The cabin is cold. I built the fire too small last night, and it died before dawn, so the air has that sharp, thin bite that settles into your joints. I pull on jeans, a thermal shirt, and a flannel. Boots take longer on bad days. I have to brace my foot against the floor and force the left one on while the femoral nerve sends white light up my hip and into my spine. I breathe through it. I’ve been breathing through it for four years.
Chief follows me to the kitchen. I make coffee in the percolator my grandfather used every morning of his life, the one thing in this cabin I’d save if the whole place burned. I feed Chief. He eats with the focused efficiency of a dog who spent the first three years of his life eating in combat zones and never quite learned to slow down. I drink my coffee standing at the window and watch the light come up over the ridge.
The mountains don’t care about my leg. They don’t care about anything. That’s why I came back.
* * *
Chopping wood on a bad leg day is stupid. I know it’s stupid. Dr. Theo has told me it’s stupid in at least four different ways, each one more creative than the last. But the wood doesn’t split itself, and the orders don’t fill themselves, and sitting in the cabin waiting for the nerve pain to calm down feels too much like the hospital. Four months on my back in a room that smelled like gauze and industrial soap, staring at a ceiling that wasn’t mine, thinking about men who would never stare at any ceiling again.
I’d rather have the pain.
The splitting block is out behind the cabin, under a stand of ponderosa pine my grandparents planted before I was born. I set a round of lodgepole on the block, swing the maul, and let the impact travel through my arms and into my chest. Split. Stack. Set another round. The rhythm is the only meditation I’ve ever been able to stand. No breathing exercises, no mantras. Just the weight of the steel and the clean crack of wood separating along the grain.
Chief lies in the dirt nearby, chin on his paws, watching the treeline. Always watching. He hasn’t stopped scanning perimeters since we came home, and I haven’t had the heart to tell him there’s nothing out there. Maybe because I’m not sure I believe it either.
By ten o’clock I have a full cord loaded in the truck bed. My leg is shaking. Not the shaking anyone else would notice, but I feel it. A tremor deep in the quadricep, the muscle firing and misfiring in a pattern that means I’ve pushed too far. I lean against the tailgate and let the sweat cool on the back of my neck, and tell myself I’ll rest when the deliveries are done.
I won’t. But the lie gets me in the truck.
Iron Peak on a Tuesday morning is about as busy as it ever gets, which means there are eight trucks parked on Main Street instead of four. I make my deliveries with the windows down and the radio off. The Garcias need a quarter cord stacked by the side door. Old Margaret Pruitt wants hers on the porch, and she’ll leave an envelope under the mat because she doesn’t want to come outside in her robe. Fine by me. Less talking.
I park outside the hardware store to pick up chain oil and sit in the truck for a minute, working up to the walk. Bad leg days in town are worse than bad leg days at the cabin. At the cabin, nobody sees me grip a doorframe or pause on the porch steps. In town, people look. They try not to. But they look.
Chief is in the passenger seat, sitting upright, scanning the street through the windshield. His ears rotate, tracking sounds I can’t hear. A car door. Footsteps. Someone laughing outside the post office.
“Come,” I tell him. He pops out of the truck on high alert. No matter what, every time we come into town, he treats it like we’re in hostile territory.
I get out. The leg holds. I cross the street with my jaw set and my eyes on the hardware store, and I don’t look at anything else because looking at things in this town leads to conversations, and conversations lead to questions, and questions lead to that look people get. The one where they’re trying to figure out how to say something kind to a man who doesn’t want kindness.
I almost make it.
The clinic is on my left. I’ve walked past it a hundred times without glancing over, because Dr. Theo knows where to find me if he needs me, and I’ve got no reason to go in there voluntarily. But today the front window catches the light at the wrong angle, or at the wrong time, and I see her.
Red hair. Not the red you see every day. Tight curls, the color of copper left out in the weather, falling around a face I can only see in profile. She’s sitting at the front desk, writing something, and even through the glass I can tell she’s concentrating. Her mouth moves. Talking to herself, maybe, or reading something back. Soft. Everything about the way she holds herself is soft.
She looks up.
I look away.
Fast. Mechanical. I keep walking, and my pulse does something it hasn’t done in years. A kick behind the ribs. Hard and unwelcome.
Keep moving.
I keep moving. The hardware store is twenty feet ahead, and I cover the distance without looking back, but the image stays.Red curls. The curve of her jaw. The quiet focus in the way she held her pen.
Stop.
I stop. Not the thought. The thought doesn’t stop. But I shove it down to the place where I keep everything else I’m not allowed to have, and I walk into the hardware store and buy chain oil and don’t say a word to anyone.
Nora calls while I’m loading the chain oil into the truck, and I already know I’m going to do whatever she asks. It’s been that way since I was sixteen years old and she showed up at my grandfather’s cabin with a casserole dish and the quiet, unshakable certainty that we needed her whether or not we said so.
She was right. She’s always right. That’s the problem.
“Rhett, honey.” Her voice is warm and unhurried, the way it always is, like she’s got nowhere to be and all the time in the world to talk to you. “I need a hand with something at the B&B. One of the porch posts is leaning, and I don’t trust that handyman from Montrose to come all the way up here before it falls on somebody.”
“When.”
“Whenever you can, sweetheart. Tomorrow? Thursday?”
