of the summer, and despite the rain, I have never been so hot or had as much fun in my life.”
He talked as he worked, because the silence was painful, and when the wood finally caught and the logs began to burn, he went back to the kitchen.
“Gonna be a full moon tonight, Annie...and no rain predicted.”
He found the roasting forks in a cabinet, and put three wieners on one and carried it to the fireplace.
The fire crackled as he put the fork into the flames, and soon the fat from the meat began dripping into the blaze, smoking it as it roasted. When the wieners were all blackened on one side and dripping on the other, he pulled them out.
“Looks about right to me,” Charlie said, and carried it back to the kitchen and made himself three hot dogs with mustard. He popped the cap off a bottle of beer, and carried it all back to the fire, then sat and ate in silence.
Another hour passed until the beer was gone and the hot dogs eaten. At that point, he got up and went back for marshmallows. He put as many as he could get on another roasting fork and then held them into the flames, turning them as he did until they were brown and toasty, on the verge of turning black.
“Just like you like them,” Charlie said, and pulled them out of the fire, then carried them and Annie outside onto the porch.
He set the box with her ashes down beside him, then, one by one, pulled the marshmallows off and ate while watching night come to the lake.
It was too cold to hear frogs or crickets, but the night birds were out. The hoot from an owl sent something small and furry scurrying into the underbrush nearby, and the silhouette of a loon floating majestically in the path of moonlight was otherworldly.
Charlie popped the last marshmallow into his mouth, then licked his fingers.
The moon looked blue, just like Charlie felt, but putting this off wasn’t going to make it easier, so he wiped his hands on his jeans, then looked down at the box.
“Let’s do this, baby. Our last hurrah.”
He picked it up, and as he started walking toward the shore, he began hearing the gentle lap of water against the rocks.
He stopped at the edge and looked up, gazing into the moonlight and to the billions of stars above him, holding Annie in his arms.
He stood within the silence until the view before him blurred from welling tears. Then, swallowing past the lump in his throat, he took the lid off the box.
“Always in my heart...always on my mind,” he said, and flung the ashes out across the water in an arc.
Some of them caught on the wind—some seemed suspended in midair, as if they’d just performed a delicate jeté—and then they were gone.
Charlie had done the impossible.
He’d finally let her go.
* * *
Charlie locked up the cabin and left for Dallas before sunup, and the farther he drove, the lighter he felt. The sadness was still there, but that heavy weight in his chest was gone.
One day, one thing, one step at a time.
He smelled like smoke, or he would have gone to the office just because he didn’t want to be home. He wasn’t quite ready to jump back into the world of lost people, but he needed something besides himself on which to focus.
So he went home and cleaned up, then drove to work.
It was the first time he’d ever been there without Wyrick, and opening up and turning on lights as he went made him realize how much her presence there meant.
The computers were off. The coffee wasn’t made, and there were no sugar-crunch bear claws under the glass dome in the coffee bar—and no bossy woman at the front desk telling him what to do.
He strode into his office, hung his Stetson on the hat rack and his coat in the closet, then popped a little pod of coffee in the coffee maker to make himself a cup.
While it was brewing, he turned on his computer and went straight to personal email. There were over four hundred messages to wade through, so he went to get his coffee, then settled in, going through them one by one until he was done.
By then it was midafternoon and his belly was rumbling. He shut everything down and walked out, locking the door behind him. Just like he used to do before Wyrick