“What is this place?” Angie asked, handing him the picnic basket and then taking his hand and letting him help her out of the boat.
“Watch the pier. It’s a bit rotten. This is where my grandparents’ house used to be. You can still see the foundation.”
She wandered over and looked at the crumbling stone foundation. “What happened to the house?”
He went and stood beside her, nudged a stone with his foot. “It burned down a few years ago. It had been abandoned for some time.”
“What a beautiful spot.” She reached for the basket and pulled a blanket from it. She set it out and they both settled on it. “I’m surprised you didn’t build your new house here.”
“It wasn’t practical. This spot is nearly inaccessible by land. My great-grandfather ran a trading post here for lake traffic. When I came here, my grandparents were still almost exclusively using a boat for transport.”
“How did you go to school?”
“Until high school, by correspondence. Then, my grandparents bought a place for us in Anslow. They said it was because they were getting older, but I know it was so I could have a normal high school experience, make some friends.” He grinned at the memory. “Meet a girl. My grandfather was always concerned about me meeting a girl.”
It occurred to him his grandfather would be very pleased, indeed, to see this girl eating a picnic lunch by the old homestead.
“What kind of normal did you have here?” she asked.
He thought he should probably stop talking, but on the other hand, it was good to distract her and to see her growing more relaxed by the minute.
“The best kind,” he said. “I grew up using a boat, and chopping wood and hunting and fishing. I knew every inch of these woods. It helped me. It healed me.”
He was shocked to hear himself say that. He was not sure he had ever said it before. If he had been able to say it to Hailey, would she have understood?
“I could never sell it,” Jefferson heard himself say.
“Sell it?” Angie looked at him, astonished. “I think it would be criminal to sell it.”
As they ate lunch, she seemed to know all the right questions. And so he found himself talking of things he had not spoken of for years. He told her of the basset hound named Sam who had followed him through the days of his boyhood, and of a baby squirrel he had bottle-fed. He told her of the winter the snow had piled up past the roof, and of being on the lake in twenty-foot swells. He told her of bear encounters and afternoons in the hills picking gallons of huckleberries that his grandmother turned into pies and preserves.
“People see this place as magical in the summer, but my favorite time of year here was Christmas,” Jefferson said.
“Really? Why?”
“My grandmother used to have a Christmas gathering every year, right on Christmas Day. She sent out a blanket invitation. Everyone was invited, and everyone came. My grandfather and I were put to work a month in advance. We had to find the perfect Christmas tree, and make sure there was enough wood to have a bonfire down by the lake. The main body of this lake never freezes, but sometimes the arms do, and I can remember my grandfather going out there with a saw, every day in December, to check the depth of the ice. We were allowed to skate if the ice was over four inches thick. The day he pronounced it safe was better than Christmas for me. I can remember skating on it when the ice was so clear it was like skating on a sheet of glass over the water.
“It could be hard to get here in the winter, but they came for the Stone Christmas, anyway. There were no gifts allowed at her gathering—my grandmother said the gift was each other. And so people came from miles around, and the women got around her gift rule by bringing pies and homemade bread and buns and jars of preserves.
“Families prepared skits, and we sang songs, and we ate food until we could barely move. We kept a bonfire going, and there was sledding and snow fights and snowman building competitions. Lots of times people came prepared to stay, and there were sleeping bags on the floors, and the gathering lasted for days.”
It seemed, as he spoke, he was being restored to some part of himself that he had forgotten.
“It sounds wonderful,” she said wistfully. “What happened to it?”
“We had a smaller version of it once we moved into town. My grandparents got older, families grew up and people moved. It just kind of faded away.”
They sat there in silence for a long time.
“Are you up for a bit of a hike?” he asked. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”
He contemplated that invitation, even as he took her hand. He’d never taken anyone to his secret place before. Hailey would not have wanted to go. She would have complained incessantly about bugs and branches snagging her clothes. She would have worried about bears and cougars and wolves.
He guided Angie to a trail that was sadly overgrown, though the animals still used it, so it was passable. Even though her footwear was entirely inappropriate—a flimsy pair of flip-flops, she was uncomplaining as they wound their way steadily upward through the forest growth and the steadily increasing afternoon heat.
The trail ended an hour later at a waterfall. It cascaded out of a rock outcropping fifty feet above them and ended in a gorgeous green pool.
He watched, not the waterfall, which he had seen a thousand times, but her.
Her face was a study in wonder.
“This,” she declared softly, “is the most beautiful place in the world.”
They were both hot and sticky after the hike, so he stripped off his shirt.
“Ready to swim?” he asked her.
She hesitated and then tugged the hem of that serape/frock invention over her head.
He was aware his mouth fell open. He snapped it shut. He ordered himself to look away. He didn’t.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s all they had at the Emporium.”
Sorry? She was a goddess. She was a vision. He had to turn from her and dive into the water to break away from the spell she was casting on him in that tiny polka-dot bikini.
He surfaced. She was standing at the edge of the pool. Her arms were wrapped around herself. She was a self-conscious goddess.
“Come in,” he called.
She stuck her toe in and emitted a very un-goddess-like shriek. He swam over to her, took the flat of his hand and splashed her.
“Hey! I’m getting in my way. It’s very cold.”
“It’s mountain fed. Of course it’s cold. Get in.”
“Quit being bossy.”
“I’ll be bossy if I want. I’m the boss.”
She
