miles away, some bright, warm place where people had honest work to do and no one's steps echoed in an empty house. Someplace where you didn't get to be Tony's age, or mine, with nothing to show but a collection of losses.
Down at the end of my fissured road my cabin was a squat, unnatural shape hunching in the winter trees. I thought of the work I'd done on it over the years, the constant battle to keep anything man-made—no matter how small, how carefully built, how wanted—from corroding, rotting away. The processes of destruction were relentless, and had all the time in the world.
Inside, the cabin wasn't bright and it wasn't warm but it was a familiar harbor. I put on a CD, Jeffrey Kahane
playing Bach three-part inventions. I built a fire. The smell of cedar and woodsmoke, the music, the shadows began to work on me. I sliced some bread, fried some eggs to go with a can of hash I found on the shelf. I drank some more bourbon and followed the music. Bach. Logic, order, clarity. I should play more Bach. The hard knots in my shoulders began to melt and my eyelids got heavy.
In the morning I had to force myself out of bed. The day was gray and I'd slept badly, prodded awake more than once by uneasy dreams I couldn't remember. I had a dull headache and though I knew it wasn't from sleeping badly, I poured a shot of bourbon into my coffee cup and downed it before the coffee was ready. It helped a little. The coffee helped some more. I showered, and this time I shaved, carefully but not carefully enough, cursing as the foam burned my cheek.
Leaning on the kitchen counter, I smoked a cigarette, worked on the day. The piano gleamed in the light of the kitchen lamp. It wasn't as good a piano as I had in New York, but it was fine, an upright with a strong, clear sound. A guy from Albany with a key to the cabin came out a few days before I came up each time and tuned it for me; and I kept the heat on low in the front room all winter, so the piano did all right. Those things cost me. But the reason I came up here and the reason I played were pretty much the same, and this setup worked for me.
I finished the last of the coffee. If I spent the day practicing, the new Mozart might begin to sound like music.
Music; sleep; walking in the silent winter woods: that sounded like a good day to me.
But I thought about Eve Colgate's eyes as she told me about what she'd lost. And I thought about Tony's eyes, and about other kinds of loss. There were so many kinds.
Halfway up 30 toward Eve Colgate's there was a 7-Eleven.
I bought more coffee and some other things, drank the coffee in the car with the Mozart Adagio in the CD player.
If I couldn't play it at least I could listen to it.
Eve Colgate's yellow house seemed to stand more somberly on the hilltop under the gray sky than it had yesterday in the sunlight, but it was still a vaguely comforting sight, like an old friend at a funeral.
I parked in the drive behind the blue pickup. As I started inward the porch the black dog raced, barking and yapping, around the side of the house. He stopped when I did, cocked his head, wagged his tail tentatively a few times; but when I started forward again he snarled and dug his feet in as he had the morning before. His breath was visible on the cold air.
Eve Colgate came around the house, wiping her hands on a stained red sweatshirt. 'Leo!' she called.
'Okay, Leo,' I said. 'You're tough. I know.' I reached Into the 7-Eleven bag, brought out the doughnut I'd bought for him. 'Come on.' I squatted, held out a piece. He looked at it, looked at Eve Colgate. 'It's okay,' she said. He grabbed the piece of doughnut and inhaled it, wagged for more. I held out the rest. 'Sit,' I said. He didn't. I gave it to him anyway, dusted sugar from my gloves, scratched his ears.
'You can't buy him that easily,' Eve Colgate said.
'I'm not in the market. I just want a friend.' I straightened up, took the wrapped package from the back of my car. The dog escorted me up the drive, nuzzled Eve Colgate's hand when he reached her.
'Good boy.' She scratched him absently. Her eyes swept over my face as though registering small changes since she'd last seen me. Then she looked at the package I was holding. 'Come inside,' she said.
I followed her through a vestibule where a yellow slicker hung on a peg into a single room running the width of the house. On the right was a kitchen, not new but ample and serviceable. On the left an antique dining table and chairs, carefully refinished, stood under the front window. There was a woodstove like mine on the hearth, its flue running up the fireplace chimney. A couch, an easy chair, a side table, a cedar chest on the bare, polished floor. A few framed watercolors—none of them Eva Nouvels—hung on the walls and on the mantel there was a china pitcher and bowl painted in the bright yellows and purples of spring.
I shrugged off my jacket, looked around for a place to put it. Eve took it from me, pausing as her eyes caught the worn shoulder holster with the .22 from the car slipped into it.
'Do you always wear that?'
'Yes.' A long time ago I'd stopped answering that question with anything more elaborate.
She turned, hung my jacket in the vestibule. She pulled off her sweatshirt and hung it there, too. Under it she wore a thick white turtleneck tucked into flannel-lined jeans.
The air was warm, and pungent with cinnamon. There was music, too, strings. Schubert, maybe.
'Do you want coffee?' Eve asked. 'I've been baking.'
'Sounds great. Smells great.'
She handed me a plate of sticky looking sweet rolls. 'How do you take your coffee?'
'Black.' I bootlegged a piece of roll for Leo, who was walking between my legs, head twisted to sniff at the plate.
I put the plate and the wrapped silver on the cedar chest, sat on the couch. Eve brought over coffee in two white mugs. She made good coffee; better than mine, much better than the 7-Eleven's. The rolls were warm and sweet and crunchy with walnuts.
She kicked off her shoes, sat cross-legged on the other end of the couch, her back against the armrest. 'How's Tony?'
