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By Root 775 0

another up in the sky. Sometimes the birds dipped into the trees overhead, and their reflections glanced briefly across the surface of the water below her feet. She pulled her bandanna out of her back pocket and wiped sweat out of her eyes, leaving a trail of grime and sawdust across her forehead. A hawk goes blind in the dog days, people used to say. And her dad said different: Nothing about a hot summer day could make a bird lose its sight. They’re pushing their young out of the nest in August, is all. The parents fly around crazy, diving into the treetops to try to get away from their full-grown young following them around screeching to be fed, unwilling to hunt on their own. Her dad didn’t know the word fledge, but he knew what it meant. Look close, he always used to tell her. If it doesn’t sound true, it isn’t. There’s always a reason for what people say, but usually it’s not the reason they think.

Deanna was at a loss to invent any more work for herself today. Nothing she’d be able to keep her mind on, anyway. She’d finished this bridge. She’d also collected four wheelbarrow-loads of firewood from the pile here, where they’d cut up the trees, and pushed them all the way up to the cabin. She’d cleared weeds and retrenched the steepest part of the upper mountain trail. She had run into a pair of hikers up there on the ridge, a young, very dirty couple who seemed delighted with the world and each other. They’d wandered over here as a side trip from the Appalachian Trail. Hiking the whole A.T. this summer from Maine to Georgia was their plan, as they’d eagerly relayed it to her. They had gotten this far, worn out a pair of boots each, and were looking forward to picking up a care package from one of their mothers, including new boots, down where the trail came out in Damascus, before continuing on south. They thanked Deanna, impressed with the upkeep of the trails here in the Zebulon Forest—as if she’d done all the work just for them. Which answered one of the two questions she’d been asking herself all summer, anyway. As she watched the pair hike away in their baggy, colorful shorts, she wondered how that would feel, to have a mother leaving you care packages when you ran out of boot leather. Or to hike hundreds of miles beside another person, always knowing which way the trail ahead of you ran, and exactly how far.

He was sitting up there right now in the green porch chair, reading her thesis. She had not felt this nervous since the day of her final oral defense, when her committee made her go out in the hallway while it deliberated her case.

This humidity had to break. There was a storm in the air, which was probably making the hawks act up even more. She didn’t want to be down here when it hit. In her tenure on this mountain she’d been caught outside in a lightning storm exactly twice: once she’d made it into the shelter of the big chestnut log (back when it was still her own), and the other time she’d had to cower against the trunk of a hemlock in the lowest spot she could get to. Both times had been more awful than she liked to admit. He was right about her and thunder. She wasn’t afraid of snakes, but thunder paralyzed her. There wasn’t any reason, it just was. Even as a girl she’d dreaded loud noises, could not fire a gun without breaking a cold sweat, even just for target practice at a can on a fencepost. Her dad used to sit with her through storms. Eddie had done that, too, and almost the same way, though she didn’t tell him so: rubbing her back as she lay with the pillow pulled over her head, counting out loud with her the distance between flash and boom. One fifth of a mile per second.

If not for that, she thought, this would be easy. If not for those nights and early mornings and half minutes when he was suddenly kinder and truer than seemed possible, given everything. Given what he couldn’t understand. What did she really think he would do now, when he finished reading the book of her knowledge and beliefs? Change? No. Tear his hair for guilt? No. Stay, or walk out the door? Which did she want him to