4. Holt
Holt
I'm up at four-thirty, same as always. Coffee, boots, the woodpile in the gray pre-dawn. I do everything in the same order I always do it.
I look at the cabin next door.
I drink my coffee and watch the tree line go from black to gray to green and I think about a woman sitting on a woodpile laughing, and the way that laugh hit me somewhere I don't have good defenses for, and I try to figure out what to do about any of it and come up with nothing useful.
I finish my coffee and go split wood. I work until I'm sweating through my shirt and the sun is up.
I have more split wood than I can use before October, which tells me something about the state I'm in.
Her light comes on at seven. I go inside, drive to the mill, run the floor, read the manifest before I sign it.
Two conversations about the Ridgemont delivery.
One about blade maintenance. I am a completely functional adult who spent yesterday evening against his woodpile and is not thinking about it.
I'm thinking about it.
Not only the sex — though the sex was something near holy.
A fucking spiritual awakening. But, no, I'm thinking about tell me.
The way she said it, like she was just clearing the last obstacle between us.
Like she already knew what I was going to say and wanted to hear it out loud.
I'm thinking about how she handed me that water glass and didn't look away, and how I'd watched her cross the yard and known exactly what it meant, and how she'd known that I knew.
I put down my clipboard and go stand in the sun for a while.
At noon, Denny drops into the chair across from me with two burgers and the look he gets when he's about to say something he's already decided on. "You're in a good mood," he says.
"I'm in a normal mood."
He looks at me for a long moment. He's a smart man and he's known me nine years. At least he has the good sense to smile into his burger and leave it there.
***
I drive home at five. Her SUV is in the yard.
She's on the porch with a notepad, legs folded under her, bent over whatever she's working on with the focused look she gets when she's seeing something other people can't see yet. Wood shavings are still, I'm almost certain, in her hair from last night. I walk over.
She hears my boots on the steps and looks up, unsurprised. She makes room on the porch swing without being asked and I sit down. I look at the notepad.
She's drawn the cabin: a proper plan, elevation view, measurements in the margins. The porch is wider. Window boxes, planted, trailing something. The soft board is gone. There are two chairs where her one plastic chair currently sits.
Two chairs.
I look at that for a long time.
Wood stove, better placement — interior wall, more efficient. The partition between the kitchen and the back room is gone, the whole thing opened up. And in the margin beside the porch, in her sharp handwriting: materials — match original cedar.
Not matching to save money. Matching because she wants it to look like it was always this way.
"You're not selling it," I say.
She looks at me and doesn't say yes and doesn't say no and doesn't need to. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding.
She points to the back room. "Reading nook under the east window. Built-in bench."
"South wall," I say. "Not east. East gets morning sun — too hot in July."
She looks at the plan, looks at the window, looks back at me. "Do you just know things like this or do you have to think about them?"
"Both."
"That's not an answer."
"South wall," I say again.
She picks up her pencil and moves the bench, and I can see her trying not to smile and not entirely succeeding. "Fine. South wall." She taps the margin. "I want the same cedar throughout. Keep it consistent."
"I know where to get it."
"Of course you do." She says it without any edge — warm, a little amused, like she's already figured out that I know where to get everything within fifty miles of this mountain and has decided to find this useful rather than irritating.
"Will you tell me, or do I have to ask the right question first? "
"Timbercrest Lumber. Tell him I sent you."
"See, that was almost easy." She writes it down.
We work through the rest of it — the kitchen, the storage, the porch repair — and the light goes from gold to pink to gray and the evening gets cool around us, and neither of us mentions last night.
She'd moved over on the swing without being asked.
I'd sat down without asking. The plans have two chairs on the porch.
It's dark by the time I stand up. She tips her head back and looks up at me. "Thanks," she says. "For the south wall thing."
"Practical."
"Sure," she says, and her mouth curves. "Goodnight, Holt."
I go back to my cabin and lie down and look at the ceiling and think about a woman who drives four hours in the wrong shoes to look at a dead man's cabin and sees what it could be before she's out of the car.
I've built things my whole life. I know what it feels like to decide something is worth building.