We worked silently, thoughtfully, under Bob the dog’s amiable supervision. Earnest seemed to have run out of ways to lighten the mood. The afternoon milking was still a couple of hours away.
I can’t really describe what I felt for that last half hour. Initially, all I’d felt was outrage at Cat, resentment, disappointment in her. You don’t do this kind of thing. Even if, especially if, you know someone is lonely and living so far off the beaten path. I questioned the state of our relationship: Maybe we were moving beyond each other; maybe this friendship had run its course. But another voice told me this was so off the charts that I should consider the remote possibility that Cat was onto something. Hadn’t I learned that love comes at you from strange angles? Wasn’t this better than internet dating?
Strangely, to my own irritation, I did in fact feel an uptick of excitement. A premonition of something imminent—a revving of the engine of curiosity, anyway. It grew as the hour passed, and it was not entirely unfamiliar: I realized I had vaguely felt something like this for months, a growing awareness of some change approaching. It starts with the faintest tickle at the back of your mind, the base of your brain, then swells into a microscopic electric thrill or tension in your chest and shoulders. I have to believe that future events send signals backward in time to us, and we can sometimes feel them coming with some sixth or seventh sense for which we have no name.
But of course I didn’t know what form it would take. And thinking about romantic love just then, I also felt a twist or turn, a knot of confusion that I probed and couldn’t recognize. Something about the whole equation had changed; an integer had shifted in the calculus of love, needing, loneliness, desire. I was truly more on my feet, more balanced despite my sometimes intolerable longing. There was certainly a lonely hollow place in the center of my being, but its shape had changed. If I had arrived at my land and the farm as a box of disconnected Lego pieces, now it seemed that a few of them had connected, locked together here and there amid the jumble.
I decided I’d be reasonably gracious, but businesslike. I was in the middle of my working day. Brassard’s friend Jack Pelletier would be delivering a bull tomorrow, a rare event, and we needed to isolate the six cows and heifers that the bull would tend to, and to set out feed and water for the visitor. And I had milking and cleanup to do, and I did have to join—I liked joining—the ritual of cooking dinner with the men. Cat and this guy would have to entertain themselves however they could while I did what needed doing.
My eyes were drawn to a flash of reflected sunlight as a car crested the hill, and instinctively I knew it was them. I groaned and wished this whole thing were over with and I could just have a normal evening: finish the day’s work, then climb gratefully up the hill to my own land and my tent. The veeries hadn’t yet left, and I wanted nothing more than to listen to their down-spiraling whirly-whirly-whirly-whirly calling all to tranquility as I stared into my campfire, absorbing the surcease that only being alone and sufficient in the evening woods can provide. I wondered whether Cat thought they were going to spend the night and where they expected to spend it.
Cat’s beat-up BMW trundled down the road with a white van trailing some distance behind it. Cat put on her blinker, turned into the driveway, and to my surprise the white van followed and pulled up beside it. My puzzlement grew as I approached the BMW and couldn’t see anyone in the passenger seat. Then Cat exploded out of her door and practically leaped over her own hood, smiling hugely, crazily. I had planned to give her a dead-eye gaze, but things were moving too fast and too strangely.
“This is so fun!” she said. “This is TOO good! God help me, I’m gonna have a heart attack!” She turned back to the van and yelled “Get the hell out here, for Chrissakes! She won’t bite!”
The van’s parking brake ratcheted, the silhouette of the driver moved inside. The driver’s door opened, and then around the front of the van stepped a guy with buzz-cut brown hair and that kind of facial stubble that looks so careless but that I always figure must take a lot of effort to maintain. He walked reluctantly, his face paradoxical with mixed emotions—a man guarded yet undone, unprotected.
My heart did a flip, literally seemed to tumble upside down. Yes, it was destiny and it was love at first sight, overwhelming. Earnest came up beside me and I fell against him slightly.
Then I was in my brother’s arms, holding him. Locking Erik against me, swearing I’d never ever ever let him go. “You little shit bastard bastard bastard!” I said. Cat burst into tears, and it ignited Erik and me. We cried and rocked as poor Earnest stood there looking baffled.
Chapter 33
We went in and had coffee and all talked stiffly and safely for a bit. Then Cat and Earnest sort of went away on some pretext, and in the absence of observers, Erik and I eyed each other cautiously. He was shorter than I remembered, leaner in the face, slim but clearly fit—in the warmth of the house, he rolled his shirtsleeves off his forearms and they were sinewy and branched with veins. Tattoos—a line of Chinese characters, bruise blue—ran up one arm.
That moment
