I stood up. Went inside. Picked up the manual from the counter, forty-seven pages of schedules and protocols and the organized wreckage of her original plan. I turned to the first page — Partnership Agreement & Household Operations Guide, Prepared by Nell Chambers — and tore it out.
I found a pen. Sat at the dining table. Turned the page over.
On the back, in handwriting that wasn't neat because I'd never needed it to be, I wrote:
Partnership Agreement — Cliff Masterson to Nell Chambers
1. I'm getting the vasectomy reversed. Appointment is June 12, 9 a.m., Cascade Valley Urology. You can come if you want.
2. I don't need the bet. I don't need Drew's money. I'll figure out the property another way. Or I won't. It doesn't matter as much as I thought.
3. I want you to stay. Not for a baby. Not for a year. Stay because this is real and I am asking you.
4. No exit strategy.
I looked at it. Four lines on the back of a page. It was not enough. It was also everything I had.
I folded the paper, put it in my jacket pocket, and drove to find my wife.
SHE WASN'T AT MOOSE'S. Jeannie said she'd been in and walked toward the trailhead at the east end of the lot. I knew where she'd go. The south ridge trail connected there, and the south ridge was where she'd learned to walk without watching her feet.
I found her at the overlook, sitting on the ledge with her knees drawn up, looking at the valley. Yesterday's view from the swimming hole, shifted half a mile east, the river a silver line below and the peaks stacked white against the sky.
She looked up when she heard me on the trail. Her eyes were red. She didn't tell me to leave.
"Come with me," I said. "There's something I want to show you."
She stood. She followed. I took the fork off the south ridge, the narrow trail that led up through the old cedars to a clearing I hadn't shown her, hadn't shown anyone. The trail was rough, not maintained, and I held branches for her and she took them and neither of us spoke.
The clearing opened at the top of the ridge.
It was nothing special to look at. A flat shelf of rock surrounded by cedars, a view of the valley through a gap in the trees, a few wildflowers growing in the thin soil at the edges. No swimming hole, no waterfall. Just a place.
"This is where I stood when I got out," I said. "I drove until the road ended and then I walked until the trail ended, and this is where I was standing when I decided to stay alive and build something."
She looked at me. The wind moved through the cedars and the valley was quiet below.
"Nobody's been here," I said. "Not Drew. Not clients. I come up here when the cabin feels too small and the river's too loud and I need to remember why I stayed." I took a breath. "I'm bringing you here because I can't say this at the cabin where we've both been lying. I need a clean place."
I pulled the folded paper from my jacket. Handed it to her.
She opened it. Saw her own title on the front — the first page of her manual. Turned it over. Read what I'd written on the back.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth.
"It's not forty-seven pages," I said. "I'm not a forty-seven-page guy. But it's honest. Every word." I shoved my hands in my pockets because they were shaking again and I didn't care if she saw it. "I was wrong about being too wrecked for this. You were wrong about not needing it. And if we're going to do this, I want to do it without a plan and without a bet and without a single page of instructions."
She was crying. Not the surprised tears from the hallway. These were the kind she let happen, her face open and unhidden. The polished exterior she'd maintained since she stepped out of that white Prius was finally, fully, gone.
"You tore up my manual." A laugh broke through the tears.
"Just the first page."
"You wrote four lines."
"I'm economical."
She laughed through the tears, and the sound of it in that clearing was the best thing I'd ever heard on this mountain.
