Cabin Crush Under the Eclipse

The directions said take the gravel road past the second cattle grid and keep going until you think you've made a mistake, and that's about how it went, except the mistake turned out to be a hunting cabin squatting at the edge of a lake with scrubby hills behind it and eucalyptus trees doing their best to look like they belonged there, which they did, apparently, being as how this was New Zealand and everything grows here whether you invited it or not. I pulled the hire car up next to the woodshed and sat for a minute with my hands on the wheel, just breathing. Forty-four years old, widowed four years now, and here I was at the arse end of nowhere for a whole week watching somebody else's kids while their grandfather chased an eclipse across the sky.

Cyril had hired me back in the spring, a retired geologist with a flat voice and a chequebook that didn't ask questions, and he'd said, Jeanne, I need somebody sensible with the little ones for eclipse week, and I'd said yes before he finished the sentence because sensible was the one thing I still knew how to be.

The kids came pelting out the door before I'd even got my bag off the back seat. Alice is eight and Toby is six, and they hit me at the knees like two small freight trains, and Belinda their mum came out after them at a more dignified pace, thirty-five and tired around the eyes in the way mums get when they've packed a week of children's clothing into one duffel bag.

"Jeanne, thank God," she said, taking my bag off me without asking, which told you everything about how her morning had gone. "Dad's already down at the point setting up his telescope gear and I've got to drive to the airport in twenty minutes, and the spare room's made up, and there's soup on the stove, and if Toby asks about sharks again just say yes to whatever he wants."

"Say yes to what about sharks?" I asked, and she was already in the car.

"There's a surf coach coming tomorrow," she called out the window, backing down the gravel. "Wade, he's a friend of Dad's, he's going to take the kids on the boards at the beach. Be nice to him, he's better than he sounds." And then the car was gone in a long ribbon of dust and it was just me and two kids and a lake and a kettle, and honestly the quiet came down on my shoulders like a coat.

The first day was mostly me learning where things weren't. The cabin had been built by somebody who hated right angles, and the kitchen had one drawer that opened and three that didn't, and the stove lit on the third match if you swore at it first. Alice read on the couch like the couch owed her money and Toby narrated everything he did in a running commentary that would've worn out a lesser woman, and I made the soup stretch and put them to bed by eight and stood on the porch with a cup of tea feeling, for the first time in years, like a person rather than a function. That's when I saw the ukulele, leaning against the wall by the steps like it had been waiting for me all day.

Now I've played a bit of ukulele since my husband died, and I'll tell you why, because it sounds silly otherwise. Samson used to sing in the kitchen, badly, and after he was gone the house was so quiet I thought I'd go mad, and a woman at my grief group said get something small to learn, so I got a ukulele, and it didn't fix anything but it gave my hands somewhere to be at night. So when I saw one sitting there on a porch in the middle of nowhere, I took it as a sign, the way widows do, and I sat down on the step and tuned it by ear and played three chords, quietly, because the kids were asleep, and the lake went black and the first stars came out and I thought, well, this week might not be a complete waste.

The next morning I was on the second cup of coffee when a ute came up the drive with two surfboards strapped in the back and a man got out who looked like he'd been ironed wrong. Late thirties, sun-bleached, the kind of tan you get from working outside rather than lying around earning it, and he came up the steps with a duffel over one shoulder and stopped dead when he saw the ukulele sitting on the table by the window where I'd left it.

"Oh, you found her," he said, picking her up and turning her over as if checking on a pet. "She get much sun? She hates direct sun."

"She's a ukulele, not a houseplant," I said. "And she's fine. I tuned her last night."

He looked at me then, properly, and something in his face did a little reset. "You tuned her? By ear?"

"It's not brain surgery. Four strings. Even a nanny can manage it."

"That's a Kane, that is," he said, holding it up like evidence in a trial. "That's not a toy from the servo, that's a proper instrument, and she belongs to me, and I don't let just anybody tune her, no offence."

"Some taken, none felt," I said. "There was no name on it. It was leaning on the porch. What was I supposed to think, that the fairies left it?"

"Fairies don't leave Kanes on porches, they'd never get them back." He set it down on the table with what I judged to be deliberate care, and put out his hand. "Wade. I'm the surf coach. You'd be Jeanne, Belinda said you'd be here, she said you were sensible, which I took to mean terrifying."

"Belinda said you were better than you sound," I said, shaking his hand, and his grip was warm and he laughed before he even seemed to decide to.

"Two kids on foam boards in shore break, it's the whole job, and I'm good at it, so the bar for better than I sound is somewhere under a limbo pole." He went to the kitchen and looked in the coffee pot and looked at me. "Is that the last of it?"

"It was. Now it's the last of yours. Cyril bought instant for back-up, top shelf."

"Instant," he said, the way other men say cancer. "Right. Well. He's a geologist, they think the ground owes them a living." He made his instant coffee anyway and leaned against the bench and looked at me over the top of it. "So what's your story, sensible Jeanne? Belinda says you've been with the family since the little one was small."

"Nannies don't have stories, we have references," I said. "And I've only been with this family two years. Before that I was in Wellington, before that I was married. He died four years back. That's the whole programme, there's no interval."

He didn't do the thing people do, the little wince and the hasty subject change, or worse the soft voice, and I noticed that and noticed myself noticing it. "What did he die of, if you don't mind me asking, or do nannies not get asked either?"

"Cancer. He was fifty-one. We'd been married seventeen years, since I was twenty-three." I rinsed my cup. "And you, what's your story, the bloke who left a real job to teach six-year-olds to fall off foam boards?"

"Who told you about the real job?"

"Cyril. He mentioned you used to be in insurance in Auckland and now you live in a van by the sea."

"It was a ute with a canopy, not a van, and it was market analysis, which is insurance for people who like spreadsheets, and I left it at thirty-one because I was thirty-one and miserable and every year I waited made it harder, and now I'm thirty-eight and I teach kids to fall off foam boards and I own a ukulele worth more than my car." He shrugged. "People think it's not a real job. That's fine. They can think it while I'm at the beach and they're at the spreadsheet."

"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me in about three years," I said, and he looked a bit startled by that, and then the kids came thundering down the hall in their togs asking if the surf man was here, and the day swallowed us both. But that night he was on the porch with the ukulele and I came out with my tea and he shuffled along the step to make room without being asked, and he played something with more fingers in it than I could follow.

"You could show me that bit," I said.

"I could," he said, and put the ukulele in my lap, and put his finger on the chord chart, and didn't put it anywhere else, which I also noticed, and also noticed myself noticing, and I played the chord wrong three times and right once and the lake stayed black and the eclipse was the day after tomorrow and neither of us mentioned it.

The next morning Wade had the kids in the water by nine, and I sat on the sand with a thermos and a towel and told myself I was there to supervise, which was technically true, and also told myself that the fact I'd worn the blue swimsuit instead of the practical black one was nobody's business but mine. Alice was riding a wave on her belly and screaming like it was a fairground ride, and Toby was eating sand, and Wade stood waist deep in the water with his arms out like he'd been born in it, which maybe he had, I didn't know yet. He was thirty-eight and built like someone who did his job standing in the sea, and I was forty-four and knew every centimetre of my own softness and had spent four years not caring, or saying I didn't care, which is nearly the same thing but not quite.

"Coffee's a crime, but the morning's not bad," he said, jogging up the sand with water running off him, and I made myself not look anywhere obvious. "Alice's got balance. Toby's got enthusiasm. One of those is teachable."

"Which one?"

"Ask me Friday." He dropped onto the sand next to me, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, and I pulled the towel over my knees like it mattered. "You coming in? The water's honest."

"I don't swim in front of strangers," I said, which was a lie with no logic in it, and he looked at me and then away, and didn't push, and I liked him slightly more for that and slightly less for noticing.

The eclipse argument started that evening, over the maps Cyril had left taped inside the pantry door, with the path of totality drawn in red marker across the hills like something out of a war film. Wade wanted the lake.

"You've got two hundred degrees of open sky over the water, and the reflection doubles it," he said, tapping the map with a finger. "The last thing you see before totality is the light going strange on the water, and the first thing after is it coming back. It's theatre."

"It's a car park," I said. "Half the district will be on that shore with thermoses and folding chairs and a caravan generator, and you know it. The ridge is quiet, the ridge is high, you see the shadow come across the hills before it hits you, which Cyril says is the whole point, and Cyril is the one who hired me."

"Cyril will be at the ridge with his tripod and his twenty years of waiting, that's his moment," Wade said. "You don't have to have his moment. You could have your own."

"It's the same eclipse, Wade."

"It's not the same eclipse from a car park," he said, and we went around it three more times, Alice refereeing from the couch with a biscuit, until I said the ridge was not negotiable and he said fine, fine, we'd all freeze on a hill like sheep in a paddock, and Alice said she hoped there'd be sheep, and that more or less ended it.

The kids went down easy that night, worn out from the water, and I came out to the porch expecting to read, and found Wade sitting on the step with two beers from the fridge and a look on his face like a boy who'd done something he'd apologise for later. He held one out.

"Peace offering. It's not the last coffee, I checked."

"It's the last two beers," I said, sitting down. "That's worse."

"It is worse," he agreed, and we drank to that.

He got the ukulele out after a while and tuned it, which took him a while, which I pretended not to notice, and then he started playing something that was meant to be a song and was actually a man wrestling a small wooden animal. A string buzzed. Then another. He stopped, looked at his fingers like they'd betrayed him, and started again, and the same string buzzed, and I laughed. I didn't mean to, it came up out of me like something that had been stored.