"I'm not leaving either."
I don't say anything. I don't have to. I stand at the counter and I watch her lift the lid off the pot I had set simmering at four, and she smiles at the pot, and she puts the lid back on, and she gets two bowls from the shelf, and the pine ceiling over our heads holds, and the pines outside the window hold, and the light holds, and in the bookshelf behind me a tablet holds the search history of a woman choosing to stay.
13
MAX
Idrive home with a key on the seat next to me.
It is a small brass key on a small brass ring. I had it cut at the hardware store on my lunch. I had not planned to do it. I went in for a furnace filter and I stood at the key board for two minutes and I took my own key off my ring and I put it on the counter and I asked the man to make me a copy. He made me a copy. I paid in cash. I walked out with it warm in my pocket.
I sit at the red light at the bottom of the hill and I look at the key on the seat and I think about giving it to her.
I think about the small thing it is. A copy of a key. Five dollars. Two minutes at a counter. I think about what it is going to mean when I put it in her hand. I think about the fact that I have not given a copy of a key to anybody in eleven years. Dani has my spare on a hook in her own kitchen, in case. Nobody else has had a key to my front door since I bought the cabin in 2014.
I think about Evangeline in my bed this morning, asleep on her side, the covers slid from her naked body, more beautiful than anyone I have ever seen.
I put the key in my pocket.
The light goes green.
I drive the last six miles up the county road in the dark. The radio is on low. The heater is on. The truck smells like coffee and engine oil and a thing I am starting to recognize as her, Evangeline, and she must be on my skin.
I pull up the drive.
The cabin windows are gold.
---
She has lit the lamps.
I see it from the truck. The kitchen window is gold. The living room window is gold. There is smoke off the chimney from a fire she has built in the woodstove. I sit a beat in the truck. I put my hand on the wheel. I breathe out.
I get out. I shut the door soft.
I come up the porch the way I came up the porch yesterday. Boots on the mat. Heel to heel. Jacket on the peg. I push the front door open with my shoulder and the smell that comes out of the cabin at me is the smell of meat and onion and something else, butter, bread.
She is at the stove.
She is in the robe.
The robe is loose at the throat. Her blonde hair is down. Her feet are bare on the kitchen floor. She is so beautiful and my breath catches. She has the cast iron going at a low heat and a wooden spoon in her hand, and she turns her head when the door opens, and she looks at me, and she smiles a small slow smile that is not the smile of a woman in a kitchen with dinner, it is the smile of a woman waiting for me.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"You're early."
"By twenty minutes."
"I noticed."
I cross the kitchen. I stop at her shoulder. I put my hand on the small of her back over the robe.
"What are you making?”
"Stew. Bread. Pot's been on since two."
