to Margie the way she had on their drive up to the bungalow. Keefe had been fine that day. More than fine. He’d carried himself with unflappable poise as he walked naked before two young women—young women on the cusp of middle age, in fact, but much younger than he, one of whom was giggling openly. After getting dressed, he’d asked them both inside, had been gracious and hospitable, charming even. He served coffee, for him and Margie, herb tea for Sandy. They had sat around the coffee table, which he cleared off for their cups, and chatted while he stroked Stink’s head. Sandy’s dog was particularly fond of Keefe and lay on the sofa between him and Margie, his head in Keefe’s lap much the way he rested in Sandy’s lap now. Sandy sat in the armchair. Keefe had asked about their fishing plans for the day, recommended certain pools, suggested certain fly patterns, gave them each a few newly tied flies from his bench. Margie wouldn’t have known if the fly was properly tied or not, but she examined the offered flies closely and glanced surreptitiously at Sandy, who cautiously nodded confirmation. The new flies were perfect. Keefe asked after J.D., who had taken a class with him at the community college many years previous. He’d even shared with Margie anecdotes of her husband as an overly earnest young student. Noting with both affection and sympathy how disconcerted J.D. had become when Keefe suggested that he might try, in the essay he was laboring with, to be a bit more flexible with the rules of the five-paragraph essay, Margie laughed, almost snorted, and nodded in enthusiastic agreement. “Oh, don’t you know it,” she had said. “Some things never change, bless his heart.”
Sandy ran her fingers over the lump of encysted birdshot in Stink’s hind leg, checking to be certain that the cyst hadn’t grown in size. The carcasses of four scorched ticks lay on the tinfoil beside her. She’d go over him once more and that should do it.
The fishing had been very good that day, the brook trout rising eagerly to yellow stoneflies and several other patterns they threw at them. Even Margie caught several good fish.
“They really are so beautiful, honey,” she had said to Sandy. “Kind of little though, eh?”
Late in the morning, they’d taken a break, sitting on a flat seat of rock, their feet extended into the water. Margie lit a cigarette and smoked while Sandy tied on a new yellow stonefly. The one she’d had on previously had been chewed to shreds by the dozen or so fish she’d taken so far that day.
“You know, honey,” Margie said, “if there’s dementia setting in, I sure as hell couldn’t see any sign of it today. Except maybe for the whole fishing in the buff thing.”
Sandy nodded and clipped off the excess tippet from the newly replaced fly.
“You know how this sort of thing can come on,” Margie said. “It can be really intermittent, take a long time to develop, and it can be so different for different people.”
“I know. That’s the problem.”
“Sorry I can’t help, honey, but he seemed fine to me today. Lovely, really. Only way to know for sure is get him in for an examination.”
“Fat chance he’d ever agree to that,” Sandy said.
“Then let’s just hope you’re full of shit, like you said.” Margie draped her arm around Sandy and hugged her tightly to her side.
“Yeah, let’s hope.”
But the fly had been cast, and now it was riding on the current. Sandy would have to stay on the alert.
She had discovered only one additional tick in her final run over Stink’s hide. She blew out the candle, crumpled the burned ticks into the foil, and tossed it into the trash.
“All better now?” Sandy said, and opened the back door. “Better go out once more before bed.”
While Stink sniffed and peed around a few select spots behind the house, Sandy stood in the doorway, listening to the crickets, gazing into the black night.
The texture of Tommy’s grief still clung to her. She had never known a fear like this. Before coming to the Ripshin Valley, and to the headwaters in particular, she’d never been connected to anything closely enough to fear its loss so deeply. Loving in this way was too new for her to understand it yet. For perhaps the first time in her life she was able to love enough to fear losing what she loved, and it galled her she couldn’t take that fear into her hands and wring a straight answer out of it. And so much of this new loving, as Margie had said, had been wrapped around things so much older than herself. Keefe, Edith, even Stink, she thought, as she watched her old dog raise his leg against one of the trash cans behind her house, then waddle past her back into the house.
When she stood immersed to her knees in one of the crystalline pools and looked up the slope, taking in the exquisite cascade of the headwaters, she felt the thrust of time. The mountain, the stones, the water, they were all dying. One day the round world would be finished creating itself and shrivel to lifeless dust, but that followed according to the click of geologic time. Her brief, paltry life would not last to encounter a grief so crushing. But Keefe was a man, wrapped in aging flesh as vulnerable as any other man. Edith, like any other woman. Stink, like any other dog.
That day, after she’d taken Margie back to her car at the Damascus Diner, Sandy had returned to Keefe’s and spent the night. When they shared a bed, their occasional lovemaking was generally gentle, even-tempered. Pedestrian, by most standards. But that night Sandy had been ardent in her desires, leaving Keefe exhausted and not a little taken aback. She had pressed herself into him with fierce abandon, as if she could draw a diagnosis, an answer to her fears, directly from his body through her fingers and mouth, her belly and thighs.
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