“I brought these as a thank-you,” she said. “For walking me down the trail the other day. Just a small gesture of appreciation between neighbors. Oh, and Mae says hi.”
“Mae did not say hi.”
“Mae said, and I quote, ‘Tell him I'm still mad about the gate.’ But I'm interpreting that as hi.”
I could have invited her onto the porch. Could have offered her some coffee and gone along with her charade of pretending we were the type of neighbors who sat around and made small talk, but I didn’t.
She set the bag on the railing. There was a long pause where she was clearly deciding whether to leave or whether to stand there and make me look at her, and I could see her waffling before she finally decided.
“Okay,” she said. “Enjoy them.”
She turned and walked back toward her cabin. I waited until she was past my truck before I got up.
The paper crinkled as I opened the bag. Two cinnamon rolls inside. Still warm. The icing on the underside was already starting to melt into the paper.
I'd been mad about the Switchback gate for two years. Mae had built it wrong and refused to admit she'd built it wrong and the whole thing was now a kind of slow ambient warfare between us that included her never giving me the day-old rolls for free and me never volunteering to fix the gate even though I drove past it three times a week. The fact that she'd told Soleil about the gate within a few days of meeting her was a betrayal I'd address with Mae directly the next time I saw her.
The fact that the rolls were warm meant Soleil had driven up the ridge with them on the passenger seat, which meant she'd asked Mae to make them fresh, which meant Mae had made them fresh, which Mae did not do. That was a lot to take in.
I ate one of the rolls standing in the kitchen, then walked back out to the porch. Biscuit was gone.
He’d been on the porch when I went inside, and he hadn’t been on the porch when I came back out. There were only two places Biscuit went when he wasn't with me. One of them was the meadow, and the other was Cabin Three. Damn dog.
Soleil’s laughter floated through the trees. I stood on my porch with the second cinnamon roll in my hand and listened to my dog and my tenant in her cabin through the open window and realized this was now my life.
My cabin was supposed to be a safe space, especially the attached workshop. I'd built the shop before I'd built anything else on the property. Nine years ago, my first summer up here, before there were cabins or fences, I'd put the door on the south side, so the morning light came in at the workbench. I'd left two windows on the west wall and a skylight in the roof.
The shop was the only building on the ridge where I'd taken the time to do finishing work on the wood. The door frame was tongue-and-groove, the windows were trimmed, the floor was set tight enough that sawdust didn't slip between the boards. It was where I worked. It was where Biscuit slept when he wasn'tsleeping by the door or, apparently, in someone else's cabin. It was the one piece of the property I didn't rent and didn't show and didn't think about as anyone's space but mine.
The door was open because the morning was warm. I stood at the workbench finishing the curved leg of a side table made from black walnut. I’d put in three weeks of slow work, and the piece had already been paid for. I was using the spokeshave because the curve wasn't quite where I wanted it, and the spokeshave was the only tool that let me feel the wood with the same hand that shaped it. Fully absorbed by the task, I didn't hear her until she was already inside.
“I just wanted to —”
I turned around with the spokeshave still in my hand.
She stopped two steps in. “Sorry. The door was open.”
I slid my safety goggles to the top of my head, annoyed and somehow happy to see her at the same time. “It's open because it's warm.”
“Right.” Her gaze darted around the space. She was looking around the way she'd looked at the lily on her first day, with the kind of focus most people only gave to screens. She took in the workbench… the lumber stack against the wall… the hand tools on the pegboard… the half-built rocking chair in the corner that I'd been ignoring for a month because I couldn't figure out the back angle.
She also took in the tool in my hand. “That's a spokeshave.”
I didn't respond.
“I had a teacher in college who used one. She made canoe paddles.” Soleil took another step in. “Can I — is it okay if I —”
“Why are you here, Soleil?”
She stopped. Looked at me. Recovered.
“Biscuit was at my cabin. I brought him back. I didn't think he should be wandering.”
My chest tightened. I’d invested four years in that dog, and this was how he repaid me? “He wasn't wandering. He was at your cabin.”
“That's wandering, by my definition.”
I set the spokeshave down on the bench. Slowly. Because if I didn't, I was going to hold it tighter than the wood deserved.
