Eating My Debt

The generator had quit again around nine, which meant I was grading forestry exams by propane light, which meant my eyes were bleeding, which meant I was in a mood. That's the state I was in when I heard the truck.

You get to know a truck out there. Cedar Break sits a quarter mile off the neighbor's place, up a ridge in the eastern Oregon foothills, and the sound carries. Carrie Mayfield's truck didn't rumble like a normal vehicle, it ground, like it was chewing gravel and holding a grudge about it. Third time that week I'd heard it grind up past my gate.

I counted my debts while I listened to it fade. She'd rehung my screen door in June after I broke it trying to open it with my hip like an idiot. She'd jumped my truck twice, both times without making me feel like a complete waste of a driver's license. She'd patched a section of my roof after the first big storm, shingles and everything, in under two hours. And she'd killed a rattlesnake on my porch in August, which honestly I might have paid actual money for.

Robin Chapman, thirty-six years old, associate professor of forestry, ten years past her PhD, and I could not hang a screen door. The irony of teaching people about trees while my own lodge fell apart around me was not lost on me. It was just depressing.

I'm getting ahead of things. Let me back up to the screen door itself.

I was still holding a red pen over exam fourteen when there was a knock, and I knew before I opened it. There's only one person who knocks on that door, and she doesn't live here.

"Evening," Carrie said. She was holding a grocery bag and wearing that grin she wears, the one that says she knows exactly how this looks. Twenty-eight years old, wildlife biologist, spends her summers on a hotshot crew, and built like the job. "I have made a terrible mistake."

"What kind of mistake?"

"I bought a butternut squash. By accident. And you know, lentils. I was in a hurry, my brain just, it grabbed things. I don't even like lentils."

I looked at the bag. There was a butternut squash in it and a bag of lentils and, I noticed, a six-pack of beer, a block of cheese, and what appeared to be a fresh loaf of sourdough.

"That's a lot of accidental groceries," I said.

"My brain does this," she said, shrugging. "It's a documented condition."

"Get in here, you weirdo, before the mosquitoes figure out the door's open."

She came in and put the bag on my counter like she owned the place, which after three months of favors I suppose she partly did. I got two beers out of the fridge, and we went out to the porch, because the porch in September is the best room in the house. The light was going gold behind the ridge and the whole valley was doing its thing, which is the thing that made me rent this dump in the first place.

"Exam grading?" she asked, nodding at the stack I'd abandoned on the table inside.

"Midterms. Don't ask me how they went."

"That bad?"

"One student defined dendrochronology as the study of tree sadness."

Carrie laughed, a real one, head back. "Okay, but is he wrong?"

"The tree rings are about age, Carrie, not grief."

"Sure, that's what the university wants you to think."

We sat there a while drinking. This is the part I should explain, the part where I admit how pathetic the whole arrangement was. Thursday nights, sometimes more, she'd show up with some flimsy excuse and we'd sit on this porch and talk about absolutely nothing. Firewood. Road washouts. Whether the guy at the Junction City store was lying about his fishing catches, which he was. And every week I thought, I owe this woman about forty hours of labor and a case of good whiskey, and every week I did nothing about it because doing something about it would mean admitting the visits were the best part of my week.

"How's the beetle crew treating you?" I asked.

"Chelsea's out there right now. My field tech, the one I told you about. She's been baiting the traps up the east slope all week."

"Alone?"

"She's twenty-three, Robin, she can walk a transect by herself." She took a pull of her beer. "Though she did text me a photo of a squirrel sitting on trap four like it was posing for a magazine."

"Is that a problem for the data?"

"It was a problem for my afternoon, I laughed for ten minutes. Anyway. How's the department?"

"Ah, you know. Celeste's back from her sabbatical and already trying to drag me to the fall dinner."

"Will you go?"

"I'd rather be eaten by the squirrel."

"You are a delight," she said. "Truly a warm and generous person."

"I contain multitudes. Mostly resentment."

The sun went behind the ridge and the temperature dropped the way it does out here, all at once, like a lid coming off a pot in reverse. Carrie reached over and pulled the wool blanket off the porch chair and dropped half of it across my knees without a word, which is the kind of thing she does that makes the whole debt situation worse.

"You know," I said, "I've been doing the math."

"What math?"

"On you. Door, roof, two jumps, one snake. You've put in, conservatively, a full day of skilled labor on my house. Plus groceries that were definitely not bought by mistake."

She waved it off. "It's nothing. I like having tools and a reason to use them."

"That's not the point. The point is I'm running a tab and I don't like running a tab. It makes me itchy."

"So settle it."

"With what? My skill set is trees and grumbling. I can't rehang a door. I can barely open one."

"You could cook," she said, and then, fast, before I could answer, "if you cook. I mean. Do you cook?"

"I can cook. Nobody's died. There's been some close calls with a pork loin but nobody's died."

"Then cook me dinner. One dinner, we call it partial payment, interest waived. Deal?"

She stuck her hand out over the beer bottles, dead serious, and I shook it, and her hand was rough and warm and I noticed that about it longer than a person should notice a handshake.

"Deal," I said. "Saturday?"

"Saturday. I'll bring the accidental groceries."

"You mean the groceries you're going to buy on purpose and pretend were a mistake."

"My brain does this," she said, completely straight-faced, and we both sat there grinning into our beers like a couple of idiots.

The thing about shaking on it, though, is that a handshake means something out here. It's a contract. And I sat there after she finally ground her truck back down the ridge, dark now, headlights sweeping through the trees, and I thought, well. Great. Now I have to clean the lodge.

* * *

On Friday I called Celeste, partly about the dinner and partly because I needed to tell someone, and Celeste has known me since grad school and has seen every bad decision I've made, so one more barely registers.

"Let me get this straight," she said. "The hot neighbor."

"She's not the hot neighbor, she's the neighbor."

"Robin. I have seen you describe a seminar speaker with less feeling than you just described a butternut squash."

"It's debt repayment. It's transactional."

"Uh huh. And what are you wearing to this transaction?"

"Clothes, Celeste. Regular clothes."

She made a noise that meant she didn't believe me, which was fair, because at that exact moment I was looking at the two decent shirts hanging in my closet and doing an evaluation I did not want to put into words. "Come to the department dinner next month," she said. "That's my price for listening to this."

"Blackmail."

"Friendship. They look similar." Then she said, "Look, just, be normal Saturday. Be yourself."

"That's terrible advice, I'm a mess."

"Yeah," she said, laughing. "But you're a mess who can cook. Go buy wine."

I hung up and looked around the lodge, which had reached that stage of academic-year decay where the surface of the kitchen table is theoretical. If this was debt repayment, fine. But standing there with a rag in my hand, I already knew I was going to cook like it wasn't.

* * *

It was later that same Friday when Celeste called back, which I should have expected, because Celeste does not let things go, she files them away in some mental drawer and pulls them out when you least want them pulled out.

"So the dinner is October eighth," she said, no hello. "I put you down as a maybe, which in my book means yes with extra steps."

"Celeste, I told you, I can't."

"Why can't you?"

And here is where I made my mistake, because instead of saying I don't want to, which is the truth and also allowed, I said, "I have plans."

There was a pause. "Plans."

"Yes."

"What kind of plans?"

"The normal kind. Personal plans. On a Friday night. Like people have."

"Robin, you live in a lodge with a generator that has opinions. What plans could you possibly have that I don't already know about?"

"A date," I said, before my brain could file an objection. "I have a date."

Celeste went so quiet I checked whether the call had dropped. "You have a date."

"Yes."

"With a person."

"That is generally how it works, yes."

"Okay. Bring them. To the dinner. October eighth."

"No," I said, too fast. "No, that's fine, we'll just, we have our thing, we don't need the dinner."

"Uh huh. So there's no date."

"There is absolutely a date."

"Then bring them. Robin, I swear, if you show up alone I'm going to introduce you to every single postdoc in the room and one of them will talk to you about soil."

"Nobody wants that."

"Then bring the mystery person. I can't wait to meet them. What's their name?"

I hung up on her, which she deserved, and then I sat down at the now-clean kitchen table and stared at the woodstove for a while, doing math. The dinner was in a few weeks. Celeste had a memory like a trapline. There was no version of this where I showed up alone and she let it slide. There was exactly one version where the lie held, and that version required a person.

There was one person within a quarter mile.

I thought about it. I thought about it for about two hours, during which I graded exactly zero exams, and then I couldn't stand sitting there with it anymore, so I walked over. Carrie was on her porch reading something with a lot of figures in it, and when she saw me coming she marked her page and smiled, and I realized I had walked a quarter mile uphill to ask a favor that involved the word girlfriend and I had not prepared a single sentence.

"You look like you're about to defend a thesis," she said.

"I have a weird thing to ask."

"Those are my favorite kind. Sit down."

I sat on the step next to her chair. "So. My department has this dinner every fall."

"Okay."

"And Celeste, my friend, my colleague, you'd like her, mostly, is making me come. And I told her I couldn't because I had plans. And she asked what plans. And I said a date."

Carrie took a sip of her drink and did not say anything, which was somehow worse than if she'd laughed.

"Which was a lie," I said. "Except now it has to be true, because she said bring them, and if I show up alone she's going to introduce me to soil people. So."

"So you need a date."

"I need a fake date. For one dinner. In October. That's the favor. That's the whole, that's the entire thing I'm asking."

She set her glass down on the porch rail. "You want me to pretend to be your girlfriend."

"For one night. One dinner. Two hours, maybe three if the department chair gets going about funding."

"And why me, exactly?"

"Because you're the only person I know," I said, "and because you can hold a conversation, and because if I brought literally anyone else from town they'd ask questions, and because you already have a whole fake dinner planned with me on Saturday so we'd be, what's the word, method actors."

She laughed at that, a real one, and then she got quiet in a way that made me