it at the local supermarket, only a small box of individual packets.
She pours stevia into her coffee, stirs, sips. Her eyes slide closed, and she groans. “Oh my god, so good. Thank you.” A single small hand slips out from under the blanket; the other clutches the coffee without letting go of the blanket, keeping it pinned under her chin. “Nadia.”
I take her hand. It’s tiny, warm, delicate. “Nathan.”
“Well, Nathan. Thank you for the coffee.” Her eyes go to the sun peeking up over the top of the trees. “It’s very beautiful here.”
I turn and lean my elbows on the top rail, mug clutched in both hands. “Sure is.” I inhale deeply. “Peaceful.”
“Have you been here long?”
I shrug. “Couple weeks.”
A long silence. I don’t know how to fill it.
“How long are you staying?” she asks, breaking it, finally.
“Um. Open-ended.”
“Same here.”
I have a thousand questions, and none of them is anything I can ask.
“These cabins look like they were built by the same person.”
“They were,” I say. “Local fella named Roger Klupinsky.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Sure are. He was a real craftsman.” I knock on the beam, reach out and tap the join where the upright meets the overhang of the roof. “These joins are seamless. The floors, too. Everything is just this amazing craftsmanship you don’t see anymore.”
“Sounds like you say that with professional knowledge.”
I nod. “I’m a carpenter.”
“Houses?”
I shake my head. “Movie sets, things like that. I also do some carvings on the side, and that’s what I’ve been doing mostly, lately. Taking time away from work.”
“What do you carve?”
I glance at her. “I got a couple over in my cabin. I can show you some?”
She nods, smiles. “Sure.”
“Be right back.”
I leave my coffee balanced on the railing, amble over to my cabin. I’ve got four completed, and I grab them all. Bring them back to her cabin. I line them up on the floor near her feet, step back and sit on the top step.
She leans down; relinquishing her grip on the blanket finally, and takes one. “This is…remarkable.”
It’s a raccoon, small enough to sit on her palm. I tried to capture it sitting up on its hind legs, its front paws clasped in front of it the way they do, looking like it’s praying.
“It’s so cute! So lifelike.”
The next one, then. It’s a dragonfly done true to scale, and this one I went all out and painted, so the body is iridescent blue, with a bulbous thorax which goes thin and narrow behind the wings, with delicate veins in the wings. It’s my best piece to date.
“It looks like it could take off any moment.”
“Spent several days on that one. Usually, I can do a carving in an afternoon. But that one? The wings took forever.”
“I bet. They’re so detailed.”
Third is not an animal at all but a representation of the episcopal church in town, a picturesque small-town place, white clapboards and a red roof, a spire with a bell.
“Why a church?” she asks.
“Um. Well, that’s the church that’s in town here. St. Paul’s. It just looks like the kind of church you’d see in a movie about a small town.”
I don’t tell her that Lisa was obsessed with little churches like that, that she would plan entire vacations around which churches she wanted to visit, or that we’d been married in one just like it, that her funeral had been in the same church we’d gotten married in.
Maybe there’s something in the carving, but she handles it somewhat more reverently than the others. Doesn’t say anything else, just stares down at it for a while, and then sets it down to lift up the last one I brought over. It’s a dollhouse-sized rocking chair, a couple inches tall. I’d carved a tiny cat curled up on the seat of the rocking chair.
“Story behind that one,” I say. “Came out onto my porch with my coffee a few mornings ago, and there was a cat sleepin’ on it. Never seen it before. I looked at it, it looked at me, and then it just sorta hopped down and walked off around the lake, and I haven’t seen it since.”
“The amount of detail you get into such small things is remarkable.”
“Well, it takes patience, is all. And a steady hand, I guess. Carving or whittling or whatever you want to call it, it’s kinda meditative for me.”
She nods. “I can see how it would be.”
“You do anything like that?”
She shrugs. “No, not really. I used to be into watercolors, but I