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She painted from five until eight with the radio off and her phone face down and the kitchen table covered in newspaper, and for three hours she did not think about anyone else at all.

The canvas was big, bigger than anything she had painted since college, and she had stretched it on Sunday afternoon on her kitchen floor. She laid in the dark water first, then the far shore, then the long pale line of ice along the edge. She mixed the gray for the open water three times before it was right.

At eight exactly there was a knock.

He had brought a pot of chili wrapped in a dish towel, still hot, and a loaf of Joseph’s bread, and a folder of the store’s December invoices tucked under his arm, which told her he had believed her about not talking.

The canvas was turned to face the wall. He did not glance at it once. She noticed that too.

They ate at the kitchen table among the newspaper. The chili had beans in it, and she said real chili didn’t have beans, and he said real chili was whatever was in the pot, and they argued about it through two bowls each without either of them giving an inch. She told him about Sophie’s drawing, the blue shadows, the way Sophie had worked out all by herself that shadows on snow weren’t gray, and she realized partway through that she had been talking for about fifteen minutes. He had listened to every one of them.

“That was a lot about shadows,” she said.

“I like the shadows,” he said.

When she got up to go back to work, he glanced at the palette on the counter, at the gray she had mixed three times.

“Galvanized,” he said.

“You’re not supposed to look.”

“That’s the palette. You said the painting.”

“The palette is part of the painting.”

“Then I didn’t see anything,” he said, and took his invoices to the couch.

She laughed and turned the canvas back around.

It was quiet after that, the good kind. The fire going. The brush. Every so often the scratch of his pen. Twice she looked up and found him not looking at the canvas at all, looking at her, and both times he went back to his invoices without a word.

A little after ten she looked up and he was asleep on her couch, boots still on, with an invoice rising and falling on his chest.

She stood there for a minute and looked at him the way she looked at things she wanted to remember exactly.

Then she took the blanket off the back of the couch, the old one that had ridden in the back seat of her car for two years before it found this couch, and put it over him, invoice and all.

She went back to the lake. The ice at the edge still wasn’t right. She had all night.

Chapter 29

Two Chairs

He woke at four on Christmas Eve and lay in the dark looking at the desk.

It stood in the corner of his bedroom where it had stood for eleven years, since the winter he moved into Roy’s house and carried it in from the truck by himself and set it down and never moved it again. Oak. Plain. Three drawers down the right side. He had built it the summer he turned sixteen, in the workshop behind the store, with Roy leaning in the doorway the whole time saying nothing and meaning everything, the way Roy did.

The bottom drawer stuck.

It had stuck for years. It stuck because it was too full, and it was too full because every December since he was nineteen he had put one more thing in it and never taken anything out.

He had fixed every door and hinge and window and pipe and porch railing he had ever put his hands on. He had never once fixed that drawer.

He lay there in the dark and understood, finally, that fixing it would have meant opening it all the way.

Last night she had kissed him on her porch and told him she had something to finish, and she wouldn’t say what, and she had pushed him gently back down her steps laughing with her hand flat on his chest. He had driven home the long way on purpose, Birch to Lakeview and past her window one more time, just to see the light on. Then he had come home to this room, and lain down, and looked at the desk until he fell asleep, and woken up looking at it.