THE DOG STILL KNOWS ME
I go to the monument shed on a Thursday to get Micah's signature on a right-of-way form, purely administrative, the kind of errand I could have handled by leaving the paperwork in his mailbox at the pit office.
I don't leave it in his mailbox. I drive it out to the shed myself, and I don't examine too closely why.
The shed sits on the far side of the club's property, separate from the clubhouse proper, a low stone building with good north light and a roof Micah re-shingled himself two summers before I left.
I remember helping him haul shingles up the ladder that summer, both of us sunburned and sweaty by the end of each day, arguing amiably about nail patterns and flashing details neither of us actually understood well enough to argue about with any real authority.
It was, I think now, one of the last simple, uncomplicated weeks we had together, before Hollis's diagnosis, before any of the fear that eventually broke us started pressing in from the edges of our life.
I remember the smell of the place before I even open the door: rock dust, machine oil, and underneath it, cedar, from the shavings he keeps in a barrel by the door for the wood-handled tools.
The dog hears my truck before Micah does.
She comes around the side of the shed at a dead run, a big rangy shepherd mix named Diesel that Micah rescued from a farm auction six years back, and she doesn't hesitate, doesn't sniff me out cautiously the way dogs do with near-strangers.
She barrels into my legs, whole body wagging, making the low happy sound she used to make when I'd come out here to sit and read while Micah worked.
"Hey, girl." I crouch down, let her lick my chin, feel something in my chest crack a little at the specific, uncomplicated joy of a dog who doesn't know or care about fourteen months of betrayal, who just remembers that I used to belong here and has decided, on her own simple terms, that I still do. "You remember me."
"She remembers everybody who ever fed her off my workbench, which was mostly you.
" Micah's standing in the shed doorway, wiping his hands on a rag, looking at the two of us with an expression I can't quite categorize.
"Dogs don't hold grudges the way people do.
Wish I had half her capacity for forgiveness some days. "
"That's not a fair thing to say to me right now."
"You're right. Sorry." He steps back, holds the door. "Come on in. I'll sign whatever you brought."
The inside of the shed is exactly as I remember it and also, I notice immediately, wrong in a specific way I can't place at first. Workbenches along both walls, half-finished pieces everywhere, a granite bench top for somebody's kitchen, a set of grave markers waiting on delivery, the big diamond-blade saw at the back that Micah uses for the heavy cutting.
It's the same shed. But there's a hollowness to it now, gaps on the shelves where things used to sit, and it takes me a full minute of looking around before I understand what's missing.
My things. The stool I used to sit on. The little radio I kept out here for background noise. A coffee mug that used to live permanently on the corner of his main bench, because I drank so much coffee out here he finally just bought a second mug and left it for me.
"You cleared out my stuff," I say.
My voice comes out smaller than I intend, and I hate that it does, hate the specific vulnerability of standing in a space that used to be half mine, now rearranged into something that only barely remembers me at all.
Micah goes still, rag frozen mid-motion.
"Not right away. Took me about four months to be able to look at that stool without wanting to put my fist through the wall.
Boxed it up eventually. Didn't throw it out.
" He nods toward a shelf in the corner, and I see it now, a cardboard box, taped shut, my handwriting still visible on an old grocery list taped to the side because he'd used whatever box was handy.
"It's all still there. Figured you'd want to decide what to do with it yourself, eventually, if eventually ever came. "
I don't go look in the box. Not today. I'm not ready for whatever's inside it, the specific archaeology of a life I used to have out here.
Diesel, sensing my hesitation, trots over and noses at the box's taped seam like she might solve the problem for me, and I pull her back gently by the collar, grateful for the small distraction, grateful for a dog whose loyalty was never complicated by anything as messy as human betrayal.
"She's gotten gray around the muzzle," I say, mostly to change the subject, crouching to scratch behind her ears again.
"She's ten now. Vet says she's slowing down some, but you'd never know it to look at her most days.
" Micah's voice softens the specific way it always used to when he talked about the dog, an unguarded tenderness he rarely let show anywhere else.
"She still sleeps by the door most nights.
Used to think she was waiting on you to come back.
Took me a long while to admit I was doing the exact same thing, just with better manners about hiding it. "
"The rest of the place is half-empty too," I say instead, because it's true, and because it's easier to talk about the shed than about the box. "You used to have three benches full of work. There's one bench full now."
"Business slowed." He says it too quickly, too lightly, and I know him well enough, still, even after everything, to know when he's dodging something.
I let the deflection sit there a moment, watching him busy himself with a rag that doesn't need any more attention, giving him the specific grace of not immediately calling out the dodge, though we both know I've noticed it.
"Micah."
He sighs, sets the rag down, leans back against the workbench with his arms crossed, and for a second he looks older than thirty-two, tired in a way that has nothing to do with physical work.
"Truth is, I stopped taking on new commissions for a stretch.
Couldn't concentrate enough to do good work, and I wasn't going to put my name on bad work, not on stone, not on something somebody's going to look at every day for the rest of their life at their kid's grave or their kitchen counter.
Took about six months before I trusted my own hands again. "
"Because of me."
"Because of what I did," he corrects, gently but firmly. "Don't put that on you. You didn't break anything. I broke it. I just happened to be standing in my own shed when the pieces fell, is all."
I don't know what to say to that, so I don't say anything, and Diesel, sensing the shift in the room the way dogs do, presses her whole warm weight against my leg, and I scratch behind her ears and let the silence stretch.
"You want to see something," Micah says finally, and there's a rawness in his voice that makes me look up sharp.
"I wasn't going to show you. Wasn't sure I'd ever have the nerve.
But you're standing here, and I think I'd rather you know than keep wondering what I've been doing out here alone every night for fourteen months. "
He says it like a man stepping off a ledge he's been circling for a long time, and I feel my whole body go still and attentive, the particular stillness I bring to a live charge panel, the kind of focus that doesn't allow for distraction because the stakes are too immediate to spare any.
"Show me."
He leads me to the back corner of the shed, past the diamond saw, to a low shelf I don't remember from before, and pulls back a canvas drop cloth, and underneath it is a stone.
My breath catches before I even fully register what I'm looking at, some instinct recognizing the shape and weight of the moment before my conscious mind has caught up to the specific object in front of me.
Small. Palm-sized almost, a rough rectangle of the same red granite as the Mercy Stone at the gate, half-carved, my name emerging from the rock in the same lettering style he uses for the memorial, careful and deep and precise.
WREN. Just that. Not finished. The N trails off into raw uncut stone, like he started it and then couldn't, or wouldn't, or didn't know how to finish something that didn't have an ending yet.
I don't say anything for a long time. Diesel whines low in her throat, picking up on something in the room she doesn't have words for either.
"I'm not going to explain it," Micah says quietly. "I don't fully have an explanation, other than it felt like something I needed my hands to do, some nights, when the rest of me didn't know what to do with itself. I'll put the cloth back over it if you want. Pretend you never saw it."
"Don't," I say, my voice not quite steady. "Don't put it away."
He goes very still, like a man who's just been handed something fragile and isn't entirely sure his hands are steady enough to hold it.
Diesel, sensing the shift, presses closer against my legs, and for a long moment none of us, not me, not Micah, not the dog, moves at all, the whole shed holding its breath around a half-finished name in stone.
He doesn't. We stand there together, looking at my unfinished name in stone, and for the first time since I drove back into Blackmoor, I let myself wonder, just barely, just for a second, whether there's a version of this story where the stone gets finished after all.
I stay long enough that the light outside the shed's single window goes from gray afternoon to the deeper blue of early evening, Micah working quietly at his bench while I sit with Diesel's head heavy in my lap, neither of us in any particular hurry to end the visit.
At one point he sets down his tools and makes us both tea on the little hot plate he keeps for exactly this purpose, and we drink it in comfortable silence, watching the light fail outside, two people who used to build a whole life out of exactly this kind of unremarkable evening together.
"I should get back," I say eventually, though I don't move right away to leave.
"Drive safe. Roads get icy fast once the sun's down this time of year.
" He walks me to the door, Diesel trailing behind, and for a moment we stand there in the doorway, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him against the evening chill.
"Thank you for staying. Wasn't sure you would, when I called. "
"Neither was I," I admit, and it's the most honest thing I've said to him since I got back to town.
I stay another hour, longer than I planned, sitting on the old stool that's apparently found its way back out of the box and onto the shop floor sometime in the last twenty minutes, watching Micah finish a small piece he'd started before I arrived, a simple house marker for a family two towns over.
He works in comfortable silence, occasionally narrating some small technical detail for no reason other than habit, the way he used to when we were together, and I find myself, despite every careful boundary I've tried to maintain, settling into the specific ease of just being near him while he works.
"You still hum," he says at one point, not looking up from the stone.
"I do not."
"You absolutely do. Same tune as always, near as I can tell, though I've never actually asked you what it is."
"Old Dylan song. Hollis used to play it on the truck radio so much I think it just imprinted on me before I had any say in the matter."
"Suits you," he says, and doesn't elaborate, and I don't ask him to, both of us apparently content, for once, to let a small true thing sit unexamined between us instead of picking it apart for meaning.