by Mad Dash
But she wasn’t in her spot, or anywhere else along the meandering pond bank. He called out; his voice echoed back from the other side. He thought of the time, two summers ago, when she’d talked him into going for a swim, and afterward he’d fallen fast asleep, facedown on the dock. When he woke up, she was paddling innocently at the far end, and his whole backside was covered with seaweed. Not seaweed, the green stuff growing at the bottom of the pond, algae or whatever. He looked like a science-fiction-movie freak. He put his arms out and stalked around the bank toward her, making monster noises while she squealed in pretend fear. They ended up making love in the cold water.
He went around to the front again. Since her car was here, she must’ve gone for a walk. He made a megaphone with his hands and yelled, “Dash!” in three different directions. Why didn’t they have a key hidden outside someplace? They’d talked about it, never gotten around to doing it.
He turned in a frustrated circle, surveying blankness. Had she never gotten his message? He’d left it over two hours ago. She was always going on tramps in the woods, but he seldom accompanied her—he preferred sitting on the deck with a book, or better, sitting inside with a book—so he didn’t know her trail system, where to even start to look for her.
Calling the police would probably be overreacting. She’d think so, anyway. He could hear her: “Oh, Andrew, you didn’t. My God, you are so neurotic.” Half an hour, that’s how long he’d give her. At four o’clock, he was calling the cops, and he didn’t care if she mocked him.
He needed something to occupy his mind in the meantime, keep it off horrible scenarios. Dash’s foot caught in a hole or a bear trap, Dash abducted by mountain men. Dash dying or freezing to death because of a heart attack. Her health was excellent, but she could have a sudden stroke, an embolus, an aneurysm as easily as anyone else. They’d have to send dogs out to find her, and it was going to be pitch-dark in two hours. He had to do something.
He’d chop wood.
Her pile was running low. She complained about old Bender’s habit of including wood in his drop-offs that was too big for the woodstove. She could chop up the smaller pieces herself, but the logs were too much for her; she had to leave them on the ground where Bender dumped them. Here was a chance for Andrew to do something helpful and admirable. Knightly. Something she would be grateful to him for.
He found the ax in the woodshed and gripped the handle experimentally, trying to recall if he’d ever held one before. Perhaps in Boy Scouts. Shouldn’t there be a platform to put the log on, a base of some sort, so it was at a more convenient height? He’d never thrown his back out before, but if this wasn’t a golden opportunity for it, he didn’t know what was.
He took a few practice swings, wishing he’d brought gloves. He set a bulky log on end. It wobbled, but it was only about twelve inches across; if he put his foot on it to steady it—good-bye foot. He spread his legs, dug his heels into the ground for traction, like a baseball player. Lifting the ax high overhead, he brought it down with all his might.
Not bad. His whole body vibrated, but he’d driven the ax into the log a good three inches.
Now if he could only get it out. He jerked and yanked, he hoisted it, log and all, and tried to smash it against another log, against the ground, against the side of the woodshed. It never budged. He was sweating, swearing—
A man’s voice. Coming from the side of the house, and now a laugh. Dash’s laugh. He froze.
His wife and a man he’d never seen before strolled around the corner of the cabin. Dash was in the act of elbowing the man in the ribs, a bit of shtick she reverted to when the joke or pun she’d just made was especially lame or obvious. The man, a burly fellow in a plaid jacket and a hunting cap, chuckled in appreciation. They looked up and saw Andrew at the same time.
She faltered, almost stopped. She was too far away for him to read her face precisely; the widened eyes and the O her mouth made might mean gladness, might mean shock. Otherwise, she looked relaxed and fit, light-footed. She had on clothes he couldn’t remember seeing before. Her cheeks were bright as cherries. She had on earmuffs.
“Andrew!” she called, waving a mittened hand. She said something inaudible to her fair-haired, thick-necked companion, who had to be Bender’s son-in-law, and they came forward together. A small black dog bounded out of the woods and ran past them, skidding at Andrew’s feet, turning in circles, giddy with welcome. Sock, he presumed. The watchdog.
“Wow,” Dash said, stopping just shy of him, “what a surprise.” She looked healthy. She looked beautiful. She swung her arms in a restless, girlish way, as if—he hoped—she’d have embraced him if they’d been alone. “Did you call? I’ve been out walking. With Owen. Have you two met? No, of course not. Owen, this is Andrew—Owen Roby.”
They shook hands; Roby’s was thick and meaty, like a baseball glove.
“We’ve been tracking muskrats along the creek,” Dash went on; she chattered when she was nervous. “Owen’s so smart, he knows what all the tracks are, possum, raccoon, squirrel—he can tell the difference between a gray squirrel’s footprints and a red squirrel’s footprints. Can you imagine?”
“Truthfully, no.”
“Oh, and we saw a wild turkey. As close as that tree, and then it flew away. Very clumsily. When did you get here? Have you been waiting long?”
“No, no. A couple of minutes.”
“I wish I’d known you were coming. Why didn’t you go inside?”
“The door’s locked.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s stuck. Owen’s going to fix it, he has a plane. Oh, Andrew—are you chopping wood?”
“No. Yes.” He tried to swing the log by the ax behind his leg, but it hit his ankle. Without wincing, he said, “Well, just getting started.”
“Oh, gosh, you don’t have to do that. Owen’s been doing it for me.”
Two minutes he’d known Owen, and he was sick of him.
“Where’s your wedge?” Roby said, or something that sounded like that, and started looking around on the ground. Andrew wrinkled his eyebrows, as if trying to remember where he’d left his wedge. What was a wedge?
A heavy, rusting, metal thing, wedge-shaped. Roby found it in the woodshed. “Here it is.” He tossed it in the air a few times, catching it in his paw. Before he could toss it to him, Andrew dropped the log on the ground, ax and all. Excalibur in the stone.
The logo on Roby’s hunting cap said WORMER’S ORGANIC FEEDS. His fine, pale-yellow hair and the pink streaks on his windburned cheeks gave him a naked, unprotected look that didn’t match the rest of him, which was rugged and planted-looking, quietly self-assured. He didn’t look at Dash or Andrew, didn’t smirk, didn’t flex his halfback’s shoulder muscles—which only made it worse when he took hold of the ax in one hand and slammed the log off it with a single hard chop to the ground.
Andrew heard himself say, “I loosened it.” His cheeks burned.
Dash wore a gentle, amused, wistful smile he couldn’t look at.
Next Roby tapped the wedge into the white gash the ax had made. With the same gallingly unassuming efficiency, he slapped the flat end of the ax against the wedge, and the log’s two halves fell neatly away.
“Ah, yes. Much easier that way.” Andrew gave a good-natured laugh, as if nothing pleased him more than a lesson in manly wood chopping in front of his estranged wife.
Dash’s echoing laugh was the one she used when she was trying to save someone’s feelings. “Oh, let’s not chop any more wood now, guys. It’s getting cold; let’s go inside and get warm.”
Let’s? Guys?
Roby pulled off his cap, ran his wrist over his thinning hair, and tugged it back on. “I guess I’ll be heading on back now.”
“Okay,” Andrew said.
Dash had a lot more to say, though, about the sticking front door, the kitchen cabinets, the stacked washer-dryer unit Roby was going to buy with his contractor’s discount
and install in the bathroom. “Although I’ll kind of miss the Laundromat,” she added in a jokey voice, and Roby grinned and said, “No, I told you, the Velvet Cafe’s even better.”
“But only at the counter.”
“Right, not a table.”
“And especially on Mondays.”
“Because all the good stuff happened on the weekend.”
They laughed together, fond and easy.
“Gossip,” Dash explained eventually, noticing Andrew’s look. “Town gossip, at the Laundromat or at the café—”
“I got it.”
Roby finally left, walked off down the hill. It didn’t occur to Andrew to ask where he was going until he was almost out of sight; he was too happy to see him go.
“He left his truck down at the Speichers’,” Dash said, moving toward the house. “He’s putting in their new hot-water heater.”
“I thought he was a farmer.”
“He’s everything, it’s amazing. He raises beef cattle, he does construction, he delivers mail over Christmas, he works for a logging company sometimes, sometimes for the county extension service. Plus he hunts and fishes and grows a big garden every summer…” She stopped talking to open the front door, which involved turning and pulling up on the knob while hip-butting the bottom panel and pushing in. “See? It wasn’t locked, I never lock it.”
The cold cabin smelled like ashes. Dash went around turning on lamps, picking up plates and carrying them into the kitchen. “I’ll make some tea,” she called to Andrew. “Do you think you could make a fire?”
Was she being sarcastic? He watched her punch the blinking light on the answering machine in the kitchen; she had her back to him, so he couldn’t see her face while his message played back. Did he sound desperate? No, he decided; just unusually alert.
“Shall I make one in here, too?” he asked when he’d finished building a fire in the woodstove. They had a potbellied stove in the kitchen, but seldom used it. Dash said no, that was fine, while she took cups down from the cabinet and got milk out of the refrigerator.
He drifted back to the living room to hold his hands over the clanking, slowly warming stove. “Yes, very cute,” he told the dog, who had pulled a piece of kindling from the wood hoop and was trying to lure him into a game by repeatedly dropping it at his feet. Wasn’t it cats who were supposed to zero in on people who didn’t like them? His nose was itching already; he got his handkerchief out just in time to sneeze into it twice.
The cabin’s decorating theme was still Shrine to My Mother, he saw. Arlene’s old armchair sat in the corner; her dusty oil paintings from a long-ago hobby had replaced Dash’s photos on the walls; her fake Oriental runner bordered the brick hearth in front of the woodstove. Her knickknacks lined the small bookcase alongside her book club copies of The Thorn Birds, Hawaii, Ship of Fools, The Forsyte Saga. He didn’t really mind the gradual eradication in the room of almost everything connected with himself—there hadn’t been that much to begin with, although he did miss his foot-high stack of unread New Yorkers—and if it gave Dash comfort to be surrounded by her mother’s things, how could he resent it? Everything looked so settled, though, so cozy and self-contained, and that he resented. It looked as if one woman lived here by herself. Contentedly.
He turned over the library book on the hearth to see the cover. Religions of the World. Dash? Impossible. On second thought, maybe: The subtitle was An Illustrated Overview.
He started guiltily when she came in with a tray, catching him stirring through the mail on the coffee table. She set the tray down with a small, admonishing clatter. “I sent away for that.”
“What? This?” He held it up innocently: a course catalog from the University of Pennsylvania.
“I know you think I’m not serious about vet school, but I am.”
He looked again at the catalog. “This is in Philadelphia.”
“It’s the closest one there is. Except for Virginia Tech.”
“But…”
“What?” She set her hands on her hips.
“Nothing.” He put the catalog back and sat down. The idea of Dash giving up her career, her successful business, the work she was born to do in order to take up the study of veterinary medicine was so ludicrous to him, so unbelievably wrongheaded—if he said one word, it would start a fight.
He didn’t want to fight, he wanted to take her to bed. He’d figured that out halfway down Route 29, and spent the other half imagining it.
She sat at the opposite end of the sofa from him, drawing up her feet in their woolly socks. She worried too much about getting old. She stared in the bathroom mirror at night and complained about her crow’s feet, her jawline, the barely perceptible wrinkle between her eyebrows. Everything was the beginning of the end. She never took his consoling remarks to heart, but he meant it when he told her she still looked beautiful to him. She was just right. She had been twenty years ago, and nothing had changed. She was simply his type, medium-tall, fair-skinned, fine-featured. Softhearted. His own Dash, who had turned on him for reasons she didn’t understand herself. Part of her quarrel with him was that he didn’t take her leaving him seriously, but how could he? It made no sense.
“I spoke to Chloe this morning,” he mentioned as they sipped tea. Chloe was always a safe topic. “We’ve started playing chess, sending each other moves in e-mails.”
“She told me.” They smiled at each other across the expanse of couch. “I wish I had something like that with her,” Dash said, worrying a torn thread in the knee of her jeans. “Something to keep us close.”
He put his hand on her foot, the only part of her he could reach. “You? You two will always be close.”
She sighed. “She’s more like you than me.”
That was true, so he said nothing. He thought of sliding his hand up the leg of her jeans and holding her bare calf. In the past, if Chloe hadn’t come down with them, they used to make love on this couch, Saturday or Sunday mornings after breakfast, usually, the newspapers strewn everywhere, crackling underneath them. He hated sleeping alone. Did she? Her hair was coming down in sexy tangles from a barrette on top of her head. She was talking about the two geese she’d seen on the pond yesterday, and he loved her expansive gestures, the way she looked behind him and to the left when she concentrated on what she was saying, then back into his eyes. He loved her intensity and her vitality. She woke him up. She was right, she wasn’t depressed. If this was premenopause, it had just made her more…it had just made her more. On the other hand, Dash times two was a mixed blessing. One of her had always been as much as he could handle.
He missed what she said next, but came to when he heard, “Did you know you can eat muskrats? Yeah, they’re very clean animals. I asked him what they taste like and he said chicken—he didn’t even laugh! He gave me a suet feeder he built himself—I’ll show you, it’s outside. He says we get woodpeckers all winter, and they really need suet for energy. And cardinals, chickadees…”
Suet. Wedge. Crossword puzzle words he’d heard all his life, and yet he had to admit he didn’t know precisely what they meant. It wasn’t like him to resent the acquisition of knowledge.
“You’re seeing a lot of Roby, are you?” he said, leaning over to brush a spot of mud off his pants cuff. Was he jealous of Roby? Yes, but not for any good reason. Of that he was sure.
“Well, I guess. He’s doing everything Shevlin used to do.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Bender. That’s his name, Shevlin—I know, all these years and we never knew. Cottie and I are starting to be friends. I’m not sure why she likes me, but I like her, too, right from the beginning we just hit it off. I’ve been going over there in the afternoons sometimes for coffee. We talk about gardening, things like that.” She shrugged, smiling at the unlikeliness of a friendship that didn’t surprise him at all. Mrs. Bender, who sounded like a nice woman, must be about Arlene’s age.
“I’m glad you have someone to talk to,” he said, stroking his finger
over the toes of her foot.
“I’m trying to get Greta up to speed to take over the office for a whole week, so I can stay down here. Things are still slow, I could move some appointments around and get an entire week with no shoots.” She closed her eyes. “Think of it. I could really get somewhere if I had one long, uninterrupted week.”
“Get somewhere?”
“With myself.” She opened her eyes. “I know it’s a drag, but you have to be patient with me. It’s an important time. I’ve been meditating. I go for long walks in the woods with Sock, and just think. I’m learning lore.”
“Lore?”
“Don’t you dare laugh. I’ve been reading nature books and learning to identify birds and trees and things.” She pointed to a jumble of dried leaves and poddish-looking objects on the table; he had thought it was one of her winter flower arrangements. He couldn’t help it—it made him smile. “Andrew, I’m warning you.”
“No, I think it’s great. Really. But…aren’t you ever lonely?”
“Nope. Not lonely.” She ran her thumbnail over the place on the cup where her lips had been. “Or if I am, it’s a good kind. Scary, but educational. I’m having a genuine learning experience.”
“You could take an adult education course at Mason-Dixon. I think they’ve got one on wildflowers.”
She narrowed her eyes, not sure if he was making fun or not. He didn’t know himself. If she wasn’t lonely, then she didn’t miss him. But he was expected to be completely supportive while she played at Thoreau or Thomas Merton or whatever the hell this was.
The dog, who had been dozing in front of the stove, roused itself to jump up on his knees and deposit a moist stub of rawhide in his lap.
“Pet her,” Dash said, her face breaking into a smile. “Oh, look, she likes you.”
“How big is it going to get?” He patted the dog’s head with three fingers.
