“I didn’t say that.”
Another pause.
Farah was rarely short of words.
“I handled it badly,” she said.
It was not quite an apology.
But it was closer than I expected.
“You handled it without me,” I said. “That’s the part that matters.”
“I understand.”
“I hope you do.”
“We were under a lot of pressure.”
“I know.”
“Theo probably told you everything.”
“He told me enough.”
She exhaled.
“I wasn’t trying to steal from you.”
“I don’t think you were trying to steal the cabin.”
“Then why involve an attorney?”
“Because once you accepted money from strangers for the use of my property and didn’t remove the listing when I told you to, it wasn’t just a family disagreement anymore.”
She didn’t answer.
“If you’d called me and said, ‘We need money, would you reconsider renting the cabin?’ I would have said no.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“It would have told you where the boundary was.”
“I already knew where you stood.”
“Yes.”
The silence after that was important.
Finally Farah said, “I don’t want this hanging over every holiday.”
“Neither do I.”
“So can we move past it?”
I considered the question.
“We can move forward,” I said. “That doesn’t mean everything goes back exactly the way it was.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you don’t have access to the cabin unless I invite you. Neither of you makes plans involving my property or finances without asking me. And if I say no, the answer is no.”
Her voice cooled slightly.
“That sounds like rules.”
“It is.”
“You’ve never needed rules like that before.”
“We didn’t have this problem before.”
She didn’t like that.
I could hear it.
But she said, “Okay.”
Not warmly.
Not happily.
Just okay.
For me, that was enough.
I did not cut Theo out of my will.
I did not threaten to sell the cabin so neither of them could ever use it.
I did not call relatives and turn the whole thing into a family campaign against Farah.
I wanted the problem stopped.
It was stopped.
Late in September, I drove to the cabin alone.
The leaves had only started changing at the higher elevations. Patches of red and yellow appeared among long stretches of green.
The gravel road was rougher than I remembered.
Buddy had warned me county crews hadn’t graded it recently.
When I reached the gate, I stopped the car and got out.
For a moment I simply stood there.
The mountains smelled different in early fall.
Drier.
Colder.
The kind of air that tells you summer is ending before the calendar does.
The new lockbox was mounted behind the cabin, partly hidden by the porch railing.
Buddy had left me a note taped inside the back door.
Better box. Harder to steal. Coffee at my place if you get bored.
I laughed.
The cabin looked exactly as it should.
George’s old plaid jacket was still on the hook near the mudroom, even though I had not worn it in years.
A stack of National Geographic magazines sat under the end table.
One of the porch chairs had a loose slat I kept meaning to repair.
That afternoon, I carried a cardboard box in from the car.
Inside were George’s old field guides.
Birds of the Carolinas.
Wildflowers of the Southern Appalachians.
Trees of the Blue Ridge.
They had been sitting on a shelf at home since he died.
I had told myself many times that I would bring them to the cabin.
I never had.
Until then.
I arranged them on the shelf above the fireplace.