They were delighted, though.
I left them gagging themselves with their Popsicle-stick crosses and headed down the road where they’d pointed. I walked for a while through switchgrass and mud before I saw a rustedout trailer in the pines. I didn’t approach Lily’s house from the front. I went around back, where the grass was unmowed and woods encroached. Fir and more fir. But there was a swept concrete patio under a faded blue awning, and when I looked in the back window, I could see dishes stacked neatly in the drainer. I could see a Formica table with the chairs pushed in, a lit fish tank whirling with bubbles. It was an old trailer, but tidy and aspirational, with a new carpet sample on the floor and a crocheted blanket over the tiny bench couch. I saw the pink scarf Lily stole from the lost and found—tassels trembling in a draft—on a hook by the door. As I watched it move in the breeze, I realized the hook was in fact a horn, centered on a mounted deer head.
The thing had its wide mouth closed, its white nostrils flaring.
From behind me a man’s voice said, “Lily?”
I turned. Someone lay in a lawn chair in the shade under a far fir. “Lil, you back?”
It was Mr. Holburn, and as I watched, he took a deep breath and pushed himself up straighter in the frayed nylon chaise. I tried to think of something to explain myself—I’d been picking early Juneberries, I’d lost my way—but then I saw the tallboy in his hand, the pile of empties overturned in the moss. It was Sunday afternoon, Memorial Day weekend, so it probably didn’t matter what I said. He wouldn’t remember once I left.
There was a bright yellow pine needle hanging from his gray beard.
He swung his legs off the lawn chair and started to stand. “You back now? I’ve been waiting here—”
His aggrieved expression drained the moment he stepped out of the shade. That’s when he understood a mistake had been made, and forgot he’d made it just as fast, giving in to a long, laden blink of his eyes. When he opened them again, he was squinting so intensely he looked like he was in pain. “You?” he asked. “Excuse me,” he added, all politeness. “Do I know you?”
“Nope,” I said, though it wasn’t quite the truth. I’d poured his coffee at the diner more than once, and years back, when I was twelve, I’d competed against his two nephews, and won, in the Two Bears Classic Dogsled Race. He’d given me a slap on the back at the finish line.
He put a palm to his gut, sliding it up his Forest Service T-shirt to his throat. A sliver of belly grinned out at me. “It’s like a tree is growing from my chest, you know? I don’t feel right. It’s like my mouth don’t fit on my face or something.” He rolled his jaw. “Don’t mind me,” he apologized.
He turned from me, found another can on the ground to crack open. When he turned back again, his brow was creased.
“You still here?”
I reached for my backpack, unzipped. Pulled out a pair of boots.
“This is private property,” he explained then. But sadly, as if it couldn’t be helped. “No hunting or fishing allowed.”
Did he think I’d pulled out a tackle box or something? A gun? “I’m not hunting.”
“No—” he had to search for the word. He had to look at the black-and-orange sign posted to a tree in their yard and read it. “Tesspressing.” He giggled.
“Where’s Lily?” I blurted.
“Lily?” He shook his head slowly, as though he bore the weight of all the world’s mysteries. “Gone with that lawyer son-of-a-bitch. She said to me when she left, ‘Keep the house nice.’ And look! I’ve had all my fun outside, like she asked. I did dishes, right? I kept it up good.” He sat back down in his lawn chair, grunting, as if the mere mention of these tasks had drained him.
As he slumped down, he pointed warily at the boots now cradled in my arms. “What’s tha—?”
“It’s—” I was trying to think of some way to explain. Before I could answer, though, he brought his palm over his face like a lid.