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Roy had brought him here first, to this spot, when he was eight years old.

He remembered it with the clarity that childhood memories sometimes had, not complete, not reliable, but vivid in the details that had mattered: the weight of the fishing rod, which had been too big for him and which Roy had helped him hold without making him feel helped. The cold of the granite through his jeans. The way Roy had sat beside him without talking for a long time, which he had not understood then as a gift and understood now as one of the more significant ones he’d received.

Roy had not been a man who talked much. He had been a man who showed up, who fixed things, who stood next to you in the way that meant you didn’t have to handle whatever you were handling alone. Shane had understood this about him long before he’d had the language for it, had absorbed it the way children absorbed the qualities of the people who raised them, through proximity and repetition.

He had spent thirty-eight years becoming, in most of the ways that mattered, his grandfather.

He wasn’t sure, on most days, whether this was something to be proud of or something to examine. It was both, probably. It was both, and the lake didn’t have an opinion about it, and the mist continued to move, and he sat on the cold granite with his line in the water and let the morning be what it was.

* * *

The hardware store had been in the family since his great-grandfather had run a supply operation out of the same building in the 1920s, informal then, practical, the kind of commerce that existed because people needed things and someone had to have them available. Roy had formalized it in 1958. Colter Hardware. Est. 1958. The sign had been Roy’s idea, the lettering painted by Roy’s hand, the establishment of it an act of declaration that Shane had always found moving in a way he didn’t examine too closely.

This is a thing we do, the sign said. We have been doing it. We will keep doing it.

He had repainted the sign once, when he was twenty-five, because it had needed it. He’d matched Roy’s lettering as closely as he could. He’d been told by three separate people that it looked exactly the same, which was what he’d wanted, and he’d nodded and not said anything, which was what he usually did.

He was good at the hardware store. He wanted to be clear with himself about this, sitting at the lake in the early morning. He was not suffering through it. He was competent and efficient and the store ran well and the people of Merrybrook relied on it and on him, which was not a small thing. He understood that it was not a small thing.

It was just that there were mornings, fewer than there used to be, he told himself, and believed this less than he used to, when he woke up and the first thing he thought about was not the store or the day’s tasks or the things that needed doing but a different version of things. A shape of a different kind of day. He’d stopped trying to make that shape specific years ago because specificity made it real in a way that served no purpose.

He was thirty-eight years old. He ran a hardware store in a mountain valley that most GPS systems couldn’t find. He was good at it. He showed up. He fixed things.

This was enough. It was enough.

He watched the lake and tried to find the place where it was enough.

* * *

The mist had started to thin by the time his thoughts went where they’d been trying to go since he sat down.

He hadn’t intended to think about her. He had, in fact, made an internal note that he was not going to sit at Clearwater Lake and think about the new art teacher like a person who had run out of more dignified things to think about. He had the Henderson water heater and the restocking order and the east booth dimensions and at least four other legitimate occupations for his mind.

He thought about her anyway.

She had come into the store yesterday afternoon, which he had known about approximately four seconds after she’d walked in because the bell had a sound and at some point in the last three weeks he had learned to register it as distinct from other arrivals, which was not information he’d asked his brain to collect and which he was choosing not to look at too directly.

He’d gone to the back room instead, on a pretext that had not fully convinced even him, and had come out again and she’d been in aisle seven and had turned around and their eyes had met and he had said her name for the first time, which had felt (he pressed his line into the water and let the feeling move through him and out the other side) which had felt like something he’d been working up to without knowing it.

Ms. Hayes.

Her name, which he knew because the whole town had been saying it for three weeks, which he had been hearing without thinking he was listening, which had landed somewhere in him anyway.

He thought about the narrow aisle.

He thought about the proximity of her hand to his, reaching for different things at the same time, and the quality of almost, of two things that come very close to touching and don’t. He was a practical man. He built things and fixed things and understood, in a technical sense, the mechanics of proximity. He did not usually find proximity interesting in and of itself.

He found this proximity interesting.

Absolutely not, he thought, which was what he thought every time, which was becoming less convincing every time he thought it.

He looked at the lake.

The mist had nearly burned off. The sun was clearing the eastern ridge now, the light coming over it in a way that lit the peaks first and then moved down, the valley catching it last, and the lake went from gray to silver to something closer to gold in the space of ten minutes. He’d watched this happen hundreds of times. He never got tired of it.

He thought about what Harold Finley had said to him last Tuesday, when Harold had come into the hardware store for something he definitely hadn’t needed and had ended up staying for forty-five minutes, in the way that Harold sometimes did.

Harold didn’t say much. When he said something, it was worth attending to.