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He served, they sat, and Miranda ate slowly, taking her time with each bite, asking after his techniques and flavorings. They shared stories of their family meals, hers always centered by pasta and red sauce, his by game from the mountains and vegetables from the garden. They stayed at the table for a long time after the plates were emptied. The candles sputtered a bit. He thought of asking her if she wanted to sit in the living room, but something kept them right where they were. They talked of their mothers’ illnesses. He told her how his father had died soon after cancer took his mother. A heart attack.

“Well named,” Dix said as he folded and unfolded a napkin. “Losing her broke his heart.”

Then he looked up, and in the clear blue lakes of Miranda’s eyes saw a sorrow of his own reflected. It was a sadness he hadn’t fully realized he felt, and its revelation made him realize how lonely he had been—and how accustomed to loneliness he had become. In that moment, her eyes were a gentle press of light and warmth that seemed to dissipate the shadows of those feelings. And offered a promise to hold those feelings at bay, indefinitely.

They both got quiet, emptied of words. She yawned. He stood in response. She seemed reluctant to rise, but he attributed this to tiredness, the late hour, not to a desire to stay at the table any longer. She reached her arms over her head and stretched before getting to her feet and going toward the door. He held it open for her. The air, touched that night with the cold of the imminent winter, drifted in the gap. She thanked him. For dinner. For everything, she whispered. At the door, at the end of that evening, he went ahead and pushed the loose strand of hair behind her ear. She tilted her head toward his hand. His fingers grazed her cheek. Then she was gone.

A few evenings later, the lights were on when he drove up to the house. The smell of sautéing onions wafted toward him. Music was playing, some low, female vocalist. Miranda was at the stove when he came in the door, but crossed the kitchen with a cold beer in hand for him. She was smiling. Her hair was loose. There was flour on her cheek.

It was her turn to make him dinner, she announced.

After that meal—a veal dish, something he’d never had before—she didn’t go back to the cabin. He could still recall the taste of wine and berry sauce on her lips when, washing dishes side by side, he had bent his face to hers. Without words, she’d let herself go soft in his arms, and then they’d wandered, side by side, to his bed. He remembered how strange his coarse hands felt on her smooth skin, the contrast of his lean, hard musculature against her pillowy, delicate body. How odd it seemed to dress in the morning, tiptoeing around his own room while she slept in his bed, her hair a spray of dried grasses spread over his pillows. How quickly he got used to hearing music in the air and something sizzling in a pan when he came home at the end of the day. How much he enjoyed the lunches she packed for him, thermoses of soup and sandwiches on thick slabs of homemade bread. How accustomed he became to her appearing in the barn with a cup of hot coffee for him when he was working.

She told him she seemed to be like her grandmother—she showed her love through food.

And on that day, that afternoon when three full seasons had passed since he had first pressed his chapped lips to her moist ones, as he stood in the sun splitting wood and tasting his own sweat as it drizzled into his mouth, wondering when and why things had changed so much between them, he slowly realized that he was waiting for that cup of coffee. He was waiting for her. And it didn’t look like she was coming.

While Dix waited for Miranda, she watched him. She had gone to the garden, seeking a simple task to settle her mind. She was being irritable and she didn’t know why. She was being short-tempered with the one person who deserved it not at all. She was being what her mother would have called “a brat.” She disliked herself for it. She picked a few tomatoes and ears of corn and returned to the kitchen. From the sink, with the water rushing over her gleanings, she watched Dix’s deceptively effortless competence on full display. He swung the ax with an economy and precision of movement that made it seem as if the logs were splitting of their own accord. She’d watched him do this before and loved the rustic choreography of his efforts. She admired him and was jealous of him. She adored him and was besieged by doubts as to why he loved her. She toted up all the comforts and kindnesses he had given her and feared she had offered little in return. Everything he gave her seemed like a revelation, a shiny, new object unpacked just for her, and she felt she came to him empty-handed. She couldn’t even get pregnant. Tears began to drip down her face. Dix appeared to her as if he were underwater.

“God,” she said out loud. “What is this ridiculous self-pity?”

She felt weak in the face of his exquisite self-reliance. The comparison stung. She turned off the water and rubbed her hands in a towel, reminding herself of all the reasons he said he loved her. She was calm, peaceful, quick to smile, unselfconscious, generous, kind, not made up or given to airs. He had told her over and over again. But these were all things she felt she had not earned, things that just seemed like dumb luck. These were also things she felt less able to find within herself these days. She was more peevish than peaceful, more irritable than generous, quicker to find fault than to smile.

Why?
she wondered.
Because I have not figured out who or what I want to be.

She had not found a place for herself in this world, a job or task she could set before herself to make her mark, to make a life. She had been looking forward to the happy occupations of motherhood, the absorbing busyness of giving oneself over to another’s life. A baby was going to be her answer to the question of what to do. But that answer was proving as elusive as all the others.

Dix kept reminding her it hadn’t yet been a year. They weren’t really “trying,” just forgoing birth control. She was only twenty-four years old. He was only thirty-one. There was so much to look forward to. There was no hurry. Yet she felt anxious all the time now. As if she was missing something. She wondered if they should get married. He’d always said there was no need. Nothing a courthouse could give them that they didn’t have already. She’d always agreed. Besides, there was no one to come to a wedding. But now she wondered if being married might settle something inside herself. If it might be a tonic to some restlessness in her soul. She was starting to realize she was lonely in a way that had nothing to do with the presence of other people but had to do with something missing inside herself. She was mad that she wasn’t whole, and frustrated that she wasn’t finding whatever seemed to be lacking. And she felt silly and stupid for feeling so bad when there was so much good in her life.

Miranda watched the man she loved split logs in the long drafts of yellow, late-summer light, the ax moving in an elegant arc overhead and then down against the hard wood without hesitation or doubt that the desired goal was a given. She felt her tears dry, leaving sticky salt residue on her cheeks. She wanted so much to go to him, but she didn’t know what to bring to him, and she felt that just herself could not possibly be enough.

That first summer together, Dix and Miranda stumbled in and out of the shadows of their relationship. Some days there was more light than others. Miranda might suggest a hike and a picnic for them, and Dix would push off a client so he could say yes to her. Dix might reach across the darkness of their bed and pull her in between his arms. They’d laugh together at the antics of one of the chickens. They went to the grocery store together, had lunch while they were in town. The stuff of life kept reestablishing their threads of connection even after their occasional emotional fumbling strained or broke them.

Sometimes, when Dix went to check up on a house, if there wasn’t too much work for him to do and if the owners were away, Miranda would pack a lunch and tag along, turning the chore into a kind of date instead. One day, as they drove down an unfamiliar road toward a new log home Dix wanted her to see, she watched the trees click by outside the passenger-side window. Fall had settled in and brilliant red and yellow leaves had begun to drift down, leaving the deciduous trees partially naked among their evergreen brethren and creating seductive gaps in the landscape that allowed glimpses of homes and hillsides that were usually hidden. She was watching for these new sights, these peeks from a distance into otherwise private worlds, when suddenly, something close in the road jumped into her line of sight, startling her so that she flinched backward. It took her a moment to realize it was just a man standing at a listing mailbox by the side of an otherwise-deserted street. It took her a moment more to recognize something familiar in his passing profile.

“What’s going on?” Dix said.

“Nothing,” Miranda replied, trying for a nonchalance at odds with the unexpected thumping in her chest.

Dix glanced from her to his rearview mirror a few times before saying, “That’s the hippie guru guy.”

“What?” Miranda asked, honestly confused. “What are you talking about?”

“That guy you were looking at. The guy by the mailbox.”

Of course Dix had seen the man by the side of the road. She said he didn’t notice things, but, in fact, almost nothing escaped him. He saw critters rushing through the underbrush. Birds hidden in dense trees. Things that were on the verge of disintegrating and would benefit from repair. Her feelings. Even though neither he nor she could readily identify what her feelings were, what they portended, what to do about them, it did not mean he didn’t notice them. Miranda involuntarily twisted the ring on her finger. Dix’s eyes dropped to her hand, then went quickly back to the road. She was too distracted to notice the trajectory of his gaze.

“What do you mean the ‘hippie guru guy’?” she asked.

“Some guy bought an old farm that had been abandoned for a long time. No one wanted it because it’s in such a damp spot. So little sun. Old woman died out there, alone, one winter many years ago. Anyway, he’s been there, I don’t know, a year maybe. People thought it strange that he bought the place, then there’s been talk that it was just him and a bunch of lost, random women—that’s how the guru stuff started, especially because the women were so somber and always came into town together. Like a pack. Some thought he was a Mormon or some such. You know how folk talk. But then more recently, he started taking in kids. Runaway types. Some went back home after being there and told stories about him and the place.”

Dix paused. Miranda wondered if he was afraid the talk of town gossip upset her. Sometimes it did. There had been so much chatter about her family. About her. Her and Dix. She hated it. But she tried to steady her mood. They were having a nice day. She wanted to keep it that way.

“Who knows if any of it is true or not,” he went on. “People make stuff up. Especially kids.”

That last bit was for her benefit. He was always telling her to ignore gossip. That people just fabricated stories and didn’t care if they hurt people in the process. Miranda realized she was spinning the ring. She stopped, but she had a strong feeling that Dix knew where it came from. It seemed impossible, but then again, he knew so much. Kept most of it to himself and brought out his knowledge and understanding only when required. Like his tools. Kept in immaculate repair, in a tidy box, until they were needed for a specific task. She didn’t want him to know where she’d gotten the ring, and she didn’t want to know why she didn’t want him to know.

“What kinds of stories?” she asked, trying not to seem overly interested. “What do the kids say?”

“That he’s got all these ideas about the evils of modern life. No television, computers, cell phones. Trying to stay apart from the modern world. Its corrupting influence. Like some New Age Amish person. Guess that’s why so few kids stay out there. Try it for a bit. Then back to the video games. Even if it means putting up with Daddy smacking them around.”

He was quiet for a bit, looking for the driveway to the house he was taking her to.

“Who knows, though?” he said. “You know how kids talk. How town people gossip. He could be a monk who gave a kid a ride once and they’d turn the story and make him a serial child molester.”