Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (17 page)

Great, he thought, now I have choices.

He worked, throwing hours at the ever hungry case—a complicated high-stakes fight involving a drug company, a young mother, and a fatal side effect. One day his boss caught him as they were leaving a meeting.

“I have another one for you,” he said. “You're doing so well with our client here, I thought you might be just the guy for this one. We're her third law firm.”

Tom arranged his face into an expression of interested anticipation that had nothing to do with his thoughts. Being the second law firm was not necessarily horrible; in a best-case scenario, it meant that the first firm was incompetent, or that a client's unrealistic expectations had been treated less than sympathetically, which caused the client to leave but hopefully become more malleable going forward. Being the third firm, however, generally meant a client's refusal to let go of a hopeless situation for reasons that had little to do with the jurisprudence. Not for the first time, Tom considered that law school should include more classes on therapy and less time on arcane cases from the 1780s concerning the ownership of goats.

And now, of course, given his “perspective” as a widower, he got all the hopeless ones. Sometimes he felt as if he walked around the office with a sign on his back:
GOT GRIEF?
Tom wondered what kind of cases he would get if they knew about Lillian.

The new client sat in his office, her hands in her lap, her jaw tight in a way that made Tom's teeth hurt.

“They want me to settle,” she said as Tom introduced himself, her words running over his. “Isn't that the strangest word?”

According to the file on Tom's desk, the woman's five-year-old daughter had been killed by a delivery truck when the girl rode her bicycle from their driveway into the rarely traveled cul-de-sac. The driver, a young man, was clearly heartbroken; the company had twice offered settlements that Tom instantly recognized as above the norm.

“I don't want to settle,” the woman said.

“What is it you're hoping for?” Tom asked. Likely it was revenge, at this point, but it was always better for clients to hear themselves say it.

“Have you ever lost anyone?” Her stare was direct. Tom knew she didn't believe he had, not if he was sitting there asking her what she wanted.

It was time to switch the focus to her, for him to step gracefully rearward into the position of objective counselor. A shifting of papers. Perhaps an offer of coffee. It wasn't that the law was unfeeling, Tom's boss always said, it just worked better with a little distance. The woman looked at him as if she knew that, too, as if the two of them were standing outside a burning house and people were still inside. As if his refusal to enter was hateful.

“Yes,” he said.

She nodded in recognition.

Tom picked up the settlement papers. “The previous offers were generous,” he said. “And the young man has apologized. I see here that he wrote you letters.”

“Yes.”

“What is it you want me to do, then?”

“Make it last longer.”

“Why? What is it you hope to accomplish?”

Her hands moved in her lap.

“You need to tell me,” he said, “otherwise I can't help you.”

“He's the last one who saw her,” she said finally.

“And you want him to pay?”

“No.” She shook her head and looked at Tom as if perhaps she had been right about him in the beginning. “He and I—we're the last two that saw her. What do I do when he's gone?”

•   •   •

EVEN AS AN ASSOCIATE,
he could put in only so many hours at work—at some point he had to go home. Still, there were ways to stall—a nightcap at the bar across the street from the firm, a different and longer route home each night, although it seemed they all eventually led past Lillian's apartment.

One night, as he drove slowly by, he looked up. In the illuminated window he could see Chloe at the sink, washing dishes, Lillian and Isabelle and Al sitting at the table, leaning into each other's words. Tom went home and turned on every light in his house.

•   •   •

“YOU'RE PROBABLY WONDERING
why I brought you here.”

Isabelle and Tom sat on the front porch of the cabin, looking out over the rocky beach to the water beyond. It was early May, the air still cool, and Isabelle was wrapped up in a blue quilt from one of the beds inside, a red stocking hat on her head. She looked like a determined garden gnome, Tom thought.

“I figure I'm going to get a talking-to,” he replied.

“So, are you going to marry her?”

Isabelle's increasing bluntness was a side effect of her “predicament,” as she liked to call it—but Tom knew that she was not above using it for her own purposes, either. It was one of the things he liked most about her, when he stopped to think about it.

“So much for subtlety,” he replied with a wry smile.

“The woman is getting round,” Isabelle said.

Tom wondered sometimes how people kept moving forward into things like marriage and children. He and Isabelle both knew what it felt like to watch a spouse leave you. Divorce or death; in either case you were left with half a contract, riveted in place by promises you had not broken. You could try to move—forward, sideways—but in the end it seemed you were always traveling in a circle, coming back to the moment of departure. No wonder they gave out rings at the ceremony.

“I don't know how to do it,” Tom said.

“Maybe you need a different ‘it,' dear,” Isabelle commented, tugging her hat down over the top of her ears.

“But while you're here,” she added casually, “there is something you could do for me.”

•   •   •

TOM STOOD LOOKING
at the hunks of wood—a half-cord, easily, he figured, although the logs he had chopped in his teenage years had been clean, consistent lengths, redolent with the smells of alder and maple, their bright surfaces almost begging to be cut. He remembered the joy of his growing muscles, the loft of the axe as it swung up in an endless arc and then came slamming down. The complete and utter satisfaction of a smooth surface cleaving into air as the pieces went flying to either side of him.

This was not going to be like that, he could tell, looking at the haphazard jumble of gnarled stumps and logs, half of it wet and rotting, the other portion hard and glistening and green. This was wood that defied the axe, a living lesson that when it came to heat, sometimes it was better to use man's other inventions—electricity, gas, propane.

“Where did you get this?” he asked Isabelle.

“My neighbors did some land-clearing,” she said innocently. “Wasn't it nice of them?”

Isabelle had had the cabin for decades, Tom knew. She'd heated with wood for the years she lived there; she'd even bragged to him about chopping her own supply. Isabelle knew junk wood when she saw it.

“Isabelle,” he said. “Be reasonable.”

“Being reasonable never taught me anything,” Isabelle responded calmly. “Nor will it keep my cabin warm. I'll be inside if you need me.”

•   •   •

TOM HADN'T PICKED UP
an axe in almost fifteen years, not since his father died and his family stopped going to the lake. Tom centered the first hunk on the flattest piece of ground he could find, hoping for muscle memory, or at least muscles. He had chosen a rotten piece, figuring it would be an easy start. He held the axe level, feeling the balance, the weight of its head in his right hand, his left cradling the curve of the grip. He remembered his father giving him a lesson, watching his father's arms heave the axe up, right hand sliding down the wooden belly to meet the left, bent knees straightening, his body lifting up, almost off the ground.

“Gravity is your friend,” he told Tom.

Now Tom hoisted the axe above his head, hearing the sounds of his right hand sliding down the handle, the blade moving through the air. He felt gravity grab the axe head as it reached the top of its arc, and he brought it down, feeling it enter the log with a soft, soggy thud. He rocked the handle back and forth and the wood collapsed sleepily into pieces, insects skittering for cover, fat white larvae curling up against the light.

He laid the pieces out in the sun, shaking his head.

It took him an hour to get through the water-softened hunks, but by the last one he was feeling masterful. The axe swung in a smooth, intuitive arc; the logs fell apart almost before the blade touched them. It would be months if not years before they would be any good for burning, but, at least, separated into pieces and stacked out of the rain, they would have a head start on drying. It felt good to do something physical, to feel as if he was being useful in a way you could measure by height or weight.

He shifted his attention to the other half of the pile and manhandled one of its gnarled chunks into place. It sat there, squat and irritated, its rings swirling out of line, pushed into new shapes by limbs that had started forming early on.

The axe blade plummeted down, bouncing off the implacable surface of the log and careening toward his leg.

“Shit!” he yelled, leaping back.

Isabelle poked her head out the door of the cabin, a white bowl ringed with painted blue flowers in her hands. The picture of tidy domesticity.

“Everything all right out there?” she asked.

“Thrill a minute,” he said.

“Look at all that you've done,” she noted. “You'll be finished in no time.”

The door closed.

Tom glared at the door, then at the log that sat unmarked by the experience.

He flexed his thumbs, feeling the blisters that were already forming. He hoisted the axe, hearing his muscles growl, then brought it down hard and straight, feeling it connect with a jolt that blasted up his arms and lodged in his jaw. When he looked down, he saw a thin crack in the wood—a paper cut, at most. He pulled the axe out easily and aimed again for the same spot. Again. And again, his arms pounding with blood. Finally, he felt the blade sink in, but when he tried to pull it out again, it wouldn't come. He rocked the handle from side to side. Nothing. He lifted the axe and the log came with it, hanging there like a dead thing.

The muscles in his arms were shaking. He had made a mistake—he should have done this pile first, while he was still fresh. He was too tired for this. Glancing up at the cabin, he could see Isabelle through the window, putting on a kettle for tea. Scotch would have been better, he thought. She looked out, a wave morphing into a thumbs-up.

Fine.

Still holding the handle, he slammed the log into the ground, hoping to wedge the axe in deeper, or remove it, or something.

“Let go,” he muttered between his teeth, as he raised and then battered the log at the end of the axe. “Let GO.” It didn't release, but slowly he could feel the blade moving inward, an inch or so each time, until finally the log split into two pieces.

“YES!” he yelled triumphantly.

He looked around at the pile next to him. There were still twenty-five logs left—and Isabelle's patience appeared to be endless.

•   •   •

SOMEWHERE AROUND
log number ten he ceased to care. His body took over, the endless bass beat of the axe pummeling his mind into numbness. Log after log after log.

You got to the point where you believed that was all life was, just one piece of bad news after another—a test result, a failed medication, a nurse's sympathetic expression, stupefying you, claiming space in your brain that used to house memories of your wife's naked body running into the ocean, of the grin on her face as she lifted a brush to paint your bedroom walls a warm and luscious apricot that you swore to her you'd never like.

What had made him believe he could love Lillian after that? She had said she didn't believe in substitutions. She had opened a door and he had walked through, grateful. But he had only half entered, bringing all of that with him.

He could feel it as he chopped—the deep, black anger, the grief crammed between his shoulder blades like chunks of dirty, compacted ice. He raised the axe and aimed for the gnarled stump in front of him. His swing ramped up to a staccato, his muscles screaming. It wasn't until he couldn't see the log in front of him that he realized he was crying.

He put down the axe and sat on the ground. His skin steamed, sending clouds of heat up into the cool air. He was tired, empty. Spent, his father always used to say—as if energy was something you might have saved if you'd been careful, thinking of the future. Something neither of them had had, in the end, Tom thought. Although as he sat there, his body thrumming, Tom understood that wasn't true in his case. He had a future, but he had been no better than the mother in his office, their minds locked into immobility with the effort of looking back, remembering not what they'd had but the loss of it.

“They aren't leftovers,” Charlie used to tell him as she took the bits and pieces of a previous day's meal out of the refrigerator. “They're a head start.”

Tom looked at the cut logs scattered around him. He shifted his shoulders, stood up, and started stacking them.

•   •   •

“HERE,” ISABELLE SAID,
coming up next to him as he put the last log in place. She handed him a beer. “Why don't you take this down to the beach?”

Tom walked to the edge of the water, his body shivering from exertion. His rational mind noted that tomorrow was likely going to hurt. He put on his sweatshirt and lowered himself carefully onto a driftwood log, looking down Isabelle's inlet toward the bay. Back at the cabin was a stack of cut wood, almost as tall as he was. At his feet he could hear the tide, running through the stones as it moved up the beach. He felt the smoothness of the log under his legs, the breeze cooling the sweat in his hair. He wanted to sit there and never leave.