He thinks I’m leaving, and he’s protecting his heart against that.
He would rather lose me now than lose me later.
She sat in the unfinished chair for a long time, embraced by the work of his loving hands while she absorbed the enormity of having lost his heart.
She photographed the gown.
She did it because it needed doing, and because she had learned, at some point in the last few years, that the work itself kept her going when nothing else could.
She did not look at the rocking chair while she worked. The chair belonged to the man who’d stopped building it, and she was not going to presume to touch it again.
She got the shots needed, packed up the gown, broke down the tripod, and carried everything back to the house. Arlo was on his porch across their adjoining pastures, with Brown Dog at his feet. He lifted one finger off the arm of the rocker. She lifted hers back.
Ten minutes later—about the length of time it took him to decide he had a pretext—he wandered over to her place.
“Seen a yellow-handled screwdriver anywhere around the shop?”
“No.”
“Hm.” He stood on the porch steps. “Figured.”
“Did you actually lose a screwdriver?”
“Been a while since I last saw it.”
“How long?”
“Oh . . . twenty years or so.”
She laughed despite herself, which was, she understood, the point. She also understood that Arlo did not wander over with such a thin excuse unless he’d decided she was in need of company. Maybe Fern had whispered to him, from wherever she was. Maybe he’d watched enter the workshop with a spring in her step and leave without it. Maybe he had simply looked at her face and known.
“Sit a spell if you’ve got the time, Arlo.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
He sat in the wicker chair, and she took the rocker, her knees sticking up a little and her elbow not hitting the arms just right. Dillon’s rocker fit her so much better than this one.
For a while, they didn’t talk.
They just looked at the lake. A pair of red-winged blackbirds argued belligerently in the cattails at the edge of the water. Behind the barn, Bonnie and Clyde honked at something.
“Pretty day,” Arlo said eventually.
“Yes.”
“Willows have greened up nicely.”
“They have.”
A pause.
“You know what I like best about spring out here?” he said. “How loud it is. Back east, spring snuck up on a soul. You’d be walkin’ to work and notice there were buds on a tree and then leaves. Out here, spring arrives.. Blackbirds. Frogs. Critters poppin’ out of holes. Like Spring just pops up and yells, Here I am, across the whole valley.
“Mm.”
“It’s the only honest season in the year.”
“The others aren’t honest?” she asked in mild surprise
