She heard the squeak of the fence between her property and Arlo’s but didn’t lift her head.
Boots crunched on the gravel driveway, unhurried, the slightly uneven gait of a man whose left knee had been giving him trouble. Brown Dog’s toenails clicked on the porch boards. She felt the dog flop down beside her chair and heard his long, theatrical sigh. The dog rested his chin on her foot.
Arlo lowered himself into Fern’s rocking chair with a grunt.
He didn’t speak.
She didn’t, either.
After a long while, he said, “Came over to get that pressure canner Fern said I could have.”
Tessa finally sat up. “She tell you that before she died or after?”
“Oh, she told me that for twenty years. Figure today’s as good as any to collect.”
His voice was mild, and it dawned on her that he’d been raised in a time when one didn’t randomly walk up on a grieving person. The pressure canner was just an excuse to come check on her.
She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. If she saw even a hint of sympathy in his eyes, she would fall apart.
He didn’t seem to mind.
“Brown Dog’s been limpin’ again,” he announced after a while to the general air in front of him. “That left hind. He’ll work it out by suppertime. Always does.”
She made a noncommittal sound. Dillon told her last week that Brown Dog mysteriously developed a limp any time he wanted human food for dinner.
“Geese are extra mouthy today,” Arlo observed. “That’ll be the weather shiftin’. Means a storm’s comin’. Tomorrow night, maybe. Folks usually bring the chickens in early when the geese won’t shut up.”
“Is that so?” she managed to respond evenly.
“Fence post on the line between our places is leanin’. We’ll need to reset it before the ground freezes next fall, though it can wait till we get a good rain. No sense fightin’ hard ground when you don’t have to.”
He rambled on like that—weather, fencing, a discourse on the right way to stack firewood. She stared at the lake, half-listening, and somewhere in the middle of his observations about seasoning oak versus seasoning pine, the tears finally came.
She didn’t make a sound and she turned her face away from him. But Arlo was eighty years old and was not fooled for a second.
Blessedly, he didn’t stop talking and he didn’t reach for her. He didn’t offer her a tissue or a casserole or an opinion. He just talked about nothing in his slow, easy porch voice, and Brown Dog’s chin stayed heavy on her foot. That was the whole of the comfort he offered, but it was enough.
More than enough.
When her shoulders had stilled and her cheeks dried, he said, “Fern’s daddy went the same way, you know.”
She did look at him then. “He did?”
“Mm. Before you and Mick got together. He was in a nursing home out near Kalispell. Fern used to drive over every Sunday and sit with him. Last six months, he didn’t know her. Thought she was a waitress at the place he used to take her mother for their anniversary.”
Arlo shook his head slowly. “She’d sit there for two hours and let him order pie off an imaginary menu. Peach with vanilla ice cream. She’d bring it the next week and eat it with him, and he’d tell her she was the prettiest waitress in the county.”
“She never told me that,” she said.
“She didn’t tell anyone. I only knew because she asked me to drive her once. I sat in my truck in the parking lot with Brown Dog while she went in.” He looked out at the lake. “On the drive home, she said to me, ‘Arlo, they tell you grief is the worst part. It’s not. The worst of it is watching them slip away while they’re still in the room.’ She never spoke of it again after that.”
Tessa nodded slowly. “My grandpa doesn’t know my name anymore. He’s asking for his mother and waiting for her to pick him up from school.”
Arlo’s eyes—pale and tired and kind—were steady on her face.
“He still knows you,” he said. “Not in the way you think. But deep down. The ones we love are in our hearts, Tessa. Deeper than names, deeper than faces. That man’s loved you since you were born. He may not know your name anymore, but he’s carryin’ you somewhere inside the fog. He’s still carryin’ you.”
She put her face in her hands and cried in earnest then.
