Road to Her Heart

I'd been running the same route up to Deerbone Lodge for ten years, give or take, and I could drive that last stretch of gravel blindfolded. Twelve miles of pines and potholes, then the trees open up and there she is, the lodge sitting big and dark against the ridge, all logs and stone and chimney smoke. My monthly delivery, the one I built my whole schedule around whether I admitted that or not.

Shari was thirty-five now and I was thirty-eight, and we'd been doing this dance since I was twenty-five and rolled into a truck stop café outside Bemidji at two in the morning and she was twenty-two, waiting tables, wearing a name tag that said SHARI and a look that said don't try anything. I didn't try anything. Somehow that worked better than trying anything ever would have. Thirteen years of friendship later, here I was, still hauling her flour and frozen venison and beer, still getting a hug at the loading dock and nothing else, and telling myself that was fine.

So the rig rumbled into the lot around four in the afternoon, sun coming through the pines at that low slant it does up there, and I saw them before I even shut the engine down.

Through the big front window of the lodge, past the great room, out on the side lawn by the skinning rack, Shari was laughing. That's the first thing that hit me. Not the guy, not the deer. The laugh. She had her head tipped back and her hand up near her mouth and she was laughing at something, and I sat there with my thumb on the engine kill switch feeling like I'd walked into a room I didn't have a key for anymore.

The guy was Allen. I knew of him. Hired on two years back as a guide, forty years old, divorced, built like the kind of man who advertises on the side of a protein powder tub. I'd met him twice at deliveries and both times he'd shaken my hand a half second too long and said Andre, good to finally meet you, like we were business partners.

Today he had a doe hung up on the rack and he was walking Shari through field dressing it, hands moving, talking, and she had a knife in her hand like he'd handed it to her, and every time he said something she laughed or winced or laughed again.

Now here's what I told myself on the drive over, and I'll own up to how stupid it sounds. I told myself she's my best friend, friends show each other stuff, this is nothing. Then I watched Allen stand close behind her and guide her elbow while she made a cut, and something went off in my chest like a piston slapping a hole in the block.

I didn't have a right to that feeling. I knew that. Ten years of monthly visits and phone calls and never once saying what I should've said, that's not a claim on anybody. But knowing a thing and feeling a thing live in different zip codes, and my chest was sure voting for the wrong one.

Karen came out to the loading dock while I was backing the trailer in, waving me off the bumper. She'd been the lodge cook eight years, since she was twenty-eight, and she knew me about as well as Shari did, which I've always suspected was more.

"You look like you drove twelve miles of gravel with your jaw set," she said, helping me drop the tailgate.

"Rough week."

"Mm. Or rough ten minutes, from the look of the window."

Cook saw everything. That's just a fact about cooks.

"Who's the guy with the deer?"

"Allen. Been here two years, Andre, where you been?"

She grabbed a crate of canned tomatoes off the tailgate. "He's good at his job, I'll give him that. Guides hard all season, fixes everything that breaks, and hasn't met a woman on this property he didn't flirt with."

"Including?"

"Including everybody, you dope. Including me, and I told him I'd burn his eggs if he kept it up." She paused with the crate on her hip. "Shari thinks he's funny."

Yeah. I'd seen the funny.

Dinner that night was pot roast and the great room was full of guests, eight or nine hunters up from the cities for the weekend, all of them loud and happy and paying good money. I ate at the staff table in the corner like always, and Allen sat himself down next to Shari like always, I guess, since apparently always had been happening for two years without me knowing it.

He leaned in to talk to her. That's what got me. Not the words, I couldn't hear the words over the room. Just the lean. Elbow on the table, shoulder angled in, close enough that he'd have to smell her shampoo. And halfway through he put his hand on her forearm, just resting there while he told some story, and she didn't pull it away.

I cut my pot roast and didn't taste any of it.

Thirteen years. Ten years of her calling me when her truck wouldn't start, when her dad died, when some guest got handsy and she handled it but still wanted somebody to tell about it after. Ten years of me calling her from every time zone in the lower forty-eight, and the first thing I did in any new town was figure out what time it was where she was. And some guy shows up, does his two years, and gets to sit at her elbow on a Tuesday.

I don't have a right to it. I keep coming back to that because it's the only honest thing in my head and it still doesn't slow the engine down any.

"You're staring," Karen said, quiet, not looking up from her plate.

"I'm eating."

"You're stabbing a potato and staring at his hand."

I put the fork down. "So what's his deal. Really."

Karen finally looked at me, and she had that face she gets, the one that says she's deciding how much truth a man can hold. "He's not a bad guy, Andre. That's the part you won't like. He's decent at the job, decent to the staff, and he makes her laugh, and he's been asking her to come down to his cabin after close for months now."

The potato didn't stand a chance after that.

"And she?" I asked, and hated how much the question cost.

"And she says she's busy. Every time. But Andre," and here Karen leaned in and dropped her voice to almost nothing, "she says she's busy. That's not the same as no, and it's not the same as yes, and a man can only hear busy for so long before he starts shopping elsewhere."

I looked across the room. Shari caught me looking, and she did that thing she does, that little half smile she's given me across tables and loading docks for thirteen years, the one that says hey, you made it, same as always. And Allen, sitting right there, turned to see what she was smiling at, and took his measure of me the way a man takes the measure of a bull across a fence line.

After dinner I helped Karen stack chairs, because I needed my hands busy and she needed nothing but company. The great room had emptied out and the fire was down to coals and the whole place smelled like woodsmoke and coffee grounds, the way it always does, the way that always meant coming home to me until about an hour ago.

"She asked about you last week," Karen said, out of nowhere. "Wednesday. Wanted to know if you were running on schedule."

"She could've called me."

"Could you have called her?"

Fair hit like a hammer. I stacked another chair.

"Allen's showing her the skinning knife because she asked to learn, Andre. She's thirty-five years old and manages this whole operation and she asked a guide to teach her something so she wouldn't have to depend on the guides. Think about why a woman like that would want that."

I thought about it all night, in the bunk room they keep for drivers, staring at the ceiling beams, listening to the pines work the wind. And what I thought was the worst part. Not Allen. Allen's just a guy, and guys like that are everywhere, and she's swatted bigger flies than him. The worst part was that she'd wanted to learn to do it herself and the person she'd asked was the new guide instead of the man who'd been showing up once a month for thirteen years.

I'd made myself a visitor in my own life and then got mad the seat was open.

Sleep didn't come easy after that.

Morning came gray and cold, and I was up before the hunters, which is saying something because paying hunters wake up like they think the deer are keeping office hours. I found my way to the great room and the coffee pot in the kitchen alcove, and I was on my second cup when Shari came down in a flannel jacket and work boots, hair still damp from the shower.

"You're up early," she said, pouring herself a cup. "You always were."

"Old habit. Truck sleeps in me now instead of the other way around."

She laughed at that, same as she's laughed at that joke for a decade, and we took our cups to the hearth where the night's fire had been banked down to a low red growl. She sat on the stone ledge and I took the big chair across from her and for a while it was like every other visit. The pines outside. The coffee. Her feet tucked up on the ledge the way she's sat a thousand times.

Then Allen came through, early too, dressed for the field, and he stopped and said something easy to her about the weather and the morning hunt, same as he had the day before, and she laughed again, a different laugh, looser somehow, and he went out the big door whistling.

The room got smaller after that. I knew it did because I was the one making it small. She asked me about the route and I gave her four-word answers. She asked about the ice up on the pass and I said it was ice. She asked if I'd eaten and I said once. I could hear myself doing it and I couldn't make myself stop, like a truck on black ice where you know you should ease off the brake and your foot just bears down.

"Okay," she said finally, setting her cup down. "What is that."

"What is what."

"That. That voice. You've been giving me the receipt version of yourself since you walked in."

"There's no version, Shari. I'm tired. I drove all night."

"You drive all night every month. You've never been tired a day in your life." She was looking at me straight, the way she does, and I swear that woman could audit a lie right off a man's soul. "Does this have anything to do with you glaring holes in Allen's back at dinner?"

"I wasn't glaring."

"You were glaring, Andre. Karen saw it. I saw it. The pot roast saw it." She let that sit, then softened some. "Whatever it is, you can say it. You've always been able to say it."

And that was the moment to say it, sitting right there by the fire, thirteen years deep. And instead I said, "Nothing to say. Just tired."

She studied me a while longer and then let it go, which was worse than if she'd pushed, because her letting go meant she'd filed it away, and Shari files things away the way a squirrel does, and comes back for them later.

---

The supply shed sat behind the kitchen wing, a long low building stacked with the kinds of things a lodge eats through. Flour in fifty-pound sacks, canned goods, cases of beer, venison wrapped in butcher paper. Shari ran a hand truck out there after breakfast and I fell in behind her without being asked, because hauling heavy things beside her was at least something, and something beat sitting in the great room listening for his whistle.

Karen had a list taped to the shelf by the door and she was working it with a pencil, crossing things off. "Andre, you're a jack of all trades this morning. Grab that end of the sack there."

We made four trips, Shari and me, down the gravel path to the kitchen door, and on the third trip Allen came around the corner of the building with his skinning gloves on and that grin he wears like it was issued to him.

"Well, look at this," he said. "Shari's got two boyfriends now. One hauls her flour and one's teaching her to skin." He said it light, like a joke, the way men say true things and call them jokes so they can't be called on them. "Careful, big rig. She runs through us guides like kindling."

"Allen," Shari said, flat, a warning in one word.

"I'm teasing." He tipped an imaginary hat at her and went on toward the rack where his doe hung, and I stood there holding fifty pounds of flour and wanting to set it down somewhere it would do damage.

Shari grabbed the other end of the sack and we carried it in silence to the door. When we'd set it on the shelf she said, quiet, "He's like that with everybody. It's just how he talks."

"I know how he talks."

"Andre."

"I said I know."

She blew air out through her nose and went back for the hand truck, and I followed, and the morning went on, and my mood went with it, downhill the whole way.

---

It came to a head in the kitchen around noon. The hunters were out in the field, the staff were scattered, and Shari was at the big steel counter breaking down a case of canned tomatoes for the weekend's chili. Karen had gone to the walk-in for onions and I had helped myself to the room.

"Can I ask you something straight?" I said.

"You've never asked me anything any other way."

"Is there something going on with you and Allen?"

The can opener stopped. She looked at me across the counter and her eyebrows went up, genuine surprise, and then, unbelievably, she laughed. Not mean. Just flat-out laughed, head back, one hand on the counter.

"Andre. Andre. Oh my God. Is that what this whole visit has been? You've been walking around here like a man with a stone in his boot for two