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Paul and I left the lunch stunned, trying to absorb these details.

Then, a few weeks later, came another bombshell. Paul told me that he and his wife had separated. The knot in the rope that I had sensed tightening inside of him through the previous year had suddenly come undone—and the rope went slack. He seemed relieved. I asked him if he needed to talk about it. “Not really,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.” He took a long ride on his bike, and I saw him again the week before the holiday. He seemed okay. I guessed that he had already worked through the worst of the pain and disappointment of the break. Maybe this was the change I had witnessed over the summer.

Thanksgiving that year fell on November 26. By the weekend before that Thursday, it was clear that we would be close to completing the cabin but not fully done by the holiday. Paul’s children had their hopes set on dinner at the cabin, and really so did Paul and I. We decided it would be our new family tradition. The cabin had heat, from Russell’s woodstove, and water for the sink and toilet, and even gas for the lamps on the walls. The one missing item—so small yet so consequential—was a regulator, a fist-sized device necessary to connect the gas cooking stove to the pipe that brought the propane into the cabin from the storage tank outdoors. No regulator meant we had no stove, and no way to cook the turkey.

Paul had a solution. He bought a big turkey and stuffed it at home. (His stuffing was a sumptuous mix of bread, celery, sweet and hot Italian sausage and chunks of apple.) I rented a room at the inn the night before the meal, and he cooked the turkey in the oven of the kitchenette. The bird barely fit inside it. He also made gravy, mashed potatoes, lasagna, French-style string beans (with bacon and vinaigrette dressing), sweet potato casserole and cranberry relish. I brought Italian pastries from a bakery in Boston’s North End and apple and pumpkin pies from Melby’s. The kids came up in the afternoon—there was Paulie and Kevin; Katherine, her boyfriend and their two children; and Jodie and her boyfriend. I brought a friend from the university, a visiting scholar from Greece. He came with two bottles of wine from Crete. “So this is an American Thanksgiving?” he said, surveying the table and the rough interior of the cabin. The kids made a punch of raspberry ginger ale and sherbet. Paul had also brought a folding table and chairs from the church. We used a paper tablecloth and set the table with paper plates and plastic forks and knives. We built a fire in the woodstove and lit the gas lamps for light and a little extra heat.

“I’m hungry!” shouted Paulie.

“Everybody sit down,” Paul hollered in a fake gruff voice.

We gathered around the table, and I said grace. I offered thanks for the food, for the presence of all of us together. I acknowledged the absence of my mother as I did each Thanksgiving. I said thanks for the cabin in which we were sheltered and for the plants and animals in the forest and for the gift of a year with my brother.

Paulie, squirming in his chair, spoke up. “Okay, okay. I’ll say Amen to all that. And now let’s eat!”

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EPILOGUE

DREAMING OF APPLES

The winter following our first Thanksgiving in the cabin brought plenty of snow, but spring eventually made its welcome appearance, and I was there to greet it, pacing off an apple orchard. I liked the spot that I had been considering throughout the cabin’s construction. I asked a state orchardist to have a look, and she thought its position on the slope was good.

Paul, Andrew and I cleared about half an acre for the orchard in March, about fifty yards above the cabin. We took down the oaks, maples and red pines that were there and bucked them into stove-sized sticks, which we heaped into four big piles of firewood. Then we laid out five lines for five rows of trees. I rented the auger machine that I had originally wanted to use for the foundation, and Paul and I dug fifty holes. If we hit a rock, we moved