at your bandage,” he said. “You’ve gotten it all wet.”
“Yeah, but I know where I can get another one.” She moved sideways, and he took over.
“If you’re lucky. Say, was it absolutely necessary to do this tonight?” he said.
“It’s a new sweater. I’ve only worn it a few times.” While he wrung it out, Kerry produced a clean towel and silently accepted the dripping bundle from him, rolling it awkwardly into the terry cloth.
Impatient with her, with her failure to lash out at him, Sam said, “Give it to me.” He blotted at the sweater, then unrolled the towel. “Dry enough?”
“Sure. Here, you can spread it on this paper on the table.” He did, and edging past him in the narrow space, she moved in to shape the sweater into its proper form.
“All right, looks like I’d better rebind those fingers, only don’t think you can get away with this too many times,” Sam said when she had finished.
“So what else is there to do besides this?” Kerry affected a bored tone of voice and presented her fingers as he unrolled lengths of gauze.
“I don’t know. Play tiddledywinks. Engage in intelligent conversation. Reminisce.” He bent close. Her hair smelled fragrant and outdoorsy, redolent of balsam and pine. He wondered what she used to wash it up here at the cabin. Rainwater perhaps.
“Reminisce,” Kerry echoed, clearly taken aback. “Just what would you and I reminisce about?”
“Old times. Good times.”
“If we’d had any, that is. Ouch, you’re winding that too tightly.”
He released some of the pressure. “Reminisce—that’s what Doug and I used to do here at the cabin. We’d fry us a panful of salmon, kick back and examine our experiences in the clear light of reason.”
“You did?” Kerry sounded surprised.
“We sure did.”
“Did you ever talk about Sybilla?”
Sam cocked his head at her and tried not to laugh. “Nope. Never.”
“Well, I sure had to witness a lot of rib-poking and eye-rolling every time her name was mentioned.”
“Doug liked to rag you about her.” Sam remained noncommittal because of all things, Sybilla was one thing he didn’t want to talk about. His lips would remain sealed about that little caper.
Kerry watched him work, silent for a time. “If there’s one thing I hope to find out before the last trump sounds, it’s about Sybilla,” she said, seeming much too hopeful.
Sam finished the job quickly and more sloppily than he would have liked, mostly because he couldn’t keep his mind on what he was doing. “I’m not telling you about Sybilla,” he said firmly. “No way.”
Kerry looked sulky, annoyed. “Why not? It was a long time ago.”
“When Doug and I were stationed in Germany with the Air Force, to be exact. Too long ago to remotely interest anyone.”
“Me,” Kerry said stubbornly. “It interests me.”
“What interests me is that you’d better not get those fingers wet again tonight. Doctor’s orders.” It also interested him that when Kerry became petulant, her lips curved into the most mesmerizing pout. An eminently kissable pout. And right now the strain of pretending that he wasn’t becoming attracted to her was beginning to make him slightly crazy.
While he was making himself think about this, Kerry held her hand up and waggled her fingers experimentally, then winced with the effort.
“Time for another pill,” he said, falsely jolly. He handed her one, and she swallowed it.
“Want me to give the hot chocolate another try?” he asked.
“Might as well. If you’re not up to talking about Sybilla.”
“I already told you I’m not.” Wishing she’d shut up about Sybilla, Sam pulled out packets of hot-chocolate mix and filled the old coffeepot with water to heat on the stove; he ignored Kerry, who sat down and pulled her legs up so that she was sitting cross-legged on the old green pullout couch that had been in the cabin ever since he could remember. She stared into the growing flames and looked pensive.
“That hot chocolate’s going to taste pretty good,” she said as he poured it into two mugs and carried one back to her. She scooted over to make room for him, a movement that in anyone else Sam might have considered a sign of companionship. In this case, however, there was nowhere else to sit unless you could count a saggy old hassock and a hard backless wooden bench on the other side of the room. So sitting beside her really meant nothing. He tried to remind himself of that.
Beside him, Kerry blew on her hot chocolate to cool it; he drank his immediately. The fire crackled and spit, a whirl of sparks flitting up the stone chimney like so many manic fireflies.
“What are you going to do with that lumber you brought in?” she asked.
He had laid the two-by-four along one wall, one end of it resting on the colorful rag rug covering part of the floor. “That’s what I’ll need to fix the plane.”
She lowered her cup. “No way,” she said.
He laughed at the way she looked when she said it. She had a funny way of quirking her upper lip in disbelief; it was a trait that had once annoyed him.
“It’ll work. Here, let me show you,” he said. He reached over to the upended varnished keg that served as an end table and picked up the pencil and paper that were there. A dog-eared magazine served as a lapboard.
As Kerry leaned close, warming her hands around the hot mug, her injured finger and the one that supported it stuck out at an odd angle. Her knee brushed his accidentally. She jumped away like a scared rabbit, which was how he knew that she’d felt something, too. He wondered if what she felt remotely resembled the sudden shock of awareness that had whipped through him fast as lightning.
Sam wasn’t accustomed to such bodily phenomena in his daily life. He knew he was attractive to women and had even become smug about it, taking what they offered and refusing to give much of himself in return. But he’d certainly never, even at his most receptive, felt anything that remotely resembled a lightning strike.
And maybe he hadn’t really felt one now.
He made himself bend over the paper, deliberately keeping his distance. “This is the plane,” he said, sketching it roughly, “and this is the float and strut that are still there. Here’s the shorn-off strut. I can cut the lumber to the right size with a saw I found in the shed and bolt it onto the shaft. After that I’ll figure out a way to affix the float, and we’ll be out of here.”
“It sounds too simple,” she said. Her eyelashes cast long shadows on her cheeks.
“It isn’t hard. Of course, I’ll have to assess damage to the float and the rest of the plane.”
“And the river
