Page 49 of The Cabin
I know I should be reading Adrian’s book, but I just can’t. I dunno why. I’m not ready for it. I have to…let the bats in the belfry of my soul air out a bit, so to speak.
I can’t fathom why Adrian gave me this place, what his greater purpose was, but I’m goddamn thankful. I was suffocating, I’m starting to realize. Wearing a path in the floor of life, pacing back and forth from work to the bottle to work to the bottle, rarely even engaging in conversation with anyone beyond idle chitchat, and I ain’t got time for that most of the time. Well, patience is what I lack, more than time, but still.
I needed this.
I’m starting to breathe, a little, finally.Four in the afternoon. I’m on the porch, sipping an IPA, reading Lonesome Gods. I hear tires on gravel, a car motor. Squeal of brakes that need a tune-up. Glance left, and there’s a little red convertible pulling up on the far side of the other cabin. The top is back, and I get a glimpse of black hair.
The engine shuts off, and there’s a while of silence, followed by the car door opening…closing. I can make out the nose of the car, some of the windshield, and some of the front seat. A tall, slender figure emerges around the front of the cabin. A woman.
She’s wearing black leggings, colorful sneakers, and a baggy gray sweatshirt hanging low on one shoulder. Her hair is long and black, loose around her shoulders. A purse hangs from her left elbow; sunglasses perched up on the top of her head.
You know how sometimes, even though you can’t make out someone’s features, you can tell just by seeing them from a distance that they’re good-looking? I get that feeling with her. She’s gonna be beautiful.
It’s weird to even think that. I haven’t really noticed women, not for years. I tried, too. But it just went…nowhere. I couldn’t make my heart less of an ice block, couldn’t make my brain interested, nor my body. It’s like I just shut down when Lisa died, and not all the systems came up online again.
So to even think about a woman as being beautiful, worth noticing, is in itself weird.
She just stands on the porch, staring at something in her hand—a key, I imagine. Something about the way she’s just standing there feels familiar. Like she’s getting up the nerve to go in. Like I did, the first time.
Whoever she is, she was given that key by Adrian. Or this is whoever he sold the other part of the property to. But somehow, my gut tells me he didn’t sell it. He bought it at the end of his life, with a particular purpose in mind.
Maybe it’s his wife.
Nadine? No, I always think it’s that, but it’s not. Nadia? I think that’s her name. Maybe it’s her.
I just sit on my porch, the sweating bottle cold in my hands, and watch. Eventually, I see her sigh. Even from here, it feels heavy, that sigh. She unlocks the door, and vanishes inside.
She’s in there a while. An hour, maybe. When it’s clear she’s not coming back out right away, I go back to reading, but now my mind is on her. Wondering who she is, if my—not assumption, nor a guess; my feeling, I suppose it is—if my feeling that the woman is Adrian’s widow, is correct.
It feels right. Who else would it be? Showing up now, on the anniversary of his death. When I was in town getting library books, I looked up the obituaries around the time I know he died, and today is the one year anniversary; the funeral was immediate family only, so I wasn’t there, and I was out of town for work anyway. So…yeah. Who the hell else would show up, here, today, and stand there as if summoning the nerve to go in?
What does it mean for me?
In light of the note and the letter he left me, the book I have yet to read…what does it mean that she’s here?
The math of Adrian’s arrangements seems obvious. But…I recoil mentally from going down that road. I haven’t even met the woman. She’s grieving. Hell, I’m grieving—and I’m realizing I never did that. I just shut down, and then went about shuffling zombie-like through a muddy, miserable half-life.
I keep reading.
When she comes out again, it’s to unload her suitcases. I count five, and a duffel bag, plus her purse. Looks like she’s planning on staying a while. But so am I; on my last trip into town I brought a few of my carvings, showed them to the owner of the little shop that sells knickknacks and local art, and he agreed to try to sell them, for a few bucks off the top. I don’t need the money, but if I’m going to be sitting around carving, and the pieces don’t go anywhere, I’ll be up to my neck in them in a month.
