Page 72

“It’s the color of a galvanized bucket.”

“That’s a bucket.”

“Who’s Payne?”

“A painter. English, late seventeen hundreds. He mixed it.”

“So it’s a man.”

“It’s a color named after a man.”

“Galvanized is a color named after a bucket,” Shane said. “I trust the bucket.”

She laughed. It came out of her loud and surprised, and the whole overlook turned to look, and Lauren raised one eyebrow at them from twenty feet away, and Allison put her hand over her mouth and didn’t stop. Shane looked at the lake. He could feel the almost smile happening, and he let it.

He was going to be hearing about galvanized for a long time. He found he didn’t mind that either.

When she went back to drawing, she tilted the sketchbook toward him. Not an invitation, exactly. An allowance.

He looked.

It was the lake, but not this view. It was the view from her porch, through the gap in the spruce at the end of Lakeview Lane. He knew that gap. He had been driving past it every night for weeks. She turned the pages back, and it was the same gap again and again. August, the water gone gold. September, mist lying on it in long drifts. October, the far shore on fire. November, flat and gray, with the first ice at the edges. The same trees, the same water, the same piece of sky.

“It’s the same place,” he said.

“It’s never the same place.” She turned another page. “That’s the point. I want to paint it for a year. The same view, every season, a whole series. Big ones.” She said it quickly, the way people said things they had never said out loud, to get them out before they could be talked back in. “I haven’t painted anything of my own in a long time. I got very good at being useful to everybody else.”

That one landed.

He thought about a drawer at home that had stuck for years, the one he had never gotten around to fixing. He kept that to himself.

He could build her the stretchers. Pine, mitered corners, cross braces for the big ones. The thought arrived fully formed, the way those thoughts always did, a cut list with a delivery date. He looked at it. It was not what she had said. She had not said I need something built. She had said I want.

“You should do it,” he said.

She looked at him.

“The whole year,” he said. “All of it.”

She held his eyes for a moment. Then she nodded, once, and closed the sketchbook and put her glove back on, and he had the rare, clear feeling of having said the right thing.

Across the valley, on the north shore, the old spruce came right down to the water in a dark line. He knew exactly where the granite was under them. He didn’t point it out.

Not yet.

* * *

They made the top a little before noon. Jake took a picture of everybody with the valley behind them and made Shane get in it, and Shane stood at the end of the row with Allison’s shoulder an inch from his arm. When Jake counted down, she leaned the inch.

He carried that all the way down the mountain.

At the trailhead the group came apart the slow Merrybrook way, people lingering by their cars, Jake saying same time in January with complete sincerity. Lauren gave Allison a look that promised questions later, then got into her car, started the engine, and did not drive away, which was not subtle.

Shane stood by his truck with his keys in his hand.

This was the part where he usually found a reason. Something to drop off, something that needed checking, a door sweep that needed hanging at the Brennans’. He could feel the list waiting for him, the easy way out of anything that mattered, the next thing and then the next.

He put the keys in his pocket and walked over to her.