“Hmm,” Lance said, and sat down hard on an uncut round of tree trunk. “That’s a tricky question.” He sat still and pondered it for a time. “I guess the honest answer would be . . . yes. To both. Okay. Here’s what I’d be willing to do. I’ll pack up and go home today. Get my feet wet in the business again and catch up with what I missed. Then come the weekend, I’ll drive back out and see how you’re doing.”
“Fair enough. I’m wondering if you might take the train out, though. I could pick you up in Albany or Utica.”
“Because . . . ?”
“I was hoping you’d drive the Maserati back into the city. And . . . you know. It’s silly, but it’s even a little hard for me to say it. Sell it for me. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but it would hurt me to do it myself. I can’t really even really bring myself to watch it go. Gosh, I’m humiliated to say that.”
“Don’t be,” Lance said. “Consider it done.”
Roseanna had been back in the house for fifteen or twenty minutes after Lance’s big departure, thinking no real thoughts, so far as she knew.
Then, with little if any forethought, she picked up her new phone.
She dialed a cell phone number she still knew by heart.
After five rings the call went to voicemail.
“Nita Langley,” Nita’s elf-like voice awkwardly said, sandwiched into the space in that prerecorded voicemail message. The blank in which the user is supposed to identify herself and her mailbox.
Roseanna waited for the beep.
“Nita. It’s Roseanna. Surprise. I was wondering if you wanted to have lunch sometime. You could come out here to the farm if you want, but I understand if you don’t want to. It’s such a long drive. Oh, wait. You don’t have a car. Duh. That’s typical me, right? You could take a train to some point in between and I could meet you. Catch up over a meal. Only if it sounds like a good idea, though. Even if you don’t do it, I wanted you to know you’re invited to. I just figured . . . just because we don’t work together anymore doesn’t mean we need to act like strangers. We’ll never be strangers, now will we?”
She read off the first three numbers of her landline, the area code. Then she stopped and laughed at herself.
“Never mind,” she said. “You have it on your cell phone now. Well, that’s all. Hope you’re well.”
But before she could disconnect the call, she was struck with a strange and uncomfortable thought.
“Wait,” she said, “that’s not all. I’m not sure if you’re still with the firm, but if you are . . . no matter what you may have heard around the watercooler, this is an offer of friendship only. Totally aboveboard. Okay. That’s all. ’Bye.”
She hung up the phone.
She knew if Lance were here, they would smile together over that last bit of the message.
But he wasn’t.
So she smiled on her own, to herself. And that was also okay.
THREE YEARS AFTER THE MOVE
Chapter Twenty-Five
Paddling into Eternity
The hard clang of the bell at the gate brought Roseanna upright. She had been napping on her back on the floor of her living room, much the way she and Lance had always done—and occasionally still did. She had honed the skill of being able to nap, barely, despite the considerable din of small-scale construction.
She rose and looked out the window.
A young man was standing at her gate. Clean-cut. Maybe Lance and Neal’s age. He looked around in every direction, even above himself. He seemed to be waiting for something to happen, and open to the possibility that the event could come from anywhere at all. Even from the sky.
Roseanna sighed and walked out to see what he wanted.
As she plodded down her own dirt path, and was able to see him better, she developed a nagging sense that she might have seen him before. But she wasn’t positive, and no context sprang to mind.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, a bit irritably, when she reached the gate.
“You don’t remember me,” he said, “do you?”
“You look vaguely familiar, but . . . I’m sorry.”
“Evan Maxwell.”
“Max? My reporter friend? Or enemy, as the case may be?”
“The very one. And I have to say this right now before I say anything else—I’m relieved to hear you call me your friend. Even with that little qualification that came afterward. I thought I might find myself looking down the business end of a shotgun if I ever came back around here.”
She held the gate open for him, and he walked in.
She expected him to walk with her to the house. Instead he made a beeline for the field of sculptures.
“This has grown a lot,” he said as they moved from metal animal to metal animal. And from metal animal to metal person. “I halfway thought your neighbors might have pressured you to take them down by now. I talked to a few of them, and there was quite a split as to whether the zoo was a delight or an eyesore.”
“Yes, well, the law is the law,” she said. “And my son-in-law is an attorney.”
“You’re an attorney,” he said, stopping near the Martin sculpture.
“No, I’m an ex-attorney.”
“Still on the bar?”
“Technically, yes. But I’d sooner move the statues than go back into practicing any kind of law, even just for my own purposes. The backup plan was to haul them down by the creek where they couldn’t be seen from the road. But, as it turned out, there was no ordinance to prevent me having them up here. So here they are in all their glory. Like I said, the law is the law.”
Evan stood looking into the round sphere of what would have been Martin’s face, if the statue had been given one.
“This reminds me of that old guy who used to chop wood here. The high-top sneakers. The scraggly hair sticking out underneath the hat. What was his name again?”
“Martin.”
“Right. Martin.”
He set off walking, headed for the only other sculpture that was not of the animal kingdom. Roseanna followed.
“What’s all that noise?” he asked, looking up and around as he walked. Much the way he had at the gate. “Neighbors building? That must drive you crazy. I remember how you felt about your silence.”
He stopped in front of the statue and stared into its face. This one had a face.
“Not neighbors,” she said. “It’s Nelson—you remember him—and my son. Nelson is building onto that tiny guest shack to make it big enough for a family. He already added one big room a couple of years ago, but then he and Patty had another baby. So the thing keeps expanding. And my son and his partner come up every weekend and work on their guesthouse. Lance is here working on it now. It might never be done at this rate, but at least it has walls and a roof now, so they can camp out in it. They don’t need a tent anymore.”
While she spoke, Evan continued to stare into the face of the statue. As if it might break down and tell him who it was.
“It’s not the weekend, though,” he said. Distantly. “It’s Friday.”
“Sometimes Lance comes up on Thursday or Friday and Neal drives out on Friday night.”
“So basically there’s been nonstop company and construction going on here since I last saw you,” he said, still staring.
“Pretty much.”
“And the noise doesn’t drive you to distraction? You were so adamant about silence.”
“Yeah. I still am, pretty much. But it just never does me a damn bit of good. Stuff happens no matter how I might feel about it.”
Evan smiled without taking his eyes off the statue.
“And who is this?” he asked.
“That’s Alice.”
“Oh, that’s Alice,” he repeated, his emphasis on the words sounding nearly reverent.
Alice, in iron, came up only to about the chest of Evan Maxwell. Not because she was not life size, but because she was seated in an iron canoe, paddling.
“We all worked together on this one,”
Roseanna said.
“I’m not surprised. It’s different from the others. More detailed.”
“Right. It’s a real sculpture. We sculpted metal. Rather than just welding together a bunch of pieces to suggest a shape. It took ages. It was quite a project. I can’t help noticing you’re not taking notes about any of this. Is it safe to assume you’re not planning a follow-up story?”
He looked over at her, his eyes breaking away from Alice for the first time since he’d seen her. He seemed genuinely surprised by the question.
“I’m not even a reporter anymore,” he said. “Haven’t been for quite some time now.”
“Because . . . ?”
“I just don’t think I was cut out for it. Oh, but maybe that’s not the right way to put it. I’m not saying I was bad at it. I just didn’t like it very much. It wasn’t making me happy.”
“Then you were smart to move on.”
“I left not too long after I did that story about you, so I’ve always wondered if you might have had some influence on me.” His eyes flickered back to Alice. “So Alice was a paddler?”
“No. Not at all. Never. Not in any way. She hardly ever got out of the city. Never took vacations. All work and no play.”
“But you’ve immortalized her until the end of time in a canoe.”
“Right,” Roseanna said. “We did. It’s the closest we could get to giving her that much-anticipated retirement she missed out on. It was her own fault for not choosing a retirement hobby while she was alive. So I chose for her, and when I see her again, if stuff like that happens, I’ll be brooking no complaints.”
They walked together toward the sound of all that commotion.
As they rounded the house, Roseanna saw Mikey playing with the dogs. Buzzy ran away from the toddler in a circle, tail whipping, and the massive Hector loped along behind, afraid—as always—of being left out. Lance was up on a ladder attaching storm drains at the edges of the new guesthouse roof. Patty sat on the porch of her and Nelson’s home, supervising Mikey’s play.
“I must admit I was curious about who all still lived here,” Evan said. “That’s part of the reason I drove out. I would think about you from time to time and wonder if all those squatters were still living here, or if you’d followed through with putting them off your land.”
“I put Melanie and Dave off. Well, I had Lance do it. Probably the cowardly way out, but it got the job done.”
“And Martin.”
“No. I didn’t evict Martin.”
“He’s still here?”
“No.”
They stopped walking and just stood, half facing each other. Roseanna watched his face as he absorbed her meaning.
“Oh,” he said after a time. “So there’s a reason that wood chopper statue reminded me of Martin.”
They walked again. Roseanna didn’t answer because there was no need.
They passed the din of Lance’s guesthouse construction, Roseanna wincing more dramatically than necessary at the noise, and continued on toward the barn. There Evan stopped suddenly, his eyes fixed to the hand-carved wooden marker on the downhill side, which stood angled out over the valley.
“Is Martin buried on your property?” Evan asked.
“No, that’s not him. Turned out he had a prepaid cemetery plot next to his wife.”
“So who’s this?” he asked, tentatively moving closer. “Earnest,” he read out loud. “Who was Earnest? Another squatter?”
“No. Earnest was a horse.”
“I didn’t even know you had a horse.”
“He wasn’t living here yet when you came out to do that story. He showed up later.”
“He didn’t live very long, then.”
“Oh, yes he did. He was thirty-seven or thirty-eight when he showed up. We’re pretty sure he lived to see forty. A horse can’t ask for more good years than that. Too bad you didn’t get to meet him. He was quite a character. We all miss him. Which, frankly, I never thought I’d hear myself say about a horse. Especially a very old, very smelly horse. Turns out old and smelly are not deal breakers when it comes to affection. Who knew? That’s likely to be a boon to me in my own later years, which are coming up fast.”
They stood looking out over the valley together. It riveted Roseanna, that view. It always had, and it still did. She had once assumed it would lose its pull and become more commonplace. She had assumed wrong.
The dogs came up to join them, then stopped and stood transfixed, as if also enjoying the view. Hector sat, his head quite purposely underneath Roseanna’s right hand. She patted it. The hulking beast half closed his eyes and sighed.
Behind them, Roseanna heard the dejected wail of the toddler, Mikey, brokenhearted because the dogs no longer cared to play. Inconsolable as only a two-year-old can be.
“You have two dogs now,” Evan said over the din.
“This big guy is Lance’s dog. All his life he wanted me to get him a dog. So I finally did. When he was thirty.”
“Why didn’t he get one on his own when he grew up?”
“He felt guilty about leaving a dog alone all day while he worked. So I went and got this guy when he was on his last day at the pound. Hours away from that room at the end of the hall, and the poor guy seemed to know it. He was so stressed he couldn’t stop drooling. I told Lance if he couldn’t handle the guilt of leaving him alone, he could keep the dog here and visit him on the weekends. But it didn’t take my son long to figure out that the dog was just so grateful to have a home. Everything else paled in comparison. So what was the other reason?” she added suddenly, turning the conversation in a whole new, unexpected direction.
“Excuse me?”
“You said part of the reason you came back was to see if I had thrown the squatters off the place . . .”
“Oh. That. Right. Well . . . the main thing is . . . I’ve always felt a little guilty. Ever since I wrote that piece. You didn’t want me to. You tried to tell me that. You didn’t want your family or your law partners finding you and trying to force you home. You had a lot to lose. I’ve tried to put it out of my mind all this time. But finally I had to come back and see how things turned out.”
“Not too badly,” she said. “Things turned out okay. Rocky for a time. But family finding me was the best thing that could possibly have happened, and I owe you one for that. The law partner thing was dicey, but it passed. And I didn’t lose anything I couldn’t afford to lose.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” he said.
“He would’ve found me anyway. You just speeded up the process.”
They turned around and walked back into the fray together.
“So what do you do now?” she asked him. “Now that you’re not doing the reporter thing anymore? I forgot to ask.”
“I’m a musician.”
“Sounds like a potential improvement. What do you play?”
“Guitar and bass. A little piano. I’m in a band. It’s pretty hand to mouth. I’m not making nearly as much money as I was before.”
“That’s overrated,” Roseanna said.
“Making lots of money, you mean?”
“Yes,” Roseanna said. “That.”
Lance came down from his ladder when he realized there was someone new on the property. The blessed silence rang out loudly, if such a thing were possible. He wiped his hand with a rag before he stuck it out in Evan’s direction. It still looked plenty dirty.
“Lance,” Roseanna said, “This is Evan Maxwell. Max, my son Lance. There’s a reason I call him Max. Once my back is turned he might start complaining about it, and then you’ll hear the story. The short version is, it serves him right.”
Lance stood scratching his nose for a moment, seemingly lost in thought. Roseanna could see a streak of dirt he’d left on the bridge of his nose in the process.
“Evan Maxwell,” Lance said. “Why does that sound so damn familiar?”
Then he got it. Made the connection. It was evident to Roseanna by the changes to
his face.
“Oh, Evan Maxwell,” Lance repeated. “The reporter. Interesting. Between you and me, you were smart to wait a few years before you came back. She was pretty damn miffed at you for a while there. But she looks like she’s over it now. To me, anyway. How does she look to you? But those first couple months. Hoo boy. First I showed up and more or less never left. Not full-time left, anyway. Then her old law partner showed up and served papers on her and took most of the money she planned to live on for the rest of her life. She almost lost this property. But she didn’t. Everything else, but not that. And she’s mellowed some these last couple years. Lucky thing for you.”
He smiled that crooked smile of his, then climbed up his ladder again with a slight wave.
“That was interesting,” Evan said.
“He tends to be a bit direct. Gets it from his mother’s side of the family.”
“You told me you hadn’t lost anything you couldn’t afford to lose.”
“I didn’t. Look at me. Am I dead?” She patted her solid belly. “Do I look like I miss too many meals?”
“But you could’ve lost this place.”
“But I didn’t. And even if I had, it would have been worth it to get my son back. This place is my favorite material thing in the world, but it’s still a thing. It’s not a son. So now I have both. The property and the son. If I were to ask for anything more than that, I think it would come off as downright greedy.”
She walked him to the gate, and then his car.
“Was it worth the drive?” she asked him just before he climbed in.
“More than. I feel better. But now I kind of regret that I’m not in a position to do a follow-up story. Three years later and only two squatters put off the place. That’s a hell of an update. After all this time, still two left who aren’t blood family or in-laws. No, wait, three! Or maybe we should say two and a half. I forgot about the little girl. Where’s the little girl?”
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