1503951243 by Laurel Saville

gaze.
    “Better let me in,” he said. “It’s a long driveway.”
    He climbed into the passenger seat of her Subaru, where he looked like a grown man on a tricycle, all knees and elbows in the compact space. Miranda stared straight ahead. She wondered if this was a mistake. She wondered if he was wondering the same thing. A man didn’t live in a place this hard to find if he wasn’t someone who valued solitude. Or if he liked the company of other people. She wondered why she’d been invited in.
    Did he like her or feel sorry for her? Was he lonely or generous?
    She’d known him for years, yet she knew him not at all. He was a collection of adjectives—reliable, capable, trustworthy, hardworking, skilled, private—but these words did not add up to a full person. Not yet. She wondered if that would change. If the man behind the list of admirable qualities would emerge.
    The driveway took a turn and suddenly the view opened up. She saw a small glade among tall pines. At the center was a single-story home that took her breath away with its simplicity and elegance. There was a central square to the building, with two wings set at forty-five-degree angles flowing away from it. Large overhanging eaves protected its face while the arching branches of some deciduous trees she’d never seen before caressed the corners. The overlapping shakes were a lightly weathered brown, like bark. Several low walls and walks made of muted grayish-blue stones gave dimension to the yard. Mosses and creeping plants cascaded and merged together among the rocks. The home had the appearance of something that had sprouted up naturally. There were a few similarly subtle outbuildings scattered nearby, like leaves fallen from a tree. Everything was dusted with the first light snow of the season. Miranda turned off the car and sat, intimidated into silence by the serenity of the setting.
    “It’s not at all what I expected,” she eventually whispered.
    “No,” Dix said. “I imagine not. Bet you thought I’d live in an old trailer or something.”
    Miranda flinched at the slight rebuke in his voice. Then conceded to herself that it was fair and due.
    “Not that, exactly,” she replied. As she spoke, what she had pictured, without really knowing it, came to mind. “I guess I expected a little old farmhouse with a big barn and a couple of dogs on the porch, chickens scratching in the yard. Something that maybe your grandmother once owned.”
    Dix sniffed his amusement. “My father designed this house. He was an architect,” he said, then waited a beat, as if he knew that information would be unexpected, would need time to sink in. “My mother was a landscape architect.”
    Miranda’s mouth fell open in surprise and embarrassment. She realized suddenly that she had admired Dix but also made assumptions about him as a “local.” She had figured he had a poverty of experience and exposure, that his competencies had come more by hard-won experience than sought-after education. She had never considered him as a professional person because, in what she now realized was her own limited experience, serious careers were available in cities and in offices, not in the out-of-doors. Then she realized that almost everyone mistook him. Maybe that was OK with him. Maybe it was more than OK. Perhaps it was a willful and welcome protective mechanism.
    She turned to say something to him, to apologize for herself, but he was already unfolding his body from the seat and the moment was lost. He stood in the drive and waved her out of the car. She got out and took a few steps in the direction of the main house, drawn there, intent on seeing how its sophistication played out on the inside, but Dix was heading in a different direction. She turned and followed him along a faint path that had yellowed the lawn to a far corner of the cleared part of the property. A giant beech tree shaded a small building. Spent nut casings—husks peeled back like miniature