trees just starting to bud. The outside was board-and-batten pine, weathered to the color of driftwood.
Arlo held his hat reverently in his hands, the way a man might hold it in church.
“Arlo.”
“Dillon.” Arlo stared at the door as he said heavily, “I haven’t been in here since Mick died.”
There wasn’t an answer to that, so Dillon folded his arms across his chest and waited. Brown Dog moved closer to Arlo and leaned against his leg. The old dog had a way of knowing when a person needed to feel his weight against them.
“Arlo, you don’t have to go in now—”
“I know I don’t.” Arlo put his hat back on and reached for the padlock. “But it’s time.”
Withdrawing a keyring from his pocket, he popped the padlock and opened the door. Dillon followed him into Mick Lawrence’s workshop.
The place was clean and everything was in its place. A pencil even lay sharpened beside an unfinished box.
Dillon stood very still. Tessa’s husband might be long gone, but he still felt like he was standing in a room he had no right to be in.
Arlo walked to the pegboard, took down a hand plane, and turned it over in his fingers the way a man will turn over an old photograph. “Stanley No. 4. His grandpa gave him this one when for his twelfth birthday. Told him a plane is like a dog—if you take care of it, it’ll remember you.”
Dillon almost smiled. “That sounds like something you’d say.”
“Josiah Lawrence said a lot of things.” Arlo ran his thumb along the plane’s sole. “Most of them worth listening to.”
He put the tool down on the workbench. Then he reached for a steel toolbox tucked under the bench and rolled it out on its swivel wheels. He lowered himself onto an upturned crate beside the drawered box.
“Sit down, son.”
Dillon looked around and spied a rolling stool over by a table with whittling tools neatly stored in flat trays. He fetched it and sat.
“I’m going to teach you to use this shop,” Arlo said. “Fern and I talked about this place not long before she passed. She said the shop, the tools, needed using.”
“Arlo—” He stopped, unsure of what to say. He was a veterinarian. He could intubate a colicky horse or birth a calf in a driving snowstorm. But he did not, generally, know what to do when a grieving old man asked him to learn a craft like woodworking.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Arlo said. “You’re thinking you got no business in here. Wrong tools, wrong man, wrong shop.” He finally looked up. His pale eyes were clear. “I’m telling you, Mick wouldn’t mind. He’d want someone using this place. Looking after it.”
Yes, but did that include looking after the man’s wife? Dillon didn’t know what to say to that either, so he said nothing.
“We’re going to build Makayla a mounting block,” Arlo declared. “That child can’t get on June without climbing the fence rail, and one of these days the fence rail’s going to give out. She’s gonna hurt herself or I’m gonna have to haul her out of the mud. I’m too old for that.”
“That’s a good idea.” Dillon allowed. “I’m a fair hand with repairs around a house.” He looked around the shop. “But I don’t know anything about fancy woodworking.”
“A mounting block’s not fancy. Two steps and a top.” Arlo pulled out a tape measure. “You ever run a table saw?”
“In high school shop class. Closing in on twenty years ago.”
“Then you’ll remember how by lunch.”
Arlo was a patient teacher, which Dillon hadn’t expected. He showed Dillon how to pick a board by sighting down the edge for a bend or flaw. He demonstrated how to draw cut lines with a square, then he handed Dillon a pencil from the can of pencils and said, “Your turn.”
The first cut was off by an eighth of an inch. Dillon realized he’d failed to account for the thickness of the saw blade as soon as he finished pushing the board past the table saw’s spinning blade. The second cut was better. The third was square.
He liked the feel of it. Which surprised him.
He hadn’t expected to enjoy shaping wood into something useful.
He was a man of living tissue. Pulse rates, breath sounds and all the subtle tells of how and where an animal was in pain.
Wood was alien to him. But there was something satisfying about cutting a line that stayed where you put it.
Arlo watched him work for a while without talking. Then, as Dillon started sanding the edges of the top piece, the old man said, “Mick was quiet out here.”
Dillon’s hand slowed, but he kept sanding.
“People remember his charm,” Arlo went on.
“His big laugh. The way he could talk a stranger out of a bad day in three minutes flat. And he was all that. But out here he’d work for hours without saying a word.
Fern used to stand in the doorway and watch him work.
She said it was the only time he was ever at peace. ”
Dillon ran his thumb along the edge he’d just sanded. Not as smooth as a horse’s velvety nose but getting there.
“I’m sorry I didn’t know him,” he said.
“You two would’ve liked each other. People always accused Fern of being a flaky hippie and letting her boy run wild, but he was surprisingly old-fashioned.
Valued honesty and hard work and kept his word.
He would’ve appreciated you coming here, using his tools, and building something for his girl.
” A paused. “Don’t think he’d mind you paying attention to his wife now that he’s gone. ”
Dillon kept sanding. Kept his face carefully, professionally blank.
“Of course, that’s between you and Tessa,” Arlo said mildly. “I figure a man in your position might feel like he’s stepping on a ghost. But I knew the ghost in question, and the ghost isn’t the problem. He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stingy. He’d want Tessa to keep living. Be happy.”
His throat inexplicably tight, Dillon set the sanded piece of wood on the workbench beside the others, picked up the next one, and started on its edge. He finished the last piece and straightened, stretching his back.
“That’s enough for today,” Arlo said. “You can put it together next time you’re here.”
“I’ll call you when I’ve got some free time—”
Arlo cut him off, saying, “Mick gave me the key to this place years ago. Told me to come use it any time I wanted. Now, I’m doing the same for you.” Arlo held out his hand, and lying in his palm was a shiny new key.
“Made you a copy. Use this place any time you want.”
Surprised and humbled, Dillon took the key. He wiped down the workbench and table saw, swept up the sawdust, and turned to see Arlo staring at Mick’s pencil.
Very deliberately, Arlo picked it up, walked over to the coffee can, and put it with the other pencils. He looked up at Dillon and said gruffly, “Tessa doesn’t need this place to be a shrine anymore,” he said. “It’s just a pencil.”
Dillon he put away the broom and followed Arlo outside in silence.
The next morning, he was back in the woodshop assembling Makayla’s mounting block when his phone rang. The caller was Pete Maddox. He ran cattle on four hundred acres out at the west end of the lake. “What’s going on, Pete?” he asked briskly.
“I got a cow birthing. First-timer. Been pushing going on two hours. Calf’s not coming.”
“Position?”
“Can’t tell. She’s upset. Won’t lie down or stand still to let me reposition the calf. Wife’s out of town and my daughter left for college last fall. I’ve got no help to handle her.
Dillon put down the screwdriver and screws. “Keep her quiet if you can, but don’t get yourself killed trying. If she goes down, put a rope on her and keep her down. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Dillon turned to leave, and that was when he realized Tessa was standing in the doorway. He didn’t know how long she’d been there.