The Cartographer's Wager

Two days ago I made a bet I still think I can win. That's the trouble with me. I make bets and then I spend the whole time making sure I win them instead of enjoying the trip.

The bet was simple. Cassie has to get us from Inverness to a tea house somewhere in the hills without looking at a single map. No atlas, no phone, no asking at a petrol station. Just her memory and her sense of direction. If she does it, fine, we're even for the pool game from March. If she doesn't, I get to name the next mountain we climb together, and she has to say the name out loud like she means it.

I'm Astrid. I'm fifty-two, I plan weddings for a living, and I have never once been married myself, which people find funny and I find useful. Cassie is fifty. She draws maps for a living, which is the funniest part of the whole bet, if you think about it. I bet a cartographer she can't use maps. She took the bet anyway, because she never can say no to me, and that's a thing I try not to think about too hard.

We met twelve years ago at a climbing gym in Glasgow. She was belaying a man who kept yelling instructions at her, and she was ignoring every one of them because he was wrong. I liked her immediately. There was one kiss, years back, when we were both younger and stupider, and we never talked about it again. We just went back to being friends, like two people stepping around the same wet paint for a decade.

Anyway. The van. I borrowed a white van from my cousin's husband for the weekend, and I packed it with a wooden barrel of wedding favors for a client in Kyle of Lochalsh. Forty little tin boxes of shortbread. I could have shipped them. I chose to drive them myself, a hundred miles, because I wanted this trip and I didn't want to admit I wanted this trip. Cassie saw through me in about four seconds, but she let me keep my dignity, which is her whole personality in one sentence.

* * *

We were maybe an hour out of Inverness when Cassie pulled the van over at a gas station and said the words every car owner says.

"Just checking the oil."

"We checked the oil before we left," I said.

"Well, I'm checking it again." She popped the hood and stood in front of it like a guard at a door.

I got out anyway, because the tea in the thermos was done and my legs needed stretching. The wind up here doesn't blow, it shoves. I came around the front of the van and there she was, and the hood was fine, the dipstick was sitting on the engine block where it had never been, and she had a road atlas open on the driver's seat.

An atlas. A paper atlas. She'd gone and bought a paper atlas so I couldn't check her phone.

"Cassandra Bishop," I said.

She shut the atlas so fast it clapped. "That's not."

"It is. It absolutely is. I can see the spine. It's got a Tesco sticker on it, you bought it inside like a criminal."

"I was looking at the oil," she said. "The atlas fell open."

"Atlases don't fall open. They're the most stubborn books in the world. You have to fight them to get them open."

"That's actually true," she admitted, and then she caught herself and shut her mouth. She has a square face and gray coming in at her temples and she was standing there in a rain jacket looking like a schoolkid caught with a note. Fifty years old. Caught with a note.

"So that's it. I win," I said. "Say it. Say I win."

"You don't win. The bet was about getting us there. You said nothing about me not owning a map."

"The bet was about you not using a map."

"You said not looking at a map."

"I said navigating without one, and you know I did, because you argued with me for ten minutes in the car park about whether memorizing a route counted."

"That was a different clause," she said.

"There are no clauses. It was a bet in a car park over chips." I leaned on the van and grinned at her, and I'll admit I was enjoying it. "You bought an atlas, Cassie. You drove into a shop and paid money for a book of roads because you were that scared of losing to me."

She looked out at the hills for a while. "I'm not scared of losing to you."

"No?"

"No. I'm scared of getting us lost in the Highlands in a borrowed van with a barrel of shortbread and no signal, and you standing there saying well this is lovely, Cassie, what a charming detour, in that voice."

"What voice?"

"You know the voice."

I did know the voice. "Fine. I'll give you one warning. Rip out the page for this stretch and I'll consider the bet alive. Tear it, don't peek at the rest."

"Very generous of you."

"I'm a generous woman."

She tore the page out along the spine, careful as a surgeon, folded it, and put it in her jacket pocket. Then she actually did check the oil, because she is the sort of person who, having lied about checking the oil, feels obligated to check it.

* * *

The trouble with the rest of that drive was that it was nice. That's the part I didn't plan for. She navigated off memory, roads she'd walked and drawn at some point over her career, and she narrated it without noticing she was doing it. That bend has a fairing stone. That ridge is where the old drover track crosses. She talked with her hands off the wheel in little fractions, sketching the land in the air, and I sat in the passenger seat with the barrel rattling behind us and thought, oh no. Oh no, this is the part of the trip where the bet stops being fun.

I've spent thirty years building a business where nobody sees me sweat. Brides cry on me, fathers argue with me, and I stay smooth as a tabletop. It's a good trick and it's kept me safe and it's kept me alone, mostly, and I want you to understand I chose that. Nobody did it to me.

We came over a rise late in the afternoon and there it was, a low stone building with a slate roof and a sign like a paddle. The Wanderer's Rest. Cassie hadn't said the name out loud yet, that was part of her end of the bet, but she pulled into the gravel and put the handbrake on and said, "There."

"That's it? You're sure?"

"Positive. Peat fire inside. Low ceilings, mind your head. The woman who runs it is called Morag and she'll pretend not to remember me and then she will."

"You've been here before."

"I mapped the track behind it in ninety-eight. I've been here once since." She turned the engine off. "Do I win?"

"The trip's not over."

"The trip is over, Astrid. We're here."

"We're staying the night," I said, before I'd decided to say it.

She looked at me. "We're what?"

"Look at the sky. It'll be dark in an hour and you know how you feel about me driving these roads after dark." This was true and she knows it. "One night. Two rooms. We deliver the barrel in the morning, fresh start."

"Astrid."

"One night, Cassie. It's a tea house, not a trap."

She sat with that for a bit. The wind was working on the van doors. Then she got out, went round the back, and hauled the barrel out on her own without waiting for me to help, which I knew was her way of saying yes without saying it.

"Peace offering," she said, tipping it onto its edge to roll it. "For the atlas."

"You're forgiven. Mostly."

"And for whatever this night is," she said, quietly, rolling it toward the door.

I didn't have an answer for that one, so I followed her inside and minded my head on the low frame, like she'd told me to.

Morag pretended not to remember her for exactly eleven seconds.

"Track behind the house," Cassie said, hands in her pockets. "Nineteen ninety-eight."

"Nineteen ninety-eight." Morag looked at her over the counter. "You drew my bog wrong."

"I did not draw your bog wrong. Your bog moved."

"Bogs don't move."

"That one did. It wanted to." Cassie kept her face flat. "I'll redraw it if you like."

Morag laughed, a short bark, and pointed at a table by the fire. "Sit. Chamomile for you, I remember. Your friend can pick her own."

She picked chamomile too, which Cassie noticed and didn't comment on, and then we sat by the peat fire with the barrel dumped in the corner like furniture and the light going orange outside the little windows. The ceiling was so low I could touch it if I wanted, and I didn't want, mostly because Cassie had already cracked her head once getting through the door and I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of watching me do the same.

"Peace offering for the atlas," Cassie had told Morag about the barrel, and then she'd explained the whole thing, the bet, the torn page, all of it, while I sat there like a woman being discussed at her own trial.

"She nearly had me, mind," Cassie said now, wrapping both hands around her cup. "The gas station stop!"

"The oil."

"The oil that needed checking so badly." She blew on her tea. "Actually, I'll tell you something better than that."

"Go on."

"I nearly lost it on purpose."

I put my cup down. "You what?"

"In the car park at Tesco. I had the atlas on the seat. All I had to do was open it and say, look, I tried, I really tried, and it would have been over. Done. You'd have named a mountain and I'd have said the name out loud and we'd have gone back to normal."

"And you didn't because?"

"Because you'd have known. That's the thing about you. You'd have known in about four seconds that I'd folded, and you'd have been kind about it, and that would have been worse than losing." She looked into the cup. "Kindness from you is worse than anything. You know that?"

"I don't know that at all."

"Well, you do. You win bets instead of being kind. It's the same muscle."

The fire popped. Morag was doing something with plates at the other end of the room and pretending very hard not to listen, which I respected.

"That's a terrible thing to say to a woman who drove a hundred miles on your memory," I said.

"Astrid, I had the page for this stretch in my jacket pocket the whole way. I could have looked at any time. I knew where it was the whole time, like a cigarette in your pocket when you've quit." She finally looked up. "I didn't need it. I didn't look once. Do you understand what that means?"

"That your memory is very good and your atlas is very bad."

"It means I wanted to win this one properly." She said it plain, no joke on the end of it, and that was new. "I wanted to get you here with nothing but my head. That's all. That's the confession. Laugh if you like."

I laughed. It came out wrong, too loud for the room, and then it wouldn't stop being a laugh and became something else, and I had to look at the fire and get it sorted. She waited. She was always good at waiting, that was the trouble with her.

"You bought an atlas," I said, when I could.

"Yes!"

"You drove a hundred miles off a torn page in your pocket."

"Yes!"

"You memorized my rules in a car park over chips."

"They weren't complicated, Astrid."

"And now you're sitting there telling me you did it all for," and I stopped there, because the end of that sentence had a door in it and I could hear something on the other side.

Neither of us broke that silence for a while. It was a long silence, the kind you can hear the fire working in. Cassie drank her tea. I drank mine. Morag banged a pan somewhere with what I felt was unnecessary enthusiasm.

Then Cassie set her cup down and stood up.

"Right," she said. "Pool."

"What?"

"There's a table in the corner. I saw it when we came in. Morag, do you have a table?"

"Aye, and it's got a flat spot in the middle," Morag called back. "Rolls everything toward the far pocket. House rules. Everybody