Chapter 4
four
ZACH
Dan Lemont brought a folder.
Nobody brings a folder anymore. Everything lives on a tablet and gets emailed to four lawyers before anybody’s had breakfast. Dan brings a folder, tabbed, with a rubber band around it, and he puts it on the table like he’s laying down a hand of cards.
“I’m not signing anything at my grandmother’s birthday,” I said.
“Nobody’s asking you to sign. I’m asking you to look.”
“Dan.”
“Look, Zachary.”
So I looked.
First tab was older than my father. My grandfather’s signature and Dan’s father’s, side by side, on a piece of ground neither of them could afford at the time.
Every tab after it was the same handshake drawn again, and again, until there wasn’t a property with our name on it that didn’t have a Lemont somewhere in the paperwork. Not a big slice. Just everywhere.
“When your grandmother signs at the end of the week,” Dan said, “all of that has to come across into the new structure. Same slice. Same money. New paper.”
“And you’ll sign it.”
“Course I’ll sign it.” He snapped the rubber band back around the folder. “It’s a formality.”
Then he said, “And the other thing. Are we doing that or not?”
“Not at my grandmother’s birthday, Dan.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not a no,” I said.
I’ve known that man since I was in a car seat. He taught me to fish. He carried my father’s casket.
He put the folder back in his bag, still unsigned, and went to find my grandmother.
Lydia was still asleep when I went down. She sleeps hard up here, which she doesn’t at home, and I stood in the door a minute like an idiot watching my wife breathe.
Simon was already at the coffee, in a robe, looking like a man who has decided the day is going to have to come to him.
“She up?” he asked.
“Out cold,” I said with a chuckle. “Who’s surprised?”
“Good. Leave her. That woman hasn’t slept a full night since March and you’re all pretending not to notice. Also, your grandmother’s replanting the whole east border of the resort.”
“She’s not.”
“She has a man with a truck, Zach. Might want to go check it out.”
“God help us all.”
We walk the property every year. It’s the only part of this job I’d do for free.
You go out along the service road, up past the lift barn, then cut back down through the trees on the old logging track so you come at the lodge from above. My grandfather did it with a clipboard and a temper. I do it with a coffee.
Dan can’t manage the track anymore, so he waved us off from the porch.
“Take Shayna. She’ll tell you everything that’s wrong with the place.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the place.”
“There’s something wrong with every place.”
Shayna fell in beside me at the gate. She’s good company. She always has been.
She knows this ground, too. The Lemonts have been coming up here since before either of us could drive, and somewhere past the lift barn she stopped, looked back down the hill, and told me the east border was going to flood in April if my grandmother put anything in it that couldn’t take wet feet.
She was right. I’m not telling my grandmother that.
“You still take the long way around the barn.”
“It’s the only way that isn’t mud.”
“It’s not the only way. You just always take it.” She started walking again. “You’ve done it since you were nineteen.”
I laughed, because it’s funny, being known that long.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, further down the track.
“You’re going to.”
“Do you ever think about Jackson?”
I had to go looking for what she meant, which ought to tell anybody everything. “The bed? God. That was a lifetime ago.”
“It was.” She went quiet for a few steps. “I didn’t handle that well.”
“Neither of us handled anything well. We were children.”
“Mm,” she said.
And she left it there, and I let her, because we were nearly at the tree line and I could see my roof.
“Is Lydia all right?”
“She’s great. Why?”
“No reason. She seemed a bit quiet last night, that’s all. I wondered if I’d said something.”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“I do that, you know. I’m told I’m a lot.”
She wasn’t wrong, and I knew that first-hand.
“You didn’t say anything,” I said. “She’s just not a people-y person. She goes quiet in a crowd and everybody decides she’s unhappy. She isn’t. She’s working.”
“Working.”
“Watching. Same thing with her.” I stepped over a root and held a branch back for her. “Ask her tomorrow what your mother had on at dinner. She’ll tell you the earrings. She’ll tell you your dad checked his watch twice during the toast and that Petey didn’t eat anything.”
“That’s a bit unsettling.”
“It’s the best thing about her.”
“That’s a lovely thing to say about your wife.”
“It’s true.”
“Doesn’t stop it from being lovely, Zach.” She stepped over the root herself. “Is it hard for her? Coming into all of this?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“You want the honest version?”
“Always.”
“She built that lodge. All of it. Every beam, every chair, the whole feel of the place, and she drove it up here herself in a car with the seats down.” We came out of the trees. “And my grandmother introduces her to people as my wife.”
“Magda adores her.”
“Magda absolutely adores her. Doesn’t change what she says.” I heard my voice do something and pulled it back. “Anyway. Lyd goes small at these things and I hate watching it. She won’t let me fix it. She says fixing it would be worse.”
“She’s probably right.”
“She’s always right. That’s the problem with marrying somebody who notices everything.”
Shayna laughed at that. It’s a good laugh, hers. It always was.
We came out above the lodge where the trees break and you get all of it at once. The roofline, the ridge behind it, the light coming down over the whole run of it.
“God,” she said. “Look at it.”
“I know.”
“You did this.”
“I didn’t do any of it. I paid for it.”
She put her hand flat between my shoulder blades.
“You always undersell yourself up here,” she said. “You never did that anywhere else.”
I folded my arms and looked out over it with a better view than I’d had in all the years I’ve been coming up. Her hand slipped down for a second, patting me on the back before it slid away.
Petey had the boat photos out when we got in. Somebody had found the album.
Shayna went straight for it, laughing, and pulled one out and held it up over the table.
“Zachary Lee Wright,” she said. “Explain yourself.”
There I am with no shirt on, standing up on the rail of a boat in Baja doing something that could comfortably have killed me. Long hair. Absolutely no sense.
“That’s not me.”
“That is entirely you.”
“That is a man who looks like me.”
My grandmother took the photograph out of Shayna’s hand, looked at it a long moment, and said, “He was so happy,” in a voice that landed somewhere I wasn’t expecting, and put it back in the album.
Lydia came down while I was standing there.
She stopped in the doorway and looked for me. She found me. I held up a finger. One second. I had Dan mid-sentence and my grandmother holding an album and I only needed a second.
By the time I got there she was over by the window with Simon, laughing at something, perfectly fine.
We didn’t get to talk until dinner.
And I never mentioned the walk with Shayna.
Not because I was hiding it. There was nothing to hide.
It came into my head once, while I was watching Lydia put her earrings in.
I thought about it for roughly as long as it takes to think about anything.
Then I said something about my grandmother and the east border instead. She laughed, and we went downstairs.
No harm, no foul.