Chapter 2
Tess
The truck door slams behind me, and the cabin doesn’t so much as flinch. A skiff of snow rests on the porch railing like spilled sugar. One of the porch boards has separated from the joist below and is swaying in the wind, in and out, like a sleeping dog’s ribs.
The cabin is worse than the photos.
The photos weren’t flattering. They showed a tilted porch, a door whose original purpose seems to have been “concept,” and a piece of plywood that’s doing the work of three windows.
I took those photos with me into the bathroom of a Denver hotel, sat on the closed toilet seat with the door locked, and stared at them for an hour.
The plan had been “fly out, look at the place, list it with Marcus, fly home Sunday.” My mother’s plan, generously rephrased. She even printed me an itinerary.
The photos were a love letter. They said, “You can have me if you want me, but I’m a project.”
I’ve never had anything in my life that asked to be a project.
My family’s specialty was fixing me. Softening my edges.
Tucking my brightness into more presentable shapes.
Turning down the volume on a girl who came out of the womb humming.
They corrected me so often and for so many years that by the time I was twenty-three, the woman in my mirror was a polite stranger I once met at a party and, somehow, joylessly, had been dating ever since.
Then my Aunt Rosa who I hadn’t seen since I was nine, and who my mother referred to with a small voice and tight mouth as “that woman,” died in a hospital in Albuquerque and left me a cabin in Colorado in a will my mother didn’t know about until the lawyer called.
By the second day, my mother knew.
By the third, Marcus knew.
Marcus Hale is an associate of my mother’s.
He develops things. He likes to say it like that, “develops things,” with a small quotation-mark smile.
He’s been to my parents’ house for dinner six times in the last four years, twice without his wife.
His business cards have raised lettering.
His shoes cost more than the room they were standing in.
He started calling the Albuquerque executor about Aunt Rosa’s land before she was in the ground.
He began calling me directly the day after the funeral.
For three days, I kept the lawyer’s letter zipped inside the inner pocket of a coat I never wore.
I read it standing up in the kitchen of my Sacramento apartment, a kitchen in which I had never once cooked anything I wanted to eat.
I read it sitting on the bathroom floor with the fan running.
I read it at three in the morning with my forehead pressed to the cold glass of the window above the sink.
Knowing what was mine while my mother and Marcus treated it like theirs was the most significant thing I owned.
A whole house. Mine. A house that nobody had picked out for me, decorated for me, talked me down from, or tucked into a tasteful shade of greige on my behalf.
A house I could paint magenta. A house I could burn pancakes in.
A house I could hum in, loudly, with the windows open, and nobody would shush me.
I wanted it the way a starving woman wants bread.
My mother said, “It will be uninhabitable, sweetheart. You’ll lose money.”
Marcus said, “I can have it under contract by Memorial Day, Tess. Above market.”
My mother said, “Take a sensible weekend, look at it, sell it, and come home.”
Marcus said, “Don’t waste your spring on a teardown.”
My mother said, “Tess, please be reasonable.”
Marcus said, Tess. Just that. Just my name in his mouth, in the soft, clipped way he says it, like a man placing a hand quietly on a doorknob he assumes is unlocked.
I sold my couch on Marketplace, my car to a man who paid in twenties. I bought a box truck, packed everything I owned, and drove for two days with my stand mixer riding shotgun like a little KitchenAid co-pilot.
And here I am.
Standing in an inch of fresh April snow, on a cabin porch that has more give than my college mattress, looking up at the most beautiful, terrifying, forgotten little place I’ve ever seen.
“Hi,” I say to the cabin. “Hello, sweetheart. Yes, I see you.”
A long ribbon of dirty snow slides off the eaves and lands with a wet thump six inches from my feet, splattering my jeans to the knee.
“Okay,” I tell the cabin. “Loud and clear.”
The cabin punishes my optimism as the third porch step from the bottom gives way beneath my left boot when I turn back toward the truck for another load.
I yelp. My left leg disappears up to mid-shin. My right knee hits the second step. The basket of yarn I was holding spills, and my favorite butter-yellow skein rolls off the porch, bouncing onto the snow like a tiny, delighted dog.
“Oh, you bastard,” I tell the porch lovingly.
I plant both palms on the unbroken plank above me, using it to lever myself out of the hole.
My new phone, a cheap, basic model with a private number only known by a lawyer in Albuquerque, is in my pocket.
Two bars. No internet. The lawyer’s office is closed until Monday.
And Mr. Eddie Burns, the handyman Aunt Rosa hired to keep a loose eye on the cabin after she moved into the hospice last fall, left me a voicemail three days ago.
I called him at the start of the week to ask if he could come up here today, walk me through the property, and tell me which windows leaked and where the well pump shutoff was located.
His message, when it came back, was extremely polite. He was sorry. He was no longer accepting clients on this particular ridge. Due to personal preference.
He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to.
In small-town code, personal preference means, “I don’t go up there anymore.”
I extract my leg. My boot is intact, but my pride is in pieces. The yellow yarn stopped rolling ten feet down the slope, and is perched on top of a tuft of grass like it’s posing for a postcard.
I hop off the porch using only the unbroken steps because I learn from my mistakes, and I’m halfway through retrieving the yarn when I look up.
And up.
And up.
Because a man is standing thirty feet from me on the slope, half hidden by a stand of pines, and I didn’t hear him arrive at all.
He’s enormous in the way a mountain is enormous.
Not just tall, although he is, but built.
Shoulders like a doorframe. Beard like he wants something between his face and the world.
A flannel under a heavy wool jacket, dark canvas pants, boots that have gone way past comfortable and now look like they’re a part of him.
I should be afraid. I’m a woman alone on a ridge, with no neighbors in sight, and a stranger appearing without sound. Every instinct my mother trained into me, every soft-spoken man she’s chosen for me to confirm them with, is tells me to back up the porch and lock the door.
I’m not afraid.
I don’t know what to do with that, exactly.
“Oh,” I say before I can stop myself. “Hi.”
He doesn’t answer. His face is like a slab of granite exposed to the elements, and whatever emotions flicker across it do so slowly. His pale gray eyes remain so steady on my face that I momentarily forget the yarn.
He looks at me the way I imagine a man looks at a coyote that has wandered into his yard, neither afraid nor friendly, just calculating what kind of problem I might pose.
“I saw you wave.”
“Oh.” My face goes hot, which is wild, given the temperature out here.
“Hi,” he says, like a man remembering a foreign word he was taught once and filed away.
I straighten up, yarn in hand, and smile. “I’m Tess. Tess Carter. I just got here. Aunt Rosa was my aunt. The cabin. Obviously. I don’t know if you knew her—”
“Didn’t.”
“Right. Yeah. Of course you didn’t. You would have said.” I take a breath and dial myself back. “Sorry. I talk a lot when I’m nervous. And cold. And recently fallen through a porch step.”
He glances at the porch, at the gap in the third step, at my wet leg that has snow up to the knee. “You good?”
Two words, but they land in my chest as if he touched it.
I have not been good for five years. I haven’t been asked.
“I’m fine. Slightly less dignified than I started the day, but fine.”
A beat. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t move. He just looks at me like he’s reading the cover of a book he hasn’t decided whether to open.
“You’re standing in three feet of snowmelt,” he says. “The drift behind you is deeper than it looks.”
I glance over my shoulder. A fencepost pokes out of the white about four feet up that I could have sworn, three minutes ago, was at ground level.
“Right,” I say. “Got it. Thank you.”
He doesn’t move. The pines don’t move. The wind sighs through the boughs in a way that should be charming but is making me very aware that I’m alone on an unfamiliar ridge with a man who could pick up a Subaru.
And yet…
“You’re my neighbor,” I say with more certainty than I have any right to. “Aren’t you?”
A pause. A long one.
“I’m up the ridge.” He tips his chin sharply toward a darker stand of pines climbing up and away behind the cabin, into a fold of mountain that looks like it keeps its own weather.
“Oh, thank God.” I press a hand to my chest. “I waved. Earlier. From the porch. I wasn’t sure anyone was up there or if I was just waving at the trees. I wave at trees sometimes. It’s a thing. It’s a whole thing I do.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. It isn’t a smile. More like a geological event than a smile, a slab of granite considering, after a thousand patient years, whether to shear off the cliff face and slide into the sea.
“I saw you wave.”
His voice is low and rough, as if he hasn’t used it in a while and is having to remember how. The sound slides into my chest and settles there.
“Are you the handyman?” I ask hopefully.
“No.” Quick. Definite.
“Are you—”
“No.”
Okay then.
He turns slowly, the way a large animal turns, and starts back up his trail. I have a sudden, ridiculous urge to call after him.
“I’m Tess!” I call. “In case you missed it!”
“I heard you the first time, ma’am,” he says, without turning around.
Ma’am.
He called me ma’am like he was drawing a line.
He disappears into the trees like a man who has spent a significant portion of his life learning how to vanish. I’m along on the slope with my yarn and my broken porch step and my heart doing something I haven’t given it permission to do.
“All right,” I say unsteadily to the empty trees, my perpetual smile already curling the edges of my mouth. “Okay. Okay then.”
I climb back up to the porch, avoiding the third step.
And as I stand on the wreck of my new front porch with my dead aunt’s cabin at my back and a stranger’s two-word goodness rattling around in me like a stone in a tin cup, I realize I haven’t felt this alive in five years.
Not since the last time I allowed myself to want something my mother hadn’t first approved.