Chao nods tightly.
"Detective Ducharme?"
Patrick meets his eye, sinks into his chair. It is not until long after the detectives have left the office that Quentin realizes Ducharme never actually answered.
Getting ready for winter, in Caleb's opinion, is only wishful thinking. The best preparation in the world isn't going to keep a storm from catching you unaware. The thing about nor'easters is that you don't always see them coming. They head out to sea, then turn around and batter Maine hard. There have been times in recent years that Caleb has opened the front door to find a chest-high drift of snow; has dug his way free with a shovel kept in the front closet to find a world that looks nothing like it did the night before.
Today, he is readying the house. That means hiding Nathaniel's bike in the garage, and unearthing the Flexible Flyer and the cross-country skis instead. Caleb has covered the shrubs in the front of the house with triangular wooden horses, little hats to keep their fragile branches from the ice and snow that slide off the roof.
All that is left, now, is storing enough chopped wood to last through the winter. He's brought in three loads now, stacking them in cross-hatches in the basement. Slivers of oak jab his thick gloves as he moves in rhythm, taking a pair of split logs from the pile dumped down the bulkhead and laying them neatly in place. Caleb feels a wistfulness press in on him, as if each growing inch of the woodpile is taking away something summerish-a bright flock of goldfinches, a raging stream, the steam of loam overturned by a tiller. All winter long, when he burns these stacks, Caleb imagines it like a puzzle.
With each log he tosses on a fire, he is able to remember the song of a cricket, or the arc of stars in the July sky. And so on, until the basement is empty again, and springtime has flung itself, jubilant, over his property.
"Do you think we'll make it through the winter?"
At Nina's voice, Caleb startles. She has come down the basement stairs and stands at the bottom with her arms crossed, surveying the stacks of wood. "Doesn't seem like much," she adds.
"I've got plenty." Caleb places two more logs. "I just haven't brought it all in yet."
He is aware of Nina's eyes on him as he turns and bends, lifts a large burl into his arms, and deposits it at the top of a tall stack. "So."
"Yes," she answers.
"How was the lawyer's?"
She shrugs. "He's a defense attorney."
Caleb assumes this is meant as an insult. As always in legal matters, he doesn't know what to say in response. The basement is only half full, but Caleb is suddenly aware of how big he is, and how close he is to Nina, and how the room does not seem able to hold both of them. "Are you going back out again? Because I need to go to the hardware store to get that tarp."
He doesn't need a tarp; he has four of them stored in the garage. He does not even know why those words have flown from his mouth, like birds desperate to escape through a chimney flue. And yet, he keeps speaking: "Can you watch Nathaniel?"
Nina goes still in front of his eyes. "Of course I can watch Nathaniel. Or do you think I'm too unstable to take care of him?"
"I didn't mean it like that."
"You did, Caleb. You may not want to admit it, but you did." There are tears in her eyes. But because he cannot think of the words that might take them away, Caleb simply nods and walks past her, their shoulders brushing as he makes his way up the stairs.
He doesn't drive to the hardware store, naturally. Instead he finds himself meandering across the county on back roads, pulling into Tequila Mockingbird, the little bar that Nina talks about from time to time.
He knows she meets Patrick there for lunch every week; he even knows that the ponytailed bartender is named Stuyvesant. But Caleb has never set foot in the place, and when he walks through the door into the nearly empty afternoon room, he feels like a secret is swelling beneath his ribs-he knows so much more about this place than it knows about him.
"Afternoon," Stuyvesant says, as Caleb hovers at the bar. Which seat does Nina take? He stares at each of them, lined up like teeth, trying to divine the one. "What can I get you?"
Caleb drinks beer. He's never been much for hard liquor. But he asks for a shot of Talisker, a bottle he can read across the bar whose name sounds just as soothing on the tongue as, he imagines, the whiskey it describes. Stuyvesant sets it down in front of him with a bowl of peanuts. There is a businessman sitting three stools away, and a woman trying not to cry as she writes a letter at a booth. Caleb lifts the glass to the bartender. "Sldinte," he says, a toast he once heard in a movie.
"You Irish?" Stuyvesant asks, running a cloth around the polished hood of the bar.
"My father was." In fact, Caleb's parents had both been born in America, and his ancestry was Swedish and British.
"No kidding." This from the businessman, glancing over. "My sister lives in County Cork. Gorgeous place." He laughs. "Why on earth did you come over here?"
Caleb takes a sip of his whiskey. "Didn't have much choice," he lies. "I was two years old."
"You live in Sanford?"
"No. Here on business. Sales."
"Aren't we all?" The man lifts his beer. "God bless the corporate expense account, right?" He signals to Stuyvesant. "Another round for us," he says, and then to Caleb: "My treat. Or rather, my company's."
