First Warm Day

The first warm day of the year arrived on a Wednesday in April and nobody trusted it.

It was sixty-three degrees by noon, which in another part of the country would not qualify as an event. In Oakridge Harbor, after five months of snowbanks and road salt and darkness at four in the afternoon, it emptied people out of their houses.

By one o'clock there were windows open all over town.

I could see them from the truck on my way back from Rockland: upstairs bedroom windows shoved six inches above their winter positions, kitchen curtains moving, storm doors propped open with bricks. Somebody on Shore Road had put laundry on a line. Three houses farther down, a man was washing his car in shorts despite the fact that there was still a strip of dirty snow under his hedge.

The harbor had changed color.

All winter it was dark steel, sometimes nearly black, with white showing where the wind caught it. That afternoon it was blue. Not summer blue. Nothing generous yet. But blue enough that I noticed it coming around the bend above the landing and slowed down without meaning to.

Reagan noticed nothing.

She was asleep in the passenger seat with her head wedged against the door.

I had closed the store for the afternoon.

This requires some explanation, because I do not close the store for the afternoon.

There had been a reason. I had needed to go to Rockland to pick up an order that had somehow been delivered to a business with an address nothing like mine, and Sarah had class, and the alternative was leaving a handwritten sign on the door saying BACK SOON without defining soon. I hate those signs. They ask too much of everybody.

So I had put CLOSED - WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON on the door on Monday.

Then I had spent Tuesday explaining it.

Mrs. Lessard wanted to know where I was going. Harold wanted to know whether I was reopening at four. A woman I had never seen before asked whether Wednesday afternoons were going to be a regular thing now.

They were not.

By twelve-thirty on Wednesday, the box was in the back of the truck and I had nowhere I needed to be until Thursday morning.

That is an unusual condition.

I drove past the turn for Water Street.

Reagan woke up.

Her head came off the door. She looked through the windshield, then at me, then over her shoulder through the back window.

“You don't have to supervise.”

She sat up.

The store disappeared behind us.

Reagan remained concerned.

◆

There is a road north of town that follows the water for about three miles before turning inland. I had driven it before. I had never driven it slowly.

It is not an especially useful road. There are houses along the first mile, then woods, then a stretch where the land drops away on the right and you can see across a narrow inlet to a line of spruce on the other side. In summer there are enough tourists on it to make stopping unpleasant. In winter there is nothing to stop for.

In April there was mud.

There was mud everywhere.

The shoulders had collapsed into it. Driveways were two brown trenches with gravel between them. Every truck I passed had a dried fan of it up the doors, including mine. The snow was gone from the open ground but remained in the woods in long gray patches where the sun hadn't reached, and the trees had not yet decided to do anything.

That is the strange part of April here. The weather changes before the landscape does.

The air coming through my open window was warm. The woods were still November.

I drove until I found a turnout above the inlet.

There were two picnic tables, both wet, and a trash barrel chained to a post. A wooden sign said something about shorebird habitat. Somebody had put three bullet holes through the bottom half of it.

I parked.

Reagan was standing before I had the key out.

“You were asleep ten minutes ago.”

Her nose was already against the window.

I got the leash from behind the seat.

The moment her feet hit the ground she pulled toward the grass with the focused urgency of an animal who had apparently been denied access to smells for several years.

I let her.

There was nobody else there.

That was the first thing I noticed after the road went quiet. No voices. No doors opening. No bell over the store entrance. No grinder, no milk steaming, no truck backing into Bell Hardware, no Denise calling something across Water Street that could have been directed at me or somebody fifty yards away.

Just water below us and the occasional ticking of the truck as it cooled.

I stood beside the picnic table and looked out.

The inlet was smaller than it seemed from the road. Across it, the opposite shore was close enough that I could make out individual trunks between the spruce. There was a house at the far end, weathered gray, with a dock pulled halfway up onto the rocks for winter. A red canoe was upside down beside it.

The tide was low.

The exposed shoreline was brown rock and weed and pale shells, the unattractive machinery underneath a harbor that looks much better when full. Gulls moved around down there with purpose. Every few minutes one lifted off, went somewhere else, and resumed doing exactly what it had been doing before.

Reagan found a stick.

It was approximately five feet long.

“No.”

She pulled it free from a patch of dead grass.

One end caught on a small bush.

She pulled harder.

The bush moved.

“Reagan.”

She backed up.

The stick came loose all at once and nearly took her with it.

She stood over it, delighted.

I had owned her long enough to know that intervention would only formalize the situation, so I walked toward the water.

She followed with the stick crosswise in her mouth.

The path went down farther than I expected. It curved through the trees and came out on a narrow strip of stones at the edge of the inlet, where the air was ten degrees colder and smelled like salt and things left wet.

I put my hands in my jacket pockets.

The jacket had been unnecessary at the truck. It was necessary there.

That was April too.

Reagan dropped the stick at my feet.

“No.”

She looked at it.

Then at me.

“No.”

Her ears moved forward.

“You found it. That's the activity.”

She waited.

I looked out at the water.

She waited.

I lasted perhaps twenty seconds.

I picked up the stick.

It was heavier than I expected and wet on one end.

“This is not going far.”

I threw it.

It did not go far.

It also did not go where I intended. It turned in the air, landed partly in the water, and made a sound considerably larger than the throw deserved.

Reagan went after it.

I had forgotten about the leash.

It came tight around my wrist and pulled me two steps down the stones before I got my footing.

“Jesus Christ.”

Reagan reached the water.

Then stopped.

The stick floated six feet offshore.

She looked at it.

I looked at her.

“You're a Labrador.”

She put one front foot into the water.

Took it out.

The stick drifted farther away.

“You have webbed feet.”

This did not persuade her.

She watched the stick continue slowly toward the middle of the inlet with the expression of somebody watching a bus leave after deciding not to run for it.

Then she looked at me.

“No.”

She looked at the stick.

“I can't help you.”

She looked at me again.

There are people who believe dogs cannot communicate complicated ideas with their faces.

Those people have not owned dogs.

“This was your stick.”

She sat down.

The stick continued out to sea.

◆

We walked farther along the shore.

Without the stick, Reagan became interested in everything else.

She put her nose into rockweed. She investigated a lobster buoy that had washed above the tide line and had been there long enough to fade almost white on one side. She found half a crab shell and carried it for perhaps thirty feet before deciding she had made an error.

I found a piece of green sea glass.

I don't collect sea glass.

I put it in my pocket.

The shoreline ended at a granite outcrop warmed by the sun, and I sat down on it.

Reagan climbed up beside me and turned around three times before lying with her front paws over the edge. Her coat had picked up mud along her belly. There was something stuck to one ear.

I left it there.

From that low down, Oakridge Harbor was completely gone. I knew it was less than four miles behind me. I knew if I climbed back to the truck and drove for seven minutes I would come over the rise and see the church steeple, then the top of the old hotel, then Water Street dropping toward the harbor.

But sitting there, none of it existed.

I could not see my store.

I could not see anybody else's store.

Nobody could come through a door and ask me whether I had the book with the blue cover.

Nobody could call my name from the café corner.

Nobody knew exactly where I was.

That last one occurred to me and stayed for a while.

Not in a dramatic way.

I am not a person who wants to disappear. I like being known. I like walking down a street and knowing who owns the van parked badly outside the bakery. I like knowing that if my truck doesn't start, I can walk two blocks and find somebody with cables. I like that Mrs. Lessard knows when I change my hair and that Theo knows which window in my building sticks and that Sarah can tell, from across the store, whether I have actually heard her.

There are costs to that arrangement.

One of them is that it is difficult to have an afternoon nobody knows about.

The water moved against the rocks below us with a small repetitive sound. Out toward the mouth of the inlet, sunlight had broken into thousands of white points that appeared and disappeared too quickly to look directly at.

I took the piece of sea glass out of my pocket.

It wasn't very good sea glass.

One edge was still sharp.

I put it back.

Reagan sighed beside me.

“Long day?”

She didn't move.

I scratched the place behind her ear where the fur is softer.

There was a small brown leaf stuck there.

I took it out.

She lifted her head, looked at me briefly, then put it back down on her paws.

We stayed until the sun moved behind the trees.

◆

On the drive back I kept the windows down.

The temperature had started dropping, but after five months of driving with the truck sealed tight against winter I wasn't ready to put the glass up.

The road smelled different every few hundred yards. Mud. Wood smoke. Salt water. Something green I couldn't identify because nothing looked green yet.

Reagan slept again.

When we came over the rise into town, the harbor appeared first.

Then the church.

Then Water Street.

I slowed at the intersection.

The store was down there.

From that distance I could see the gold lettering on the window but not read it. The afternoon sun was on the glass, turning it into a mirror, and for a second the building looked unfamiliar to me.

Not wrong.

Just like a place that belonged to somebody else.

I had the strange thought that this must be what everybody else saw.

A bookstore on a street.

Nothing more complicated than that.

Then a person came around the corner carrying a Bell Hardware bag and I recognized Theo from two blocks away by the way he walked, and the feeling ended.

I turned toward Pell Road.

Reagan woke up again.

This time she didn't object.

◆

At home, I opened the kitchen window.

It had been shut since October and resisted for the first six inches, then gave all at once and went up hard enough to rattle the glass.

Cold air came through immediately.

The house smelled different with it.

I fed Reagan.

She ate as though the afternoon had been physically demanding.

I made toast and stood at the counter eating it while the light went out of the backyard. There was still a dirty shelf of snow along the fence where the sun never reached. Water dripped from it steadily into the dead grass.

The forecast said forty-one tomorrow.

Thirty-eight Friday.

There was a snowflake on Sunday, although by April the weather app seemed to use the snowflake mostly as a threat.

I put my plate in the sink.

When I took off my jeans, the piece of sea glass fell out of the pocket and landed on the bedroom floor.

I had forgotten about it.

I picked it up.

Green. Clouded on both sides. Not old enough. Not round enough. Worth nothing.

I carried it into the kitchen and put it on the windowsill.

It looked stupid there by itself.

I left it.

The next morning it was thirty-nine degrees and raining.

By eight-fifteen, three different people had told me we had been lucky to get the weather yesterday.

I agreed with all of them.

I did not tell anybody where I'd gone.