Alone in a Cabin

by Leanne W. Smith

  Buffing a towel over his head, Canon pulled clothes from the chest of drawers and got dressed, taking a minute to glance up at the redhead with her frozen smile. Then he went back into the bathroom marveling at the intersections of the human heart and mind.

  A runaway chasing false love. A brunette in a dream. What lonely souls wouldn’t do to fill the aches inside them.

  * * *

  Going back inside the house wasn’t as bad as Maggie had feared. Material items are only items, after all. Inanimate objects. None of them drove Tom’s choices. Although…when she looked over to Tom’s side of the closet she couldn’t help but wonder what clothes he had been wearing the day he first cheated. Was it something Maggie had bought for him? Did Bethany enjoy the smell of Tom’s Versace? If Maggie had known it would draw other women like fruit flies she wouldn’t have let that clerk in downtown Franklin talk her into the larger 3.4 ounce bottle.

  Outside the bedroom the parceling grew easier.

  Maggie stared out the back window at the pool in the early August heat. Fourth of July decorations she never had brought in dotted the landscape. Leaves from the birch trees floated in the water from the hard rain the night before. She would miss those birch trees, her herb garden and the oak-leaf hydrangeas. But Maggie never had loved the house. Tom won that argument. The house was too large, too presumptuous, and didn’t have nearly enough windows.

  After making a trip to the local UPS store for sturdy boxes, Maggie packed most of the kitchen and marked the bookcases with a Post-it. She scooped clothes, shoes and purses from the closet, leaving the long dresses she had bought for Tom’s medical conventions and that cruise five years ago, along with Christmas and birthday presents, the Coach bag with the tassel on the zipper.

  Surreal.

  Twenty-four hours ago Maggie hadn’t known this was how she would spend her day. When she checked her phone that morning each of the kids had texted some version of when should we be there? She texted back change of plans then turned her phone off. Let Tom break the news.

  Maggie’s head throbbed. She found Tylenol in the medicine cabinet and dropped the bottle in her purse—the one of tan leather—the one she had bought herself.

  On her way out, she grabbed the new gray blanket off the upstairs sofa. This August heat was a sauna now, but colder days were coming. Gray looked to be the new color of her life. Tom could have the rest—Tom and Bethany—and all the accidental children they wanted to conceive.

  2

  “Rustic cabin. Built in the 1850s. Original fireplace. New windows. Only 70 miles from Nashville. Perfect writer’s retreat.” Airbnb description

  Maggie held the steaming mug and studied her daughter across the table. They sat opposite one another in a hipster coffee house only a short walk from Maggie’s new high-rise condo in the Gulch, one of Nashville’s hottest real estate markets.

  Robbie frowned back at her. “You’re going to leave me and Cal?”

  She had expected Robbie to be unhappy with her decision. But, as the therapist Maggie paid one hundred dollars a session to said, she was not responsible for her children’s happiness. They had to claim it on their own the same way Maggie had to reclaim hers.

  August to December had been a painful yet liberating blur. A lot of soul-searching. One day at a time. Maggie’s world rotating on its axis.

  “I’ve only rented the cabin for a few days. You’ve got Mark. Cal’s engaged. I’m not abandoning you.”

  “But it’s Christmas, Mom!”

  “I’ll be here Christmas Day and head to the cabin the day after.”

  “For how long?”

  “Through the following Monday, day after New Year’s.”

  Robbie’s frown deepened. Maggie wondered if she was truly mad or just hurt. Either way, change had become their new normal, welcome or not.

  “Since when are you so matter-of-fact?” asked Robbie.

  “New me.”

  Robbie frowned at the table top, her finger picking at a bothersome nail in the wood. “Why go by yourself?”

  Maggie gripped her mug a little tighter, its warmth a comfort. “Who else do I have, sweetheart?”

  Robbie winced, and Maggie felt guilty for causing it. But she didn’t turn away from her daughter’s probing eyes. Robbie was a stunner. Long brown hair. Eyes the color of molasses. And it wasn’t just Maggie who thought so. Heads turned toward their table and lingered.

  Calvin was the masculine version, five minutes younger, proud to be three inches taller. Maggie had taken care not to overdo matching clothing when they were young, wanting each of them to stand strong as an individual. She and Tom had prided themselves that when giving them matching names—Robyn and Calvin—they had at least given Robyn the more feminine and unique “y.” But then they fell into calling her Robbie.

  “You’ve got to stop feeling sorry for me,” Maggie said. “I’m fine. You and Cal are both in new jobs. Choose your own vacation days and let me choose mine.”

  “How long, exactly?”

  “A week. Maybe longer if I get into a good writing groove.”

  “So you are planning to write?” For the first time Robbie stopped looking worried and showed interest.

  “That’s the whole point! And I’ve been given this great and unexpected window of opportunity.” Maggie shot Robbie her best smile across the table.

  But Robbie wasn’t swayed by Maggie’s forced enthusiasm. “I don’t like you going out there alone, Mom. Cal won’t either.”

  “It’s not as remote as you’re making it sound.”

  “Fifteen miles from the nearest town.”

  “Less than a marathon. I can run it if I have to. Did you look at the pictures?” Maggie pulled out her phone, but Robbie pushed it away.

  “I believe you. It has wi-fi? Cell reception?”

  “No Internet, but great cell reception according to the caretaker. There’s a caretaker! Right down the road.”

  “Still…won’t you be afraid at night?”

  “Me? I’m a lioness.”

  Robbie rolled her eyes. “If you say so, Mom.”

  Maggie decided to let the eye roll go. She might not have demonstrated high levels of courage in the past, but hadn’t she been fast-tracked into learning bravery over the last four months? “I’ll turn on all the outside lights. And take a gun, if you want me to.”

  She was only joking about the gun, but Robbie latched on to it. “That’s not a bad idea. Cal will want you to.”

  “I’ll do it then. I’ll do anything for you and Cal. You know that.” Maggie reached for her daughter’s hand, and this time Robbie didn’t push her away. “Let me have this one thing.”

  Robbie couldn’t say no to that. She knew how rarely Maggie had ever put her own desires before anyone else’s.

  Twenty-seven years ago, just before learning she was pregnant, Maggie had approached a local newspaper about writing a regular column. An editor there gave her a shot. Then twelve columns in the doctor said it was twins.

  While Maggie knew she could still manage a bi-weekly column after the babies arrived, Tom—and her parents, his parents—felt the commitment was too much. So she gave it up. She couldn’t explain to them then, like she couldn’t explain now, how the opportunity had briefly—exquisitely—fed her soul.

  But then the twins arrived and her heart had a new focus. Only…as Maggie sat in school pick-up lines and drove the kids to piano practice she would catch herself daydreaming, ordering phrases in her head, hearing bits of dialog. She never really stopped writing that column.

  As Robbie and Cal grew older and began to need her less, Maggie turned to reading and cooking. Deep in her bones she knew she should be doing something with the words that were forever sorting themselves out in her head, but the newspaper she had worked so briefly for went out of business. The world changed. Technology moved fast. Maggie worried about keeping pace. She didn’t have a resume and wasn’t sure how to write one.

  She hid behind the twins’ homework
, ballgames, and the cupcakes needed for bake sales so long that if Tom hadn’t forced her into stoking the old fires of her writing dream Maggie might never have returned to it. But here she was. Journaling, which had actually proven better than therapy, became the first floating ring she had clung to. Reading books on writing was the second. Now Maggie was eager to actually dive in on a fictional story.

  The idea to rent the cabin had come to her at Thanksgiving. Maggie was still getting used to the smaller kitchen of the condo, and parking wasn’t easy downtown, so she didn’t invite the larger circle of family and friends to join them. Just a quiet meal with Cal and Yvette, Robbie and Mark, followed by a visit to her mother in the nursing home who, with the dementia, didn’t know not to ask about Tom.

  Now Maggie was an official divorcee, as of one week and three days ago. Tom knew a lawyer who knew the judge who pushed it through quickly. As Christmas loomed, she was wrung out and shamed out. Writing had become the last crumb of her shattered self-dignity. If Maggie couldn’t get this right, she didn’t have a second option.

  This was it. This was huge. This was everything. But she didn’t know how to say all of that to her daughter. So instead she said, “Neither of us chose this, Robbie, but it doesn’t all have to end in tragedy.”

  Maggie watched as Robbie picked up her Mayan Mocha, a sign of resignation. Then she pondered how long and deep were the ripple effects one person’s life could have on another’s.

  3

  After the inciting incident kicks the heroine to the ground, she has to decide whether to lie there or stand up and put one foot in front of the other. If she can rally the reader has cause to cheer.

  The cabin was perfect. Maggie had begun to think she would never reach the old log structure on the winding dirt road through the countryside, but there it was suddenly in a burst around a corner through a clearing.

  The Outback bounced through the final puddles left by recent rains and came to a halt in a dirt patch in the yard. As she stepped out, Maggie heard a truck ambling up the road behind her. That sole cottage she passed two miles back must have been the caretaker’s.

  The truck pulled in. The rusty hinges of his door protested as a man swung it open and got out with the help of a cane. He was as weathered and nicked as the green Ford pick-up he drove.

  “You must be Mrs. Raines.” The man grinned, his voice little more than a whisper. Larynx cartilages hardened and the vocal cords shrank with age. Maggie knew this because Tom was a throat specialist.

  She reached to take his gnarled hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Thompson.”

  “Been caretaker of this place fifty years,” he wheezed. “Still cut the grass in summer. Takes me longer’n it used to. Keep the pipes from freezing in winter. She’s cozy. Fella in Florida owns her now, but he don’t come up here much.”

  He pointed toward the door with his cane. “Let’s have a look-see.”

  Maggie popped the trunk for her suitcase, deciding to wait on the crate of kitchen supplies.

  Mr. Thompson glanced over. “Need help?”

  “Thank you, I’ve got it.” She closed the trunk, embarrassed for him to see the gun case. Cal insisted she bring it along, as Robbie had predicted. “I’ll bring the rest in after I make a trip to the store.” She pulled the rolling bag behind her over the hard-packed ground.

  The porch sat wide—a swing on the right, two rocking chairs to the left—with a “welcome” sign dangling from a nail on the door.

  “These are from original trees on the property.” Mr. Thompson knocked his cane against the porch rails as he thumped up the steps. “Hickory. That’s a strong wood. They’s hickory trees all over these parts.”

  Maggie let her eyes fan over the surroundings and felt her city leanings, unable to name most of the trees she saw, though she did recognize an oak, some maples and dogwoods. “Are they the ones with rough bark?”

  The old man’s eyes twinkled. “You know a thing or two, don’t you?”

  She didn’t tell him about helping the twins gather leaves for a fourth grade project. Mr. Thompson’s comment was generic, but it made Maggie wonder what the older man saw when he looked at her. She had once resembled the Jaclyn Smith of Charlie’s Angels acclaim—it was her high cheekbones—but in more recent years all she saw in the mirror was a middle-aged woman whose more attractive days had fled. Maggie didn’t want to be preoccupied with her looks, but was sensitive to her status as a woman replaced.

  Mr. Thompson put the key in the lock, swung the door open, and stepped back so Maggie could go inside. A wood fire crackled in the fireplace. At her raised brow the old man’s eyes lit up again. “You said you’d be here about noon, and it’s noon. So I snuck down here and built you a fire.”

  On impulse she hugged him, pleased Mr. Thompson was the caretaker. No other neighbors were in sight, but having a kind old man down the road was enough.

  The hug seemed to catch him off guard. Recovering, he swept a hand over the room. “She’s old, but as you can see, a beauty. Solid. And she’s been modernized, all but the fireplace.” He grinned back at her. “Do you know how to build a wood fire, Miss?”

  “Been a while, but I’m sure it will come back to me.” The twins had been in Scouts. Building fires, filleting fish, roasting S’mores, and spending a few nights on the ground in a pup tent had been part of it. Mostly fathers went on those trips…and Maggie.

  Not that she was ever a natural. Maggie had been happy enough to let those fathers build the fires. But now that she was on her own, she was determined that she would…she could…learn whatever was necessary…whatever was required.

  “Well, you call me if you have any trouble. My number’s by the phone in the kitchen. Look over the place and let me know if you have any questions ‘fore I take my leave. I know you didn’t come out here to gab with me.”

  Mr. Thompson leaned on his cane as Maggie walked through the cabin.

  So perfect. Like the pages of a magazine. Cushy red couch and ottoman in front of a big stone fireplace on the right. Braided rug beneath them. Quilt rack in the corner by the front windows. TV cabinet to the left. A narrow dining table and four chairs flanked the far wall with a cutout over it that held a view of the kitchen. Another cutout, long and narrow, sat above eye level between the living room and bedroom. Maggie could see the cutouts allowed the heat to circulate.

  The path from the front door to the back split the log structure neatly in half. Running a hand along the ancient logs, she stepped through the main room toward the kitchen. Small, but ample counter space. Red barstool near an old-fashioned phone on the wall. A washer/dryer combo sat to the left of the back door, an upper shelf running over it with supplies. A hallway on the left led to the single bedroom and bath. Maggie peered into the bathroom first, with its all-white, footed tub, then the bedroom, with its dried vase of lavender on the bedside table, king bed, white matelassé coverlet and red pillows. Exposed beams ran overhead. Nothing on the walls, no clocks, no pictures, just windows—lots and lots of windows—with simple lace toppers.

  “That bath used to be a second bedroom. It’s newly redone,” she heard Mr. Thompson call from the living room as she turned from admiring the bedroom back to the bath. Gray slate floors. And a glass shower large enough for two. Maggie wondered how many couples came here for romantic getaways.

  Mr. Thompson didn’t ask her why she was alone and Maggie was grateful. She knew she might as well have ‘divorce’ inked on her forehead. Her left hand still felt strange without the golden band she wore there thirty years. She often caught herself reaching to straighten the marquise diamond that no longer twisted on her finger.

  “The windows,” Maggie cooed as she returned to the living room, unable to pull her eyes from them. Even skylights overhead. Among all the Tennessee cabins listed, she had chosen this one for its light. Though the wooden logs were rustic, care was taken to install modern windows. The noonday sun lit each room with golden brilliance.

  “Everybody loves
the windows,” he said.

  The pictures on the Internet hadn’t misrepresented things. The longer blurb had described the cabin as one of the oldest standing structures in Marston County, built by a man named Micah Patterson for the bride he brought here from Sacramento.

  “Don’t let those windows make you afraid at night.” Mr. Thompson stepped toward the front door. “See this switch? At night, you just flip that switch up and folks can’t see in. You can see out, but they can’t see in. Also helps tint the windows if it gets too bright. Works on every window in the cabin, even the ones in the ceiling. I don’t understand how, but it does.”

  He opened the door. “You’ll want to test it, more’n likely. Folks always do. Nobody’s up this way to see inside anyway, but that’ll give you privacy if you want it.”

  “Will the fire be okay while I go to the store in town?”

  “Oh, sure. You won’t be gone more’n two hours, I reckon. That stone hearth is wide. Sometimes a wood piece will pop a spark out, but it don’t get past that hearth. It’s a solid-built cabin.”

  Mr. Thompson looked to the sky as he went out. “Looks like snow clouds. I hope it don’t snow,” he muttered.

  Maggie heard the door of his pick-up creak again as he climbed back in. As the sounds of his Ford jostling back down the road died out, she went to inventory the kitchen, to see what kind of pots and pans it had before making her grocery list.

  * * *

  Shirley stepped into the frame of Canon’s doorway, causing him to look up. “Let’s go on, before it gets dark.” She held out his jacket.

  He stood and stuffed his arms into the sleeves, then poured himself another cup of coffee, one for the road.

  “That’s not decaf,” she said.

  “That’s alright.”

  Her face twisted into that look she had been giving him more of lately—her disgusted look. “Tell me you’re not plannin’ to come back here and work all night.”