It had been almost nighttime, two weeks into January. She’d come close to selling a full-page ad to a chiropractor who had wanted to buy her dinner. Amy Raye didn’t want dinner, or him, and so she’d walked home through the snowfall, and as the moisture turned to slush in her hair, a red heeler with a slight limp to his left back leg trotted up behind her and wagged his tail.
She was renting the upstairs of a three-unit apartment house four blocks behind the Methodist church. The house, painted purple and mauve and light green, was one of the fifty or so Victorians in the neighborhood. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, wooden steps that ran up the backside of the house. At the landing, she looked over her shoulder. The dog sat at the foot of the stairs, his eyes fastened to her like Velcro on flannel, his tail pushing the sloppy mess on the asphalt into inconsistent mounds. She nodded, slush slipping from her hair and falling onto her cowboy boots with the thick rubber soles. Then she turned to unlock the door, and when she opened it, he had climbed the stairs, and he followed her inside. She bathed him that night, untangled his mats with her hairbrush, called him Saddle because she loved horses and because his coat was the color of chestnut leather. They ate chicken broth and French bread, and after she had read ten pages of Love, Groucho: Letters from Groucho Marx to His Daughter Miriam and reached over to the lamp and turned it off, the dog jumped onto the bed and lay next to her, leaning his warm back against her side. She fell asleep right away but an hour later awoke, and he was still there.
Wearing sweatpants, a thermal nightshirt, and thick wool socks, she rose from bed and asked him if he needed to go out. She slipped on a down parka, pulled a fleece hat over her ears, and stepped into a pair of tall rubber boots that she usually saved for mud season in spring. Saddle followed her out the door and down the stairs. The snow had stopped falling. They’d walked two blocks heading east when they’d come to a house with lamps glowing from inside, and silhouettes of people in the windows, and the sounds of an acoustic guitar and singing. They stood there, the two of them, facing the house. She didn’t flinch when a bearded man opened the front door, and with a Southern accent, asked her if she’d like to come in. And the dog, too, she thought he’d said. She went inside the house, slipped off her boots, and walked soft-footed into the room from where the music came. Someone offered her a chair, and so she sat and listened to another man, who looked like a boy, smile and sing and play the guitar, and nod when others sang, too.
She didn’t know then how short the man who looked like a boy was, just over five foot seven, with strong legs the same length as his torso, or that he would always wear soft clothes, corduroy and aged flannel and cotton as smooth as a lamb’s ear. She didn’t know that when they made love his skin would smell of sage and milk thistle, and his hair, damp with sweat, would smell like moist bark deep in the woods. Or that she would marry him, and by the time she was thirty-two, bear a son with him and be the stepmother to his daughter.
That day on Ypsilon Mountain, the distance between Amy Raye and Farrell began to change, the kind of change that begins like a warm current in a cold stream. And the sky began to turn. Amy Raye hadn’t noticed the sky at first. She’d first noticed the ground, shadows from the clouds. Then drops of rain as they made small depressions in the sandy earth, and her husband’s footprints before her, the treads of his hiking boots forming perfectly shaped ridges in the moist soil.
“The weather has turned,” he’d said.
“Do you want to head back?” she asked.
“Let’s hike a little farther and see if it passes,” he said.
But the storm didn’t pass. And then, as though there had been a great rip in the sky, the clouds seemed to burst. The rain poured down in steady, biting streams, and the soil quickly turned into puddles of sloppy mud.
“There’s a shelter up ahead. Let’s make a run for it,” Farrell said.
Amy Raye wondered how he had known about the shelter. She would ask him later. He must have hiked this trail before.
The shelter was a small cabin with a lean-to porch. The front door was unlocked. Amy Raye and Farrell shook the rain from their clothes and smoothed back their wet hair before they entered. Inside the cabin was a cot, a small table with two chairs, and a wood stove. Beside the stove was dry wood, about a tenth of a cord’s worth stacked neatly against one of the walls, and on top of the wood was kindling.
Farrell set his pack on the table. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
“I could eat,” Amy Raye said.
He unzipped his pack and took out a thermos, a plastic container with meat and cheese, another container with dried fruit, a package of crackers. He brought out two metal cups as well.
“I’ll make a fire,” Amy Raye said.
“Let me do it,” Farrell said.
But Amy Raye reached for his arm to stop him. “No. You get the food.”
“Do you have a lighter?” he asked.