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Allison stood there, holding a tomato, and thought about that.

Margaret was suddenly very interested in a bunch of kale.

“Did he just...” Allison started.

“Harold says exactly what he means to say,” Margaret said, examining the kale with great thoroughness. “Always has.”

Allison looked at Harold Finley, who was fifteen feet away having what appeared to be a serious conversation with a man about squash.

She thought about a man who fixed things without being asked. Who had mended Vera Hutchins’ fence and, as far as she could tell, never said a word about it to anyone. Who said it’s fine in a tone that didn’t mean fine and walked away from his own coffee.

“He does, doesn’t he,” Allison said softly.

Margaret said nothing.

The kale was apparently very interesting.

Chapter 8

The Fishing Spot

He was at the lake before the sun cleared the eastern ridge.

This was the point, arriving before the light arrived, when the water was still the dark gray of early morning and the mountains were shapes rather than things and the mist was doing what mist did, moving slowly across the surface in long drifts that had no destination and no hurry about getting there. He’d been coming here since he was eight years old. He’d never been able to explain, to the handful of people who had asked over the years, why it required the dark. It just did. Something about arriving before the day had fully committed to being a day.

His spot was on the north shore, where a granite shelf jutted out over the water and a stand of old spruce came close enough to the edge to provide a windbreak in the colder months. The shelf was wide enough to sit on comfortably, worn smooth by decades of weather and, he supposed, by him, by the habit of a person returning to the same place often enough that they left a kind of mark. Not visible. Just there.

He set his thermos down on the rock beside him. He put the line in the water. He sat.

The fishing was incidental. He caught things sometimes and didn’t other times and both outcomes were equally acceptable. The point was the sitting. The quality of the quiet here, which was different from the quiet of the hardware store or the quiet of his house, older, larger, not indifferent exactly but not personal either. The lake didn’t care that he was there. He found this restful in a way that was difficult to explain to people who expected places to be welcoming.

The mist moved. The water was perfectly still underneath it.

He thought about Roy.

* * *

Roy Colter had been a large man in the way that certain men were large, not just physically, though he had been that too, broad-shouldered and substantial in the way Shane had inherited, but in the quality of his presence. The way he occupied a room. The way people arranged themselves around him without being asked to, the way iron filings arranged themselves around a magnet, not because they’d decided to but because it was simply what happened in that proximity.

He had died eleven years ago, in February, a heart attack that had been quick and had come without warning, which was both merciful and cruel in the ways those things usually were. Shane had been twenty-seven. He’d been running the hardware store for four years by then. Roy’s health had started declining when Shane was nineteen, and then the store had needed someone, and Shane had been there. For the first few years that had meant helping. Opening up, unloading the deliveries, learning the ledger at Roy’s elbow while Roy still made every decision that mattered. At twenty-three, Roy had handed him the keys and the daily running of the place, and what had seemed like a temporary arrangement stopped seeming like anything other than what it was.

He’d been Roy’s grandson since birth. He’d been Roy’s successor since nineteen. The distinction mattered, though he’d spent years learning not to think about it too directly.

What he thought about instead, this morning, in the honesty that the lake seemed to require of him, what he thought about was the summer he was nineteen, the summer before Roy’s health had shifted the equation. He’d been accepted to a program at Montana State. Architecture. He’d filled out the application alone in his bedroom the previous November, not telling anyone, partly because it had felt presumptuous to want something that specifically and partly because he hadn’t been sure yet what wanting it would cost.

He’d gotten the acceptance letter in April. He’d put it in the drawer of his desk.

In June, Roy had a bad week. Then another. By August the doctor had said the word management in a tone that meant something different from what the word usually meant, and Shane had looked at the hardware store and then at his grandfather and then at the acceptance letter in the drawer of his desk, and he’d done the arithmetic.

He had not gone to Montana State.

He had not told Roy about the letter. He had not, in the nineteen years since, told anyone about the letter. He wasn’t sure it would have changed anything if he had, which was part of why he’d never said it, because the arithmetic would have come out the same regardless, and saying it out loud would have made it into a sacrifice rather than a decision, and he had never wanted it to be a sacrifice.

It was a decision. He had made it. He did not spend time regretting decisions.

He thought this firmly, watching the mist move across the water, and believed most of it.

* * *