The Tree Line
"How was Lansing?" I said.
It was Saturday, a little after eight, and he was standing at the counter in his socks waiting for the toaster, and I asked it the way I have asked it every October, lightly, to the side of him, as if I were asking whether it was supposed to rain.
"Long," he said. "The Andersen guy had me for an hour on their new sliding door. Composite frame. He kept knocking on it like I'd think it was wood." The toast came up and he put both pieces on my plate and dropped two more in for himself. "Somebody's booth light blew right after lunch, two rows over, and they ran an extension cord across the aisle to fix it and taped it down with painter's tape. Guy from Pella went down on it around three. Big guy. Took a whole display of door handles with him."
"Was he hurt?"
"His pride." He poured his coffee. "They gave him a chair."
I buttered my toast to the edges, which is the only right way, and filed it.
I have checked the dates of the Lansing show every October for eight years. It is a regional builders' and remodelers' expo at the convention center, and it is held every year in September, and this year it ran from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth. Three weeks after it closed he had told me he was going to Lansing for it, and kissed me, and gone, and come home, and on Saturday morning he gave me a man from Pella falling over an extension cord. It was a good detail. It had the heft a true thing has, which comes from being unnecessary. He is not a man who lies well, and he had not lied well the first year or the fourth, and at some point in nine years he had gotten better at it, and I had been there for all of it and could not have told you when.
I ate the toast. He ate his standing up. He read me a text from Deshawn about a table saw, and I laughed where I was supposed to.
I had given him one more chance to tell me, and he had used it on the Pella man.
On Wednesday I had taken a personal day, my first in fourteen months, and told my supervisor it was a crown. He left the house at 7:58. I left at 8:21, in the charcoal wool coat he bought me for my thirtieth birthday, with the hood, because it was the warmest thing I owned and I had not thought past warm.
I had never followed him before. I want that on the record, for whatever the record is worth: eight Octobers I had watched him back out of the drive with his thermos and his lie and I had gone to work. The ninth, I went north on US-131 at ninety miles an hour with my phone in the cup holder and a blue dot on it thirty miles ahead of me, and I did not once think about slowing down.
I had not put the tracker on his truck for October. I had put it there for September, and for eight days it had shown me nothing but Ada and Godfrey Avenue and our own driveway, a man going to work and coming home. Then on the fourteenth it showed me the thing I already knew, and I found I was not able to stay at my desk and watch a blue line do it.
The dot went past Cedar Springs and Howard City and Big Rapids, at exactly the speed limit. It stopped for four minutes in Cadillac, at a gas station, and I closed seven of the thirty miles. North of Cadillac I stopped looking at it. When I looked again, I was on County Road 612, with the pines closing in on both sides, and the dot had stopped for six minutes at the Crane Lake Party Store in Aldine and then gone on and stopped again at the public landing at the north end of the lake. It was 10:45. I was not surprised.
There is a logging two-track that leaves 612 half a mile before the landing and runs along the ridge through the pines above it. I pulled onto it and went in until the road was out of sight behind me and turned the engine off. Then I walked. The needles were dry and quiet underfoot, and it was fifty-eight degrees and clear, one of those October days that has no business being so warm, and the lake came up blue between the trunks. At 10:50 I was standing in the trees above the landing with my hands in my pockets, a hundred and forty yards from my husband.
I had stood in those trees once before, in a different coat.
I kept a log, because I don't know how else to watch something.
10:50. The truck in the gravel lot, nose to the water. He is on the dock, at the far end, sitting, boots hanging over the edge. Beside him on the boards, two paper coffee cups with lids. His thermos is not with him.
11:30. He has not moved except to drink. He drinks from the left cup only.
12:15. He takes off his cap and sets it on the dock and puts it back on.
12:40. My phone buzzes with a work email. I turn it face down in my pocket without reading it. He does not look up at the sound, because there is no sound he could hear from there. I hold still anyway.
It went on like that. He did not look at his phone. I watched for it especially, and in eight hours he did not take it out once, not to check the time, not for anything. He did not eat. He did not get up to stretch or walk to the truck. At some point I understood that nothing was going to happen, and that nothing was what he had come for, and I kept writing it down anyway.
I was cold by then, the cold of standing still, from the feet up, even on a warm day. I had not brought water. I had not brought anything but the coat, the phone, the small flashlight from the glovebox and the little notebook I keep in the car for measurements, and I stood in the pines for eight hours on a cup of coffee I had drunk at seven in my own kitchen, and I did not once consider leaving. Twice a car went by on 612 behind me, and both times I stood very still until it was gone, as if anybody on that road were looking for a woman in the trees.
The white house with the green trim is on the east shore, a little more than half a mile south of the landing, and for the first hour I didn't look at it. When I did, it was a little after noon. Someone had painted the trim a darker green than it used to be, nearly black, and put a new dock in, aluminum, the kind that comes out in sections for the winter. The boathouse was the same. The second-floor windows still faced the water. I priced the dock at four thousand dollars, and then I looked back at him.
At 2:05 my legs went and I moved two trees to the left to lean on a better trunk. He was facing the water. He didn't turn. A few minutes later a man in a pickup backed a johnboat down the ramp and launched it and said something to him from the boat, and he answered, and neither of them laughed. He watched the johnboat all the way down the lake until it was gone around the south end.
A loon came by at a quarter past three, late for October, riding low. It dove not far off the end of the dock and I counted, and it came up a long way farther out than I would have guessed, and he watched it the whole time.
At 4:12 he picked up the second cup, the one he hadn't touched, and took the lid off and held it out over the water and poured it in. He poured it slowly, all the way, until it was empty. Then he set the empty cup inside the other empty cup and set them both down beside him and put his hands back between his knees.
I have watched a great many people do a great many things with their hands. I can tell you what most of it costs. I didn't have a figure for that.
In the afternoon, with the sun moving around behind me and the shadows of the pines going out long across the lot toward him, I thought about the sash cord.
It was our first spring in the house. The upstairs back window, the one in what became my office, had a broken cord, and the lower sash had to be propped open with a paint stirrer, and he came home one Saturday with a hank of new cotton sash cord and a little bag of weights he had found at a salvage yard, and he took the whole window apart. I was in the hall with a box of books. I stopped on the landing because he was whistling. He whistled the whole time he worked, something tuneless and cheerful that wasn't a song, and he didn't know I was there, and I stood with the box of books against my hip and listened to him take the stop molding off and lift the sash out and fish the weight up out of the pocket in the wall, whistling, and when I caught my face in the glass of the picture frame on the landing I was smiling. I stood there so long my arms started to shake. The window still runs up and down like it's on a greased track. I open it every morning in the summer, and every morning it goes up without a sound.
I had not thought about that in years. I thought about it for a long time in the trees.
The sun went down behind the ridge at 6:55. The lake went from blue to steel to the color of a nickel, and the far shore lost its edges, and the white house was just a pale shape with one window lit. He got up then, for the first time in eight hours. He stood on the dock the way a man stands when his knees are older than he is, and walked out to the very end, where the new boards stop, and stood there with his boots on the edge.
He said something. One word. I couldn't hear it, not at that distance, not over the small noise the water makes against a dock. His head came up a little, and his mouth made one short shape and closed, the way you say a word you have said before and know the size of. That was all. He didn't say anything else.
Then he turned around and looked straight up at the trees.
He looked at the stand of pines where I was. Not along the ridge, not at the lot, not at the sky over it. At the trees I was in. It was nearly dark and I was a hundred and forty yards away in a charcoal coat, standing against a trunk, and I didn't move. I know how to be looked at. This was not the same. He looked for as long as it would take to read a short message twice.
My heart was going at a rate I could have counted if I'd wanted to, and I didn't want to. My hands were in my pockets. One of them was around the flashlight. Then he picked up his two cups and walked up the dock and got into the truck, and the headlights came on and swung across the trunks below me, and he drove away.
I waited until the sound was gone. Then I walked back along the two-track in the dark. I kept my hand on the flashlight the whole way and didn't turn it on. I walked by the light off the lake, which isn't much, and twice I put my foot down where the ground wasn't.
He drives the limit. He always has, and he stops in Cadillac on the way back as he had that morning, whether he needs gas or not. I did not stop anywhere. I was home at 9:44 and in the shower at 9:47 and in bed with my hair wet at 10:02, with the light off, lying on my side facing the wall, and the Subaru in the driveway still ticking as the engine cooled. At 10:20 the truck came up the drive. At 10:25 he came up the stairs and stood in the doorway.
"Sleeping, Marsh?"
"Mm."
He stood there a while longer, and then he undressed in the dark and got in, and I listened to him not sleep for a long time. He lay on his back. After a while he turned toward me and put his hand on my hip, over the blanket, and left it there, and his hand was warm and smelled of the dock, of wet wood and lake, and I lay under it with my wet hair on the pillow and my eyes open in the dark and didn't move, the same as in the trees. I would have to say it was the best I had felt in a month. I would have to say that, if anyone asked, and no one had.
That was Wednesday. On Saturday, with the toast gone, I sat across from him and let him tell me about the man from Pella and his door handles, and I thought about how he had looked at the trees.
He was at the sink, rinsing his plate. "I'm going up to the cottage tomorrow," he said. "Leah's meeting me at eleven. The boathouse."
"I'll go see my mother, then," I said. "I haven't been in two weeks."
"You could ride up with me. I'd drop you in Traverse and get you on the way back."
"I'll take my car."
He dried his hands and hung the towel on the oven door, folded in thirds. "Tell her I said hi."
"I will," I said.
That night at eleven, after he had gone up, I went out to the driveway in my socks with the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and got down on the wet concrete behind his truck. I didn't turn it on. I reached up under the rear bumper, into the fold of the steel on the left side, and felt along it with two fingers until I found the edge of the square, and I held my fingers on it for a moment in the dark to be sure. It was where I had put it.