The Tent at Cedar Spring

The gravel road hadn't changed. Still washboard the last half mile, still rattling my teeth the same way it did twenty-five years ago. I eased the campervan around the same pothole that had been there since I was twenty-one and pulled into the site at the end of the loop.

Site eleven. Lake on one side, cedars going up dark and enormous on the other. Empty, which surprised me for a Saturday in late August. Maybe we'd gotten lucky. Maybe the whole thing was supposed to work out for once.

"You're doing that thing," Raine said from the passenger seat.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you drive slow and stare and don't say anything. You've done it three times since we got off the highway."

I put the van in park and killed the engine. "I'm scouting. That's different."

"It's really not." She was forty-five now, retired from the forest service two years back, and she still scanned a campground like she was working a shift. Her eyes went to the fire ring, the picnic table, the path down toward the water. "Same site."

"Same site."

"You planned that."

"I did not plan that. I called the reservation line and asked what was open and the woman said eleven and I said fine." That was mostly true. I had asked specifically for eleven, but the woman did say it like she was doing me a favor, so I figure that counts.

We got out and the smell hit me, cedar and lake water and that cold green smell the shade keeps all day. Raine stretched and I heard her back pop the way it always does now. Twenty-four years of marriage means you know every pop in a person's back.

"Want me to level the van?" she asked.

"In a minute. Come here first."

She followed me around the side of the vehicle, past the water tank, to where the big cedar stood. The one with the bark scaled off in flat gray plates and the low branch you could grab to swing yourself up if you were young and stupid. I put my hand flat on the trunk. The bark was rough under my palm, same as always.

"Feel familiar?" I asked.

Raine looked at the tree, then at me, and something moved across her face. "You put me against this tree."

"You put me against this tree. I was holding the wine."

"That's right, you were. Cheap stuff in a box."

"Boxed wine is a respectable product."

"Kelli, it came with a spout." She laughed and leaned her shoulder against the van. "You poured it and your hands were shaking so hard it foamed."

"It was a vigorous pour."

"You spilled half of it down my sleeve and then you kissed me and I forgot about my sleeve."

I kept my hand on the bark. The tree was bigger now, that was what mattered. Wider. My arms would never have gone around it the way they had that night, back when I was twenty-one and she was twenty and we'd come out here in her beat-up Corolla with a cooler and a two-person tent we barely knew how to pitch.

"I pressed you right about here," I said, tapping a spot. "And then I got scared and said we should slow down and you said okay, and then we laid in that sleeping bag all night like two sacks of flour, fully dressed, talking about your ranger application."

"And then we got married and never came back."

"Life happened. Jobs happened. Your knee happened."

"My knee happened a lot." She came over and put her hand next to mine on the trunk. Her hair was mostly gray now and cropped short, and her forearms were still the best forearms in three counties, retired or not. "You've been weird about this trip for a month. You want to tell me what's actually going on in your head, or should I guess?"

I looked out past her at the lake. Sun was getting low and orange on the water. "I keep thinking about what we didn't do here. That's all. Twenty-four years married and I still think about the night I chickened out."

"You didn't chicken out. You were twenty-one and you weren't ready. There's a difference."

"Sure felt like chickening out at the time."

"Kelli." She said my name slow, the way she does when she's about to say something I already know. "We've got a whole weekend. Nothing here is going anywhere. Not the tree, not the lake, not me." She tapped the trunk twice. "Come on, let's get camp set up before dark, and I brought something for tonight."

"What'd you bring?"

"You'll see. Go level the van."

I leveled the van. It took two tries because the ground was soft near the table and the blocks sank, and Raine stood there offering advice I did not ask for, which is also a tradition at this point. Then she got the fire going while I got out chairs and the little grill grate. There is a right way she builds a fire, teepee first, then logs across, and I've watched her do it a few hundred times and it still works better than my way, which annoys me.

We ate beans and sausages off tin plates. The sky went from orange to that deep purple it gets behind cedars, and the first stars came out over the lake. Somewhere across the water a loon called, which is either the loneliest sound in the world or the most peaceful one, depending on your year.

Then Raine reached into the cooler and came out with a brown bottle, no label, just wax on the cap. She held it out to me.

"Wait. Is this my stuff?"

"Your stuff. Batch seventeen. Your chocolate stout."

"You drove three hours with my own beer in the cooler?"

"I did. You bottled it in July and said it needed a month, and I checked the calendar." She worked the wax off with her thumb and popped the cap on the table edge, easy, one hit, the way she opens everything. "I figured we should drink it here. Where the boxed wine happened."

I took the bottle. It was good, I knew it was good, I'd been brewing in the garage for six years and this batch was the one where I finally got the chocolate right. But that's not why my throat got tight.

"You remember that night more than you let on," I said.

"I remember all of it. You poured the wine with both hands, like it was going to bite you. You kept apologizing for the cups." She took a pull of the stout and nodded at it, which is her highest compliment. "And then you kissed me and I thought, okay, this is happening, and then you pulled back and said slow down, and I thought, okay, she means it, and I'd have waited however long you needed. I just never figured it'd be twenty-five years."

"We didn't wait twenty-five years to be together."

"No. We waited twenty-five years to come back here." She held her bottle out and I tapped mine against it. "To site eleven."

"To site eleven."

The fire cracked. A log shifted and let out a spray of sparks. I sat there with my stout getting warm in my hand and thought about that night, the way her sleeping bag had zipped to mine, the way we'd lain there shoulder to shoulder not sleeping, both of us awake and pretending. I'd wanted her so bad my teeth ached, and I'd been too scared to say so, and she'd been too decent to push.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You can ask me anything, you've had me for twenty-five years."

"That night. When I said slow down. Were you disappointed?"

She took her time with it. Sipped the stout. Looked at the fire.

"Honest answer? A little. For about an hour." She turned to me. "Then you fell asleep with your head on my arm and drooled on my sleeve and I laid there thinking, I'm going to marry this woman, and I didn't think about the other stuff at all after that. You were more important to me than one night."

"And now?"

"Now I think we're middle-aged, we've got a campervan with a stove in it, and nobody's checking on us till Sunday." She reached over and took my hand. Her thumb went over my knuckles, slow. "So if you want to finish what you started at that tree, Kelli, I am not going anywhere."

I looked at her across the firelight. My heart was doing a slow, heavy kind of thing, not panic like it was that night. Something steadier.

"Maybe," I said. "Pour me another one first."

She laughed and reached into the cooler. "There's the girl from the tree. Still needs a drink in her hand before she commits to anything."

"Shut up and open the bottle."

She opened the bottle.

We got up early the next morning, or I did and Raine pretended to. She lay in the bed of the campervan with her eyes shut while I made coffee on the little stove, and when I handed her a mug through the back hatch she took it without opening her eyes.

"Trail mix or granola bars," I said.

"Trail mix. Pick out the almonds first, they're yours anyway."

"You hate almonds."

"I hate them slightly less than I hate raisins."

We ate on the tailgate and she studied the map she'd printed out at home, because Raine does not trust her phone past the last gas station. The ridge trail started a quarter mile up the road, past the pump house, and climbed switchbacks through second growth before it got into the old stuff.

"Four miles up, four miles back," she said. "Lunch at the top."

"You packed lunch?"

"I packed lunch. You packed the beer, which tells me where your priorities sit."

"The beer is for the top. That's celebration beer."

"Celebrating what?"

"The fact that we made it up a mountain at our age."

"We made it up this mountain at twenty and twenty-one. Don't get dramatic."

The first two miles were easy, the kind of trail your feet do without your brain. We talked about the neighbors' fence dispute and whether our niece should go to grad school and whether the water pump at camp sounded wrong or just old. Then the trail got into the cedars and went quiet, that quiet where the ground drinks every sound, and we stopped talking so much. The light came down green. The trail got steep and rooty.

Raine walks a ridge trail the way she does everything, steady, no wasted motion. I walk it in bursts. I go fast until I'm tired, then slow until I'm bored, then fast again. So it was on one of my slow stretches, on a root the size of my forearm half buried in duff, that my boot caught and I went forward with both arms out.

I didn't hit the ground. Raine had my arm before I knew she'd moved, one hand clamped above my elbow, and she hauled me back upright like I weighed a bag of dog food.

"Whoa. Okay. I got you."

"I got me."

"Sure you did."

She didn't let go right away. That's the thing I keep coming back to. She got me steady and then her hand stayed on my arm, and I could feel the heat of it through my sleeve, and we stood there on a hillside with a second that lasted about six seconds. Then she let go and looked up the trail like nothing happened.

"You good to keep going?"

"Yeah. Root got me."

"That root's been there since the Clinton years. It's not going anywhere and neither are you."

"Was that a joke about my age?"

"It was a joke about your footing."

We climbed the rest of the way and I thought about her hand the whole time, which is a stupid thing to admit even in my own head, twenty-five years in, but there it was.

The top opened up over the lake and you could see the whole bowl of it, the campground a scatter of roofs on the near shore, site eleven not even visible from up there, just a green notch in the trees. We ate sandwiches on a flat rock. Raine pointed out things with her chin, a