Chapter 10: The Pine Box

In the back of the wood shed, behind the sled and the harnesses, stood a pine box the size of a bread loaf.

Astrid lifted it down from a shelf and held it against her stomach.

"Mae wanted her ashes on the east channel," she said. "At ice-out. She told me twice."

"When is ice-out?"

"Mid-April, if the winter's cold."

"And you have this cabin until the twenty-eighth of December."

"Yes." She set the box on the sled very gently. "I can't scatter her from a town apartment or a motel in Grand Marais."

"No," I said.

"I could be a visitor. I could hike in with a permit and ask the new ranger to let me through."

Her mouth twisted.

"I'd have to stand in front of a stranger in a clean green jacket and say, I used to be you."

"That sounds terrible."

"It is terrible. It's also what I deserve."

"You do not deserve it."

Astrid looked at me, and some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders.

"I put the box here in May because I couldn't keep it in the cabin," she said.

"Every time I walked past it, I felt her."

"And now?"

"Now I'm afraid of leaving it alone in the cold."

I thought of my own cabin by the lake, with a stove and a roof and a sauna that smelled like my grandfather.

"Come to the lake," I said.

"What?"

"My place. It's six miles north. It's mine, and nobody can reassign it."

"I'd be a guest."

"You'd be whatever you want to be."

"A guest," Astrid said again, and her voice cracked. "Bea, I've spent eight months not being anyone's guest. I don't know how."

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