Chapter 18 #2
He set the phone down, walked out of the clinic, and drove toward the lake.
He didn’t go to Tessa’s house. He drove past the front gate, past the long gravel drive.
He turned at the eastern fence line and pulled onto the rough dirt tractor lane that ran beside the property and into the woods.
From there, he could approach Mick’s woodshop without being visible from the kitchen window.
The shop was dim and cold. He flipped on the lights.
The chair sat where he’d left it ten days ago.
He picked up the sandpaper.
He worked for an hour without thinking about anything but the wood under his hands.
The shop was quiet enough that he could hear the wind through the gap under the back door and the distant honking of Canadian geese on the lake.
He worked his way around the chair twice, raising the grain, smoothing the edges a little bit more, making sure it was perfectly smooth all over.
The door opened behind him. “Heard you was here,” Arlo said.
“Heard from who?”
“Brown Dog growled. Looked out and saw your truck sneakin’ down the back lane and figured you were heading here.”
“I wasn’t sneaking.”
“You was sneakin’. It’s all right. There’s times for sneakin’.” Arlo set a thermos and two enamel cups on the workbench. “Brought coffee. Figured you’d be at it a while.”
Arlo poured a cup, slid it across the bench, and lowered himself onto the rolling stool with a small grunt. “You finishin’ that today?”
“Going to try.”
“Good.” He sipped his coffee. “Need a hand?”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t.” He picked up another sheet of sandpaper from the workbench. “Where do you need me?”
Dillon pointed at the rocker arms with his sanding block. “There. They’ve been rough since I joined them. I never got them right.”
Arlo bent over one arm and ran his thumb down its length. “Mm. You went across the grain instead of with it. Easy fix. Hand me that sanding block.”
They worked in silence for a long time. The light through the skylights turned from white to gold to amber. Arlo did the arms. Dillon did the rockers. They didn’t talk except when one of them needed something.
Finally, Arlo straightened and stretched his back. “It’s ready for the oil.”
Dillon fetched the can of finishing oil from the supply shelf. He poured a little onto a rag and started on the seat while Arlo oiled the back.
The wood drank the oil hungrily, the pale and chalky raw wood, deepening into a warm amber shade, its grain coming alive under the rag. He worked it in slowly. Long strokes. Even pressure. The way Arlo had shown him.
Halfway through the second coat of oil, Arlo said, “She told her mama no, you know.”
Dillon kept rubbing. “I heard.”
Arlo dipped his rag again. “Quiet around here without you stoppin’ by.”
Dillon’s throat was suddenly tight. He didn’t answer.
“She knew you was avoidin’ her. Didn’t know if you was comin’ back. Did it anyway. Chose to stay because she and her girl want to be right here.”
“I know.”
“Just makin’ sure you knew.” The old man oiled along the curve of a back slat. “School talent show’s tomorrow.”
“I’m aware.”
“You goin’?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
“You should come, too,” Dillon remarked. “Makayla thinks pretty highly of you. Told me once she wished you were her grandpa.”
Arlo looked startled for the first time Dillon could ever remember. “That why she’s been calling me Pops lately?”
Dillon looked down quickly to hide his smile. “I imagine so.”
“Huh.”
They worked in companionable silence after that, and the chair came to life under their hands. By the time they’d finished three coats and the wood gleamed in burnished beauty, the windows were dark.
Dillon stood back and looked at the chair.
The seat where her body would rest. The arms where her hands would go.
The rockers that would mark the rhythm of her thinking, her relaxing, her grieving, her laughing, her stillness witnessing the slow change of light over Lake Stillwater for, he hoped, the rest of her life.
She’d said no to a hundred million dollars and chosen her porch. And he’d built her a chair for it.
His eyes burned. He didn’t blink for fear of sending tears down his cheeks.
“Help me carry it?” he asked Arlo.
The moon was a cold white thumbnail above the mountains. The grass was wet under their boots. Brown Dog tagged along with mild interest.
They set the chair down beside Makayla’s small blue rocker, its rockers facing the lake. Dillon stepped back and looked at the rocker waiting for Tessa’s morning coffee ritual tomorrow.
It was — there was no other word — right.
It looked as if it had always been there. As if it should always be there in that exact spot.
The kitchen window glowed yellow on the other side of the wall.
He could hear, faintly, the sound of a violin practicing inside the house.
The Bach partita. Its notes were quick, but stately and formal, marching along evenly as befitted the baroque era they were made for.
Makayla played it with composed precision and not a single note out of place.
She was ready for the talent show tomorrow.
He stood for a moment beside the chair, his hand resting on its back, the wood slightly warm under his palm. Then he tipped his hat at the women inside out of old habit, realized it was ridiculous in the dark of the porch, and walked across the backyard with Arlo to his truck.
Arlo paused at his fence. “You’ll see her tomorrow, then.”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” A pause. “I’d wear a clean shirt I was you.”
“I planned on it.”
“Mm.”
Brown Dog whuffed softly in farewell as he and the old man crossed the property line.
Dillon got in his truck and drove home through a valley turned blue by moonlight.
He didn’t turn the radio on. He didn’t pick up his phone.
He drove with both hands on the wheel and his head full of Bach’s partita behind a kitchen window, that and an eleven-year-old’s text saying, I want you to surprise her, too.
In his bedroom, he laid out a clean white shirt and his good jeans and the dark sport coat he only wore to funerals and weddings—and now, school talent shows.
He looked at himself in the mirror over the dresser. The man he saw was tired. In need of a shave. His eyes were red. Cal’s call had come in a little after three a.m. last night and he hadn’t slept since.
But he was not the empty man with nothing to give that Lexi had described.
He had never been that man.
He turned off the light and went to bed and slept, for the first time in long time, soundly and all the way through the night.