Chapter 15: The Sketchbook

Sawyer followed me out to the cabin and parked behind my car.

Poppy was sleeping over at the teacher friend's, with a toothbrush and a rabbit and a promise of pancakes.

The cabin was very quiet without her.

He stopped on the bottom step again.

"Porch," he said.

"Porch," I agreed.

"I called her from the yard lot," he said. "I asked who rang her the night Lorna left."

"What did she say?"

"That a mother knows. Then she hung up."

The light on the dock came on by itself at dusk, yellow on the black water.

We stood on either side of the porch rail, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

"Say it," I said at last.

"Say what?"

"What you think I've been doing in your house for five years."

He looked at his boots.

"I thought you took me because I was what was left," he said. "The man who got left at the altar and needed soup."

"Sawyer."

"I thought you were waiting for a decent way out."

He swallowed.

"Every time I couldn't find a word, I told myself it was because you didn't need any."

"I'm going to show you something."

I opened the door and did not close it behind me.

He stood in the doorway while I knelt by my grandmother's cedar chest and lifted out the blankets.

Under them lay a stack of sketchbooks tied with kitchen string.

I put the top one in his hands.

"Open it."

He sat on the edge of the cot and untied the string.

The first page was a lake skiff, drawn from the water, with the planking marked in thin lines.

The second page was the same boat from the stern.

He turned a page, and another, and another.

There were forty-one skiffs and cutters, and one half-finished sloop.

Every one had the yard's pennant in the corner, and a date in the margin in my nineteen-year-old hand.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Five Years Gone, She Walked Back In, So I Walked Out from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.