Patricia Gaffney by Mad Dash Page B

showing the small, sexy gap between her front teeth. She pushed a long tendril of hair behind her ear. To show him how sympathetic it was.
    He watched her go. She had a distinctive gliding walk, as if she didn’t care to straighten her knees all the way. She was someone he thought about often, and after today he would think about her even more. He felt a need to sit her down and interrogate her, solve all her mysteries. Where were you born? How many siblings? How many sex partners? What’s your favorite food?
    What did she want from him? Did they have things in common, perhaps because of their shared experiences with difficult stepparents, that he couldn’t see but she had somehow intuited? He was used to that dynamic, God knew, living with Dash. Which was like living with a psychic. Like being autistic and living with a psychic. It was hard to imagine how strange, fascinating Elizabeth could have much on Dash in the intuition department.
     

    dash

     

    five

    T he cabin isn’t much to look at, even with the new coat of white paint we put over the peeling clapboard, or the red shutters that match the tin roof. Technically it’s two stories tall, although Andrew has to slouch in the two upstairs rooms or his head brushes the ceiling, with a chimney in the middle and another one on the left. The comfortable but sort of slatternly porch sits low to the ground, only a half step up from the yard. The cabin’s not ugly, just unprepossessing, nothing out of the ordinary—which was a blessing for us, because otherwise we couldn’t have afforded it. The pond is what makes it special.
    It’s behind the cabin at the bottom of a long, low slope: half an acre of fresh springwater in a bowl so pleasingly shoe-shaped we were sure it was man-made. But the fellow who dug out the runoff channel for us the first year, eliminating the scum problem, said no, it’s natural and has probably been here as long as the mountain. ( Mountain is an exaggeration, but it’s what people around here call this Blue Ridge foothill two miles west of the town of Dolley, population 649.) The water drains into a creek that gradually widens as it trickles downhill, till at the bottom you have to cross it over a wooden bridge. I love the sound of my car tires on the bridge, that low, rickety rumble. It means I’m almost home.
    When we first bought the property, I’d walk around pointing at trees and saying, “That’s mine, that one’s mine, that maple is mine, that’s my oak tree, I own that little sassafras.” I had no idea I was so possessive. Or what a difference private property ownership makes. Rock Creek Park is wonderful, I used to go there all the time, especially when Chloe was little, and then later to jog or walk or just bask in nature. But it’s nothing like having your very own 5.2 acres of mountain to roam around on whenever you like, naked if you like, confident you won’t be observed by another soul.
    The first thing we did, even before painting, was hire Mr. Bender to build a pier across two points of land that jut out at the “shoelace” part of the pond. It’s only eight feet long, no handrails, nothing fancy, but all summer it’s my main vantage point, my throne. Andrew prefers the deck off the living room, but I sit on the little wooden dock, sometimes on a pillow if my rear end’s sore from a long spell of gazing, and observe the many wonders and changes of pond life.
    It’s December, so there’s not much pond life going on, not to my amateur eye. The bullfrogs have stopped galumphing at night, which I miss, and the gray, shadowy fish are swimming so deeply now, they look like ghosts. Our wood duck couple flew away in October. But the water won’t freeze till February, and in the meantime I can watch cloud reflections or trace the direction of the wind from the way it pleats and ripples the surface. The tans and grays and russets of winter are only drab until you give up expecting more. Then they’re gorgeous,