"You bought it then? Bought seasoned wood from town when you picked all this stuff up?" she asked, taking the pan that had the braising spinach in it off the heat. I had taken a chance and bought it fresh since I had known I'd be eating it immediately. Shopping that weekend, I might have gone overboard a little. That or I had just taken a lesson from the snowstorm the week before. Another one of those could happen at any moment, literally. It would take nothing for me to be stranded up here with nothing, to actually starve to death. I had been lucky this past week, but who said Natalie would be there every time the weather got dicey to make sure I didn’t die?
All the fresh stuff was just to treat myself. I had stocked up on dry food, granola bars, dried fruit and plenty of cans. Nat had shown up just on time. I had bought the steaks the day before and hadn't frozen them. I was exhausted. With the day I’d had, I probably would have ended up just scoffing a granola bar and calling it a night, but I wasn't complaining that I got to see her again. Even if she did think I had shopped for my wood and not harvested it myself.
"I told you, Natalie," I said, turning the fire under the meat off and letting the steaks sit in the pan. "I was out all day today. I did it myself." She still wasn't convinced. I told her what had happened; how on the drive back from the town the day before, I had actually met one of my neighbors. I had stopped my truck and talked to him for a while instead of following my first instinct, which had been driving past and pretending I hadn't seen him.
After talking a while, I had ended up telling the guy why I had come, how long I was staying, that it was my first time. He had had some pretty good advice as far as firewood went and had even offered to help me harvesting today. I had told him that I hadn't needed it though, but he had given me some tips: how to spot dead standing trees and the safest way to take them down in the snow. It had taken all day, but I had gotten two trees down.
"Some of the logs are still out there if you don't believe me," I told her. She had shown up as I had been breaking them down. They were up on the porch now away from the snow since it would have to be a two-day job.
"I don't know whether I'm impressed or upset with you," she said, serving the food up on our two plates. "Do you know how hard it is to get out of the way of a falling tree in two feet of snow?"
I had told her that I'd get the food ready, but she had jumped in to help. I didn't mind it. She was pretty good in the kitchen herself, and shit, she was here; I would have let her do a lot more than that if she asked.
She hadn't been gone long enough for me to miss her, but I had. Judging by my relationships in the past, she hadn't been around long enough for me to feel the way I did about her, but I did anyway. Why would I complain about that? I liked having her around, and for whatever reason, she kept coming around.
"Nothing bad happened this time," I said lightly.
"Yeah, this time," she said. She took our plates and took them over to the sofa. "Almost everyone runs out of firewood at one time or another. Why do you hate being safe so much?"
"What?" I asked, from the kitchen.
"You had to have known that you could have just bought the wood, spared yourself the trouble and the danger," she said as I came up. She gave me my plate. She was right; I had known that I could have done that instead of spending the whole day getting my own. I hadn't been trying to save money or anything; it had been the principle. This was what I had signed up for. I had come out here at the worst possible time of year, and that meant dealing with the consequences. If I had wanted it easy, I would have just booked a suite at a hotel somewhere and drowned myself in bottle after bottle of alcohol.
"Where's the fun in that?"
"Is that why you're out here? To have fun?" she asked.
"Why are you out here? Forget something?"
"No," she said, sighing a little. "Remember what you told me that day at lunch?"
I remembered. That had been the first real conversation we had ever had. I remembered everything I had assumed about her before we had actually talked. That she wouldn't get it, that she was just there to twist my arm about the company. I was glad I had been wrong about her because that time at lunch could have ended up being the last time that we ever spoke.
"What about it?"
"It was Saturday, a day after I had gotten back. I got dinner with a friend of mine. She's a hair stylist and was telling me about a wedding she had been at earlier that day," she said. I listened to the story, wishing it wasn't real but knowing good and damn well that thinking the best about people was just a good way to make sure you were disappointed. The groom was a serial cheater apparently and had proposed to the bride to get her back after the last time she had caught him. They had a prenup, and in there were all these conditions and guarantees for her in case he cheated again. No, not in case he cheated again, because he was going to cheat again; in case she caught him again.
"I wish I could say I was surprised," I said when she was done.
"Do you know people who cut deals like that?"
; "You'd be surprised at how many people do," I said. It all made sense. They weren't getting married for love, so the material assets at stake in the marriage were what mattered the most. When they finally split up because she found him cheating again, she would walk out with a nice big settlement, and he would dust himself off and find someone else to lie to.
"It reminded me of what you said about so many people just not having a line or standards anymore. I can't imagine anyone thinking that a diamond ring is a good enough replacement for a supportive, honest partner."
"He thought so, and so did she. Match made in heaven," I said, shrugging. "I've seen people like that, marriages like that. Some people don't marry for love, and that would be fine as long as there was still something there. I mean, even just mutual respect, the lowest common denominator for interacting with other human beings."
"I think I get it now, what you were trying to get away from," she said quietly. Yeah, it was one thing to know that it happened, it was another to see it so often that it felt like the only thing that happened. It made you paranoid, made you paint everyone with the same brush because you learned to expect the worst.
It was tiring too. You could choose to mind your own business and direct your attention to the places it mattered, but it would find a way into your life somehow, like Natalie's friend just overhearing that story while she was at work. Not everyone had the option to retreat from public life, but I did, and after hearing that, I was glad that I had. It was childish to believe that the world was good and kind and everyone had a reason to be nice to you because it didn't. You just had to cope, and this was how I had chosen to.
I asked her about her friend to change the subject. Her name was Kasey; I remembered her getting a couple phone calls from her while we had been here the week before. I wasn't really the kind to have a big group of friends around me, but neither was she. Besides Kasey, she only had a few more close friends that she spent her time with, and if she hadn't been cooking dinner and relaxing with me here, she would have been doing the same thing at her place.
After dinner, I made us some coffee spiked with a little whiskey. I hadn't been that big a drinker in the past, but why not start now? Fuck it, right? I had picked up a bottle that weekend, and this counted as a special occasion. We hung out by the fire for longer than an hour, just talking. I asked about work, but she didn't really have anything to report since she had only been there today for a few hours.
I had had my suspicions seeing her again; of course, I had. It was Monday, and she had missed an entire week of work already. The last time she had shown up, she had a reason: the storm. This time... did I even want to know, though? She was here; wasn't that enough? I liked having her here, so what did the reason matter anyway?