The Drive

By the time they left Burlington, the light already had that late-October thinness to it, the white-gold kind that looked weak and still somehow made everything sharper. The Subaru's windshield held the sky in a pale strip above the highway, and the trees on either side of Route 89 had mostly given up. A few maples still burned in patches of red and orange, but most of the hills had gone brown and black and pine-green, the season narrowing toward winter the way a road narrowed when the shoulder disappeared.

Ethan drove.

He always drove north. It had become one of those small marital facts that no one discussed because it had hardened into structure years ago: on the way to cabins, Ethan drove; on the way back, if the weather was bad or his shoulders were tight, Nora did. Today she sat in the passenger seat with her knees angled toward the glove compartment, a canvas book bag at her feet and her coat zipped to her throat though the car was warm enough. The heater clicked and breathed. The Subaru made its usual highway sounds—somewhere under the dashboard, a soft rattle that came and went with speed; from the back, the shifting thump of supplies in the cargo area every time Ethan changed lanes.

The radio was on low. Public radio, then static, then a classic rock station out of Montpelier, then back to public radio. A woman was saying something about school budgets. Nora listened for perhaps twenty minutes before reaching out and turning the volume down to nothing.

Ethan glanced at her, then back at the road. Ten minutes later he turned it on again, lower than before.

Neither of them mentioned it.

They had packed that morning in the quiet, efficient way people packed when they had already talked the trip to death in earlier weeks and there was nothing left to say except practical things. Groceries in paper bags. Two duffels. Ethan's toolbox. Firewood in the trunk because the island supply would be damp this time of year, or at least that was what he'd said while carrying it out. Nora's bag with four novels and a stack of student essays clipped together in a bulging packet she knew she would not touch once they got there. He'd moved through the house with purpose, checking lists on his phone, then not trusting the lists and checking things again with his hands.

Now, northbound, the trip had the texture of something already underway long before the car started moving.

"Did you call the plumber?" Ethan asked as they passed the Waterbury exit.

Nora kept her eyes on the window. "Left a message."

"Think he'll come next week?"

"I think he'll come when he comes."

"Hm."

The road unspooled ahead of them. Tractor-trailers moved in patient lanes. Once, a patch of sunlight broke through and lit a hillside so that the remaining yellow leaves flashed like coins.

After a while Ethan said, "The pump should still be fine. Jude checked it in September."

"He said that?"

"He said everything looked good."

Nora pushed her glasses up her nose. "That isn't the same sentence."

He almost smiled. "No."

That could have become one of their old conversations—the kind where she pressed and he revised and between them a thing got made more accurate—but it didn't. The moment passed. Ethan adjusted his grip on the wheel. Nora tucked one cold hand under the opposite sleeve.

At a rest area south of Montpelier they didn't stop. At another, farther north, Ethan asked if she needed coffee and Nora said no. He got one anyway at a drive-through just off the highway, black, and drank half of it too fast. The cup rode in the holder between them, steaming faintly, smelling burned and bitter. He drove with his left hand and held the cup in his right at red lights, then set it back carefully each time before the car moved.

When they left the interstate for smaller roads, the world changed scale. Fewer houses. More distance between mailboxes. Fields gone colorless and flat. A white church with a cemetery beside it, the stones leaning at angles that made Ethan think, automatically and against his will, about settling and frost heave and poor foundations. He thought in failures and corrections. It was one of the things that made him good at work. It was also exhausting to live inside.

Harwick was still twenty miles away when the low fuel light came on.

"Should've done it in Montpelier," Nora said.

"We're fine."

"I know we're fine."

He took the next station anyway. It sat alone at a crossroads where one road bent toward a cluster of dark houses and the other disappeared into woods. Two pumps under a flickering canopy. A hand-lettered sign for worms and bait in the window though it was too late in the season for either. Ethan pulled up beside the pump and shut the engine off, and the silence after the car noise had a shape to it.

"You need the restroom?" he asked.

Nora nodded and got out. The cold hit fast enough to take her breath for a second. Gravel underfoot. The smell of gasoline and damp leaves. She walked toward the cinderblock building at the side of the station, one hand already in her coat pocket for the key that hung on a wooden block the size of a brick.

Ethan watched her go, then got out and started the pump.

The gas nozzle clunked into place. Numbers rolled upward. The trunk release clicked under his thumb almost without him deciding to press it.

He lifted the hatch.

Firewood. Grocery bags. The toolbox. Their duffels shoved side by side. He moved a split log that had shifted during the drive and crouched a little to check whether the milk had tipped. It hadn't. For a moment his hand went still under the top layer of wood, resting on something softer than canvas and not as rough as bark.

He left it there a second too long.

When the nozzle thunked and stopped, he straightened, closed the trunk, and took out his wallet.

Nora came back rubbing her hands together. "Bathroom key weighs more than my first car."

He smiled because she had made a joke and because it would have been noticeable if he didn't. "Cleaner, though."

"Debatable."

She got in. He got in. The car filled again with old upholstery warmth and coffee and the faint smell of outside cold caught in their coats. Ethan started the engine and pulled back onto the road.

For the next ten miles they talked about nothing that mattered and all of it mattered because it was what they had.

The gutters on the house would need clearing when they got back.

The school might switch to block scheduling next year.

The maple at the corner of their yard had a dead limb hanging over the driveway.

Marcus's wife had apparently moved out, though Nora only knew that through another teacher whose sister worked with her. That led them near the edge of divorce as a topic and then away again so carefully the movement itself became visible.

"Sometimes people just get tired," Nora said, looking out the window.

Ethan kept his eyes on the road. "Sometimes."

"Not of each other, even. Just tired."

He nodded. "Yeah."

The silence after that had infrastructure. It was not empty. It held weight. They traveled inside it for several miles while the road narrowed further and began to roll. Pines gathered closer. Patches of old snow hid in ditches where sunlight never reached. The sky lowered, or seemed to, until even midafternoon looked like the hour before dusk.

Ethan knew every turn after the sign for Harwick. Not because they came every year—they hadn't, not for a while—but because some roads, once learned young, stayed in the body. Left at the feed store with the faded red siding. Right at the town green with the bandstand nobody used except on the Fourth of July. Past the post office, the diner, the hardware store with two rakes still out front as if fall might continue indefinitely if they pretended hard enough.

Harwick had a population sign that said 2,400 and looked as old as Ethan's memory of it.

Neither of them said they were almost there.

Instead Ethan said, "If the dock boards are as bad as I remember, I brought the galvanized nails."

Nora looked at him then. Really looked. His face in profile. The weak-coffee hair going a little thin at the temples. The jaw he had from his father. The concentration he wore like armor even now, even here, even talking about dock boards as if the right hardware might matter more than anything else.

"Of course you did," she said.

He heard something in her voice—not mockery, not quite affection, something narrower and more fragile than either—and glanced at her quickly before turning into the road that led toward the public landing.

The gravel began. The car rattled. Ahead, through the trees, the first black shine of the lake appeared and vanished, appeared and vanished again.

Ethan felt his chest tighten in a way he refused to name.

Home, he thought, though he did not say it yet.

Beside him Nora sat straighter, one hand closing around nothing at all in her lap while the lake showed itself in pieces through the pines, pale and dark at once, holding the last of the afternoon light like something kept a very long time.