The Wooden Paddle's Apology

The gravel lot at Braidhaugh Farm hasn't changed in two years, which is more than I can say for my mood. I'm twenty-three, I've been driving since mid-afternoon, and I have been rehearsing my silent treatment the whole way up from the motorway.

The plan was simple. Hamish forgot our anniversary last week. Two years together, and he sat there eating his toast like it was a Tuesday. So this weekend, which was supposed to be our anniversary trip to his farm retreat center, I decided I would be pleasant and distant at the same time. Cold but polite. It took me three days of practicing in the shower.

Then I get out of the car and there he is, leaning against the shuttle bus, holding my paddle.

I stop walking. The paddle is the thing I ordered two months ago, a vintage canoe paddle with the family crests carved into the shaft, the one I was going to give him for our anniversary. The one the tracking said was delivered to the farm and then wasn't anywhere. I spent forty minutes on hold with the courier about that paddle.

And he's holding it like it's nothing, like he didn't forget the actual day, and I have to stand in a gravel lot deciding whether to scream or say nothing at all. I pick nothing. I walk past him toward the barn.

"Tam." He moves to keep pace with me. "Before you do the thing where you don't talk to me for two days, just look at this."

I look at the paddle. It's worse than not looking at it, honestly, because the carving is even better in person. Two crests running down the shaft, and the grain is the warm brown I remembered from the listing photos.

"Where did you get that," I say, and it comes out flat.

"The neighbor's porch. Down the lane." He holds it out. "Mrs. Duncanson had it sitting inside her storm door for a week. Her grandson found it when they were stacking feed bags. The courier just left it at the wrong house and never said a word to anybody."

"So it wasn't stolen."

"No. It was one porch over the whole time." He turns the paddle so the crests catch the light. "I know I ruined the surprise. I know. I've had it in a lockbox under the depot seat since Tuesday because I didn't know whether to tell you I'd found it or let you give it to me properly."

"You forgot the day," I say. That's the part I can't get around. The paddle sitting in his office is not the part that hurts.

"I know I forgot the day." He looks down at the gravel. "I'm not going to argue with you about it in a parking lot. Give me one hour before you start the silent treatment. That's all I'm asking."

I look at the bus. It's the retreat shuttle, the one he drives, white with the farm's name stenciled on the side and a scratch along the passenger door from a gate post. He opens that door and stands there holding it.

"Take a ride with me," he says. "I've got forty minutes before I pick up the Henderson group at the station. One loop around the loch. Then you can come back and not speak to me for the whole weekend if you still want to."

I should say no. The whole strategy depends on saying no. But I've been in the car for three hours and my back hurts, and the loch is right there, and he's holding my paddle out like an offering at a temple.

"Forty minutes," I say.

He grins, and I hold up a finger. "This is not forgiveness. This is a bus ride."

"Understood," he says, and he does not stop grinning.

The bus smells like diesel and the pine air freshener he's had hanging from the mirror since I've known him. I sit in the front seat behind the driver's spot, which is where I always sit when I ride with him, and I take the paddle across my knees. The crests are carved deep enough that I can feel the edges with my thumb. There's a thistle on one side and what I think is a rowan branch on the other, and whoever did the work sanded it so smooth my hand keeps sliding along it without wanting to stop.

"Who carved it?" he asks, pulling out of the lot slow, the way he does with passengers, even when the only passenger is me. "There's no maker's mark."

I said I wouldn't talk, but it would be childish not to answer. "A man in Peebles. I drove down in March and picked the wood myself."

"You went all the way to Peebles?"

"Twice. It was done last month, and then the courier lost it." I keep my eyes on the crests.

He says it like an admission in court. "I knew you'd have something for the day, you always do. And then the day came and I was on a double shift and it went clean out of my head, and by the time I remembered I thought, well, that's ruined it, and then I found your paddle on Mrs. Duncanson's porch and thought, that's really ruined it, because now I've no good apology and you've no surprise."

So he didn't forget and shrug. He forgot and stewed about it for a week. That's somehow both better and worse.

We come around the bend where the track meets the water and the loch opens up, flat and grey-green in the way it always is up here. There are two canoe rentals already out, a father and a kid paddling near the reeds. Hamish drives the loop slow, second gear the whole way, and puts his hand on my knee like it's automatic. That hand has been on my knee on this exact road maybe two hundred times.

I don't move it. That's the thing about being furious with Hamish. I've been furious with him before, once over a miscommunicated plan and once over a dishwasher, and both times my body refused to cooperate with my anger. His hand sits warm on my knee, thumb resting in the small dip beside the kneecap, and I keep looking at the crests on the paddle instead of at him.

"There's a thing I want to say," he says, "but I'm going to drive first, because if I say it while stopped you'll have the whole lot to argue in."

"So say it while driving."

He takes the corner by the boathouse before he answers. "I forgot the day because I'm bad at days, not because I'm bad at you. Those are different things and I know it doesn't feel different from the outside." The loch slides by on my left. "I've had your paddle in a lockbox in the depot office since Tuesday. Every shift I looked at it and thought about you."

I run my thumb down the rowan branch carving and say nothing, because what I feel is dangerous and soft and would end the silent treatment immediately.

"Forty minutes," I remind him.

"You're at thirty-eight," he says, "but the next pickup got moved, so nobody's counting," and his thumb starts making small circles on the inside of my knee, and I look out at the water and decide, against all my planning, that the silent treatment can survive one more bend in the road.

He pulls into the turnout by the canoe shed and kills the engine. The shed sits right at the water's edge, all silvered planks and a rusted hasp, and the loch is dead flat past it. He leaves the key in and turns to me.

"I know you're still mad," he says. "But I've got