I go back to sinking posts.
Martin appears beside me with the level at a quarter to two. He holds it against my work, checks it, hands it back without comment. The post is true. He nods.
"You've been off today," he says. Martin doesn't usually speak. When he does, you listen.
"I'm fine."
"Uh-huh."
"Post's plumb, isn't it."
"Post's fine. You're not." He picks up a brace plate. "Callahan girl's back."
I don't say anything.
"Saw her walking on Main this morning," Martin says. "Didn't look like she was staying long."
"She's not."
"Okay."
"Festival, then she goes back."
Martin sets the brace plate and picks up his drill. "Sure," he says.
The afternoon is long and good and physical. By five o'clock the axe-throwing lane is framed and plumb and solid and I stand back and look at it with the satisfaction that comes from building something that wasn't there in the morning. The targets will go up tomorrow. I'll practice Thursday morning before the competition opens to the public.
I've won the axe-throwing event four of the last six years. I'm good with an axe. I'm good with anything that requires patience and force in the right sequence, anything where the margin for error is something you can calculate and account for and correct through repetition.
The thing about seeing Grace Callahan is that she got under the armor before I even knew I had armor. She was twenty years old the first time I talked to her — at a bonfire out at the McCready property, a big August gathering the way Silver Ridge has always done. She was back from her first year at UBC andshe was bright and direct and slightly wry in a way that felt new to me, someone who had grown up with people who were more straightforward, less curved. I talked to her for three hours that night without noticing the time. That had never happened to me before.
We were together for three years. She was the clearest thing in my life.
Then she was gone.
I load the last of the staging lumber into the equipment shed and lock the padlock. The festival grounds are quiet now — most of the crews have knocked off for the day. The mountains are doing what they do at this hour, going all that orange and rose, and the air is warm and smells like pine and sawdust and the dry August heat that means tomorrow will be a good day for building.
She's at her mother's house six blocks off Main. I know because Mara Callahan and my mother used to run the bake table at the summer fair together, back before my mother moved to Kelowna to be near my sister. The town is a grid. There are no real secrets here.
I walk to my truck and get in and sit for a minute.
I told her to go.That's the thing I keep coming back to, the one that still doesn't sit right no matter how I arrange it. She was offered a position with an event company in Vancouver — good money, real opportunity, the kind of trajectory that didn't exist in Silver Ridge. And I was twenty-four and stubborn and proud and I loved her in the certain way of someone who has never questioned a thing in his life, and I sat across from her at this same diner and saidyou should take it.
She asked if I'd come with her.
I said Silver Ridge was home.
She left three weeks later. She cried the night before, and I held her, and I thought she'd change her mind. She didn't. Ididn't ask her to. I was too proud to ask. I thought asking was the same as not letting her go, and I wouldn't trap her, not even with the wanting.
Ten years of being certain that was the right call.
Tonight I'm not certain of anything at all.
three
Grace
Mymotherdoesn'tmentionOwen at breakfast. I drink two cups and eat toast and think about how much I love her and how much she would enjoy knowing that Owen walking out of that diner has been living in my brain since eight o'clock last night.
