"You've traveled all over the Northeast, taken assignments in the Caribbean, Mexico, Costa Rica -don't give me 'I needed to expand my horizons.'"
"I didn't say I needed to. I said it's been good-"
"Hairsplitting. You should have been a lawyer."
She smiled. "This has always been home. I've never lived anywhere else."
"It still is your home."
She sighed at him, slipping her coat back on. "Do you want to listen to me or argue with me?"
He leaned back against the counter, his arms crossed on his chest as he studied her. "Then no bullshit."
"You cut-to-the-chase military types. Think creatively-"
"Carine."
"All right, all right." But she didn't have the emotional resources to dig deep and could only try to explain in a superficial way what the past nine months had been like for her. "After you dumped me-"
"Jesus," he breathed.
"Well? You're the one who doesn't want any BS. Call a spade a spade. After you dumped me, I started to look at my life here in a new way and realized I had taken everything I have for granted."
"You've never taken anything for granted."
He'd always argued with her, pushed her, prodded her. For most of her life, it'd been irritating. But last winter, she'd loved him for it. She'd thought she could talk to him about anything and hoped he could do the same with her. Only that wasn't the way it was. He'd never opened up his soul to her the way she had hers. Maybe that was why it'd been easy-at least possible-for him to walk away.
But she pushed back such thoughts. He wasn't asking about him and their relationship, but about her. "I was too rooted," she said. "I didn't want this to be the only place I'd ever lived, ever could live."
"What about men?" He tilted his head back, but if he was trying to be lighthearted, he was failing. There wasn't a hint of amusement in his expression. "Expanding your horizons where men are concerned?"
Carine groaned as she buttoned up her coat. "I give up. I lived a good life before you, and I've been living a good life since you. So don't feel sorry for me because of what you did. Let's just leave it at that. Whatever else that might or might not be going on with me is none of your business. Not anymore."
"Fair enough." He pulled away from the sink and grabbed his leather jacket off the counter, shrugging it on. "People wouldn't blame you if you'd set my house on fire before leaving town."
"I think they're breathing a sigh of relief that we didn't get married, after all. Imagine the kids we'd have had." Her voice caught, but he didn't seem to notice. She quickly headed for the back door. "I'm not still in love with you, if that's what you're worried about. 'Lust' might still be an issue, but, trust me, I can resist."
"Like you did yesterday afternoon?"
"Like I am right now," she said lightly, pushing open the door, smiling back at him. "There's something about a sweaty man covered in wood chips."
"If that's all it takes-"
But she was out the door, walking quickly down the driveway before she could do anything stupid. So far she'd had a good start to her day. She didn't want to blow it by ending up upstairs with him, or, even worse, having him decide her easy manner with him was an act and she wasn't over him, after all.
Keep practicing, she thought, and maybe the act would become reality.
Thirteen
Her cabin was cold and empty and had an odd nasty smell that she noticed the minute she walked through the back door. Ty located the cause before she did-a recently dead bat in her woodstove.
Lovely, Carine thought, and tried not to view it as an omen.
Ty carried the bat carcass out on a cast-iron poker, and she turned on the heat and stood in her kitchen as if she were a stranger. She touched the scarred, inexpensive countertop, ran her fingers over the small table, which barely fit in front of a window that looked out on the back meadow. The kitchen, bathroom and the small room that served as her studio were all on the back of the cabin. The great room stretched across the front, with its woodstove and hooked rugs, its comfortable furnishings. A ladder led up to a loft under one half of the slanted ceiling. Her bedroom. At night, she could peer through the balcony railing and watch the dying embers of the fire through the tempered-glass door of her woodstove.
It was, at most, a two-person house, all wood and dark greens, rusts, warm browns, intimate and cozy. Carine had done a lot of the work on it herself. Gus would help, Antonia and Nate-and Ty-when they were in Cold Ridge, even Manny Carrera a couple of times.
No one in town had believed Saskia North would sell Carine the one-acre lot. Saskia likes her isolation, they'd said. Her privacy. She's strange, weird. Indeed, she had been a solitary, intensely creative woman, in her late seventies when she surprised her doubters and sold Carine the lot. Even as a neighbor, Saskia was unreliable in many ways, not showing up when she said she would, making and breaking countless promises as if they were nothing. It was as if her brain was so cluttered up with ideas and whims, sparks of imagination, that little else could get in, never mind stick. Anything she thought of would be worth pursuing, at least for a while.
But only her best ideas grabbed her and held on, and when they did, she pursued them with a vengeance-a painting, a tapestry, a collage, whatever it was. That was something to see. Her folk art was sought by collectors, and had become even more popular since her death, although Ty seemed only vaguely aware of either the financial or the artistic value of what his mother did.
After she died, Gus had often said he didn't know which he liked less, having Carine out there alone, or having her out there alone with Tyler North.
Ty came in through the back door. "Bat's where it won't stink up the joint."
"Did you bury it?"
"No, Carine, I did not bury it or hold a memorial service for it. I threw it in the woods." He zipped up his jacket. "I'll leave you here and go back and finish up the wood. Take you to lunch in town?"
His words caught her off guard. Leave her on her own? Suddenly she didn't want him to leave, or perhaps she just didn't want to be here alone, raking up memories, trying to feel at home. But she didn't want him to notice her ambivalence. "That'd be good."
He winked. "It'll be okay. See you soon."
The door shut softly behind him, and Carine felt the heat come on, clanging in the cold pipes. She checked the refrigerator. Empty, no scum to clean out. She ran the water in the kitchen sink and walked down the short hall to her studio, her desktop computer, her easel, her worktable, her shelves tidy but dusty, as if she'd died and no one had gotten around to cleaning out her house.
"Damn," she breathed, darting outside into the cold air.
Nothing was the same. Nothing would ever be the same again.
She went into her one-car garage, her much-diminished woodpile just as she'd left it months ago. She loaded cordwood into her arms, one chunk of ash, birch and oak after another, until she was leaning backward against the weight of it. Gus had brought her two cords last fall, before the shooting, and dumped it in her driveway, figuring that'd spur her to get it stacked before winter. What was left was super-dry and would burn easily. But she'd need another two cords at least if she planned to spend any part of the winter here.
She dumped her sixteen-inch logs into the woodbox she'd made herself from old barnboards, then went back for another load.
A midnight-blue car with Massachusetts plates pulled into her dirt driveway, and Gary Turner waved from behind the wheel, smiling, as if he thought she mightbeonedgeandwantedtoreassureher.Heclimbed out, wearing a black pea coat with no hat, the slight breeze catching the ends of his white hair. "I was going to call, but I don't have your cell phone number-"
"That's okay. I don't have it on, anyway, and coverage out here is iffy at best." She brushed sawdust off her barn coat. "I heard the Rancourts were in town. I wasn't sure if you'd come up with them."