The Last Good Thing

Driving seven hours to ruin your ex-husband's anniversary is a complicated matter. You have a lot of time to think. And I thought about it for about six of those seven hours, and for the last hour I mostly thought about gas stations and whether my truck was going to make it up a gravel road that the map described as "seasonal."

(Spoiler: it did. Barely. I owe the suspension an apology.)

The plan, for those of you keeping score at home, was simple. Trevor's brother Dale manages the forest service permits for that district, and Dale has always liked me, because I once rebuilt his tractor for the cost of parts and a six-pack. So I called Dale on Thursday and told him my truck was making a horrible noise, which was even true, and that I needed to borrow the keys to Crow's Nest Station for a night while it got looked at. Which was not true. Dale, bless his dumb heart, said "sure thing, Patty," and left them under a rock by the gate like we were in a novel.

So that's how I came to be standing at the bottom of a fire lookout tower at five in the afternoon on a Friday in September, forty-nine years old, a diesel mechanic from Redding, holding a gas station burrito and a grudge, about to climb sixty stairs to ambush the man I'd been divorced from for four years.

"Real mature, Patty," I said out loud. Nobody heard me. The trees didn't even rustle.

I climbed anyway.

***

The tower itself is smaller than you'd think. Lower floor is a living space, if you're generous with the word. Fold-out couch, propane stove, a table that's seen some things. Upper floor is the lookout room, glass all the way around, windows facing the black timber on the eastern slope. The whole thing smells like dust and cold metal and, faintly, somebody's cigarettes from a decade ago.

I set my bag down and made myself comfortable in the way that nobody is ever comfortable in a place like that. And then I just stood there. Because here's the part I hadn't really thought through, in those seven hours of thinking. What was I actually going to do when they showed up?

I had a whole speech, on the drive. Something about how he traded fourteen years of marriage for a woman who thinks a Weber grill is fancy cookware. Something about how he was balding and she'd find out. Real classic stuff. I'd rehearsed it. I'd rehearsed it in the shower, guys. I had HAND GESTURES.

And then I looked around the tower and saw what they'd left up here from Thursday, when Trevor came up early to set it all out, and my speech died on the vine.

There was a bouquet of roses in a plastic cup. Cheap ones, the kind you get at a grocery store for twelve bucks, already a little droopy. There was a bottle of merlot, half gone, which told me either Trevor had come up here and had a drink by himself and left, or they'd started the celebration early and were planning to finish it this weekend. And there was a card propped against the wine bottle, standing open like it was on display.

I need to be honest with you, because this whole thing only works if I'm honest. I read the card. Of course I read the card. You'd have read the card.

"To my real wife," it said, in Trevor's terrible handwriting, the same handwriting that used to leave me grocery lists. "Two years. I never thought I'd get this lucky twice."

And that was the knife. Not the roses, not the wine, not even the "real wife" thing, though God, that one stung, because it implies something about the first one, doesn't it? It implies the first one was a practice run. No. The knife was "I never thought I'd get this lucky twice." Because he did think that, the first time. He said something like it at our wedding, in front of two hundred people, and I believed him, because I was thirty-one and stupid and in love with a man who could fix anything except himself.

I sat down on one of the two folding chairs, which along with a cot and a bench made up all the furniture in the lookout room, and I looked at those droopy roses for a long time.

"God dammit," I said, to nobody. "God dammit, Trevor."

Because here's the truly pathetic part. I wasn't angry anymore. Or, I was, but it was old anger, reheated anger, the kind of anger you keep in the freezer and take out when you need it, and it's never as good as it was fresh. Sitting there with the card in my hand, what I mostly felt was tired. And a little bit embarrassed. A forty-nine-year-old woman, driving seven hours to ruin a nice weekend, over a man who buys twelve-dollar roses and means every word he writes in a card to his second wife.

Lydia. Thirty-four. Yes, I know exactly how old she is, because I looked it up, which is a thing divorced people do and then pretend they didn't. She's a nurse. She runs marathons. By every account I have heard, and I have heard accounts, she is perfectly nice. That's the worst part. If she were horrible I'd have something to work with.

I put the card back where I found it, propped against the bottle, and I decided, right then, that I was going to leave. That was the plan now. I'd climb down, drive back down that horrible road, maybe sleep in my truck at a trailhead, and drive home tomorrow with a story I would never tell anyone, because who tells this story? Nobody tells this story.

And that's when I heard the door at the bottom of the tower open, and footsteps on the stairs, and a voice I'd know anywhere say, "Hello? Anybody up there?"

***

Let me back up thirty seconds and tell you what I later learned, which is that Trevor had come up early. Not with Lydia. Alone. The plan, such as it was, involved him coming up Thursday to set the scene, going home, and bringing Lydia up Friday evening. Except apparently he'd been antsy all day, and he'd driven up to check the fire-spotting equipment before she arrived, because the fire season had been bad and the district wanted the tower checked, and also, I suspect, because a man doesn't sit still in a house with champagne and roses waiting for six o'clock.

So he climbed the stairs to the lookout room to check the binoculars and the Osborne fire finder and all the rest of it, expecting an empty tower, because he'd come in on the service road and never passed my truck.

What he got was me.

He came up the last few steps and stopped dead, and I will treasure the look on his face until the day I die, whatever else happens. His mouth opened and closed twice. Fifty-one years old, hair mostly gone gray, still built like the lineman he was before the knees went, standing at the top of a fire tower holding a clipboard with nothing on it.

"Patty?"

"Hi, Trevor."

"How... what..." He looked around the room, at the roses, at the card, back at me. I watched him do the math. I watched him get to the answer. "You came here. To the tower. On our anniversary."

"Happy anniversary," I said. "The roses are droopy."

He stared at me. "How did you even get the keys?"

"Dale."

"Dale gave you the keys to our anniversary lookout tower."

"I told him my truck was broken."

"Is your truck broken?"

"No, Trevor, my truck is fine. My truck runs great. Nothing else in my life runs great, but the truck is tip-top."

He set the clipboard down very slowly, the way you'd set down a weapon you didn't want to escalate. Then he pulled out the other folding chair, the one I'd left folded, and he sat down across from me, and he did not yell. I want that recorded. He did not yell, which was somehow worse.

"Lydia's at the bottom of the hill," he said. "She's parking. She'll be up those stairs in about four minutes."

"I know."

"She's going to walk in and see my ex-wife sitting in our anniversary tower next to the card I wrote her."

"I know that too. I was leaving."

"Were you?" He didn't sound like he believed it, and honestly, I wasn't sure I believed it either, because I'd decided to leave approximately ninety seconds ago and had made no actual move toward the stairs.

"Yes. I read the card. I got sad. I decided to leave. Very mature, very dignified, you'll tell nobody, I'll tell nobody, everyone wins."

"What did the card say?"

"Trevor. I'm not reading your anniversary card to you."

"What did it say, Patty?"

"To my real wife," I said, and I heard my own voice do something ugly on the last word. "I never thought I'd get this lucky twice."

He flinched. I want you to know he actually flinched, at his own words read back to him in my voice, like he hadn't thought about what they'd sound like to anyone but her. He rubbed his face with both hands and was quiet for a moment, and downstairs, faintly, we both heard a car door slam.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to come down the stairs with me, and you're going to meet Lydia, and you are going to be civil for one hour, and then I am going to walk you to your truck myself."

"An hour?"

"One hour. Then I take you down. That's the deal."

From the bottom of the tower came a voice, bright and breathless from the stairs, calling up: "Trevor? Whose truck is that? Trevor, is there somebody up there?"

Trevor closed his eyes. "Yes," he called back, in a voice that had clearly already given up on this entire weekend. "There is somebody up here."

She came up the stairs like a weather front. I heard her before I saw her, this little huffing breath she was doing, and then she rounded the top and there she was. Lydia Sanford, thirty-four years old, nurse, second wife, in a white sundress with a bottle of wine in one hand and her phone in the other. She looked at Trevor. She looked at me. She looked at the roses.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, wow. Okay. Wow."

"Lydia," Trevor said, in the voice of a man reading his own sentence, "this is Patty. Patty, this is Lydia."

"His ex-wife," I said, and raised my hand. "Hi. Love the dress."

She did not love me back, if that was unclear. She looked at Trevor like he was supposed to produce an explanation out of thin air, and he didn't have one, because there isn't one, and after a second she turned back to me and did the once-over. I know the once-over. I've given the once-over. She took in the jeans, the flannel, the hands with the permanent black in the knuckle creases that no pumice stone on earth has ever gotten out, and I watched her decide I was a situation and not a person.

"So are you two..." she began, and then stopped, because there was no polite way to finish that sentence.

"No," I said. "God, no. I'm leaving. I came to ruin your weekend, I did what I came to do, and now I'm going."

"You came to ruin our..."

"Lydia," Trevor said. "Sit down. Have some water. Patty's leaving in an hour."

"An hour! Why an hour?"

"Because I said an hour and it's my tower."

He poured her a cup of water and she took it and sat down on the little bench by the window like a duchess, and then we all just sort of existed in the same room, which is a special kind of hell. Lydia kept checking her phone. Trevor stood at the window with his back to us. And I, because I am an idiot, picked up the card again and read it a second time even though it had done its damage the first time.

"Stop reading that," Trevor said, without turning around.

"It's a good card."

"Patty."

"To my real wife," I read, out loud, because I hate myself, and this time I watched Lydia's face do it. Do the math. Get to the answer. She set her water down very carefully.

"That's a lovely sentiment," she said.

"It's a nice card," I agreed.

"Patty, out," Trevor said, and pointed at the stairs, and for once in my life I did what the man told me, and I went out the door onto the catwalk and stood there in the wind looking at nothing, which is my number one hobby lately apparently.

I need to mention something about the catwalk. A fire tower catwalk at dusk is about the loneliest place on the continent. There's timber to the horizon, black and ridged like a sleeping animal, and the wind comes up the slope and hits you and there is absolutely nothing between you and the rest of your life. I stood there maybe ten minutes getting my face back in order, and then the door opened and it was Trevor, not Lydia, thank God.

"Lydia's taking a call from her sister," he said. "That'll buy us twenty minutes. Talk to me, Patty."

"About what?"

"About why you drove seven hours to ruin my anniversary."

"Because it's fun?"

"Patty."

"I don't know, Trevor!" And I meant it, I really didn't know, and I heard my own voice crack on it and hated that too. "I had a plan, okay? The plan was, I show up, Lydia cries, you look like an ass, I drive home feeling better. That was the entire plan. It's not complicated and it's not noble and I'm not pretending it is. What I did not plan on was you being up here early and looking like somebody shot your dog."

He came and stood at the rail next to me. Close, but not touching. Old habit, that distance.

"Say what you came to say," he said.

"Fine. She's thirty-four, Trevor. You're fifty-one. In eight years she'll be changing your diapers and she knows it, she's not stupid, she's just thirty-four."

"That's it?"

"And she calls your diesel a car."

He laughed. I want that noted, he laughed, this short surprised bark of a laugh, the same laugh he had at twenty-six when I met him at the shop, when I'd crawled out from under his F-250 and told him his fuel lines were a crime scene. It's a specific laugh. I could pick it out of a crowd. And hearing it out here in the wind, I felt something come loose in my