Bedding Down, A Collection of Winter Erotica (28 page)

She put her fingers up near her earlobes self-consciously,

wishing she’d worn a hat. Or that she’d never chopped her hair

into what she’d thought was a respectable teacher’s cut.

“I mean, it looks good,” he said. “I like it.”

“You don’t have to say that,” she said.

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“I know.”

They stood and looked at each other while Dulcie’s heart

thumped in her chest. The sound was so loud she thought she

should be able to hear it, but there was only the crack of tree limbs bending beneath the snow. She wondered what he’d been

doing while she was gone, if he’d gotten married, if he still loved apple pancakes.

Travis moved closer, and for the first time, she could smell

him, above the crisp cleanness of the snow. He smelled of

woodsmoke and cider, and something else that she couldn’t

name, something wet, like wool.

“They still call you Dulcie?” he asked.

Dulcie could only nod. She couldn’t tell him about her teach-

ing job in the city, how the students had called her Miss Becker or Sara. She thought of herself always by the nickname Travis

and her grandma had cooked up for her, even though no one

had called her it for years. Not even her grandma had remem-

bered in the end.

Travis pulled off his glove and held out his hand. After a

second, she took it. His palm was warm and soft against her

cold skin. The touch sent sparks through her, like accidentally hitting an electric fence, only nicer. She felt her face flush at the state of her knuckles, cracked and raw from working with the

maple taps.

“Dulcie, pleased to meet you,” he said, like they’d never met.

Like she’d never beaned him with her grandma’s pitchfork.

Like he hadn’t leaned over and kissed her one summer after-

noon, their lips stained blue and sticky sweet from raspberry

ice pops.

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She had to laugh and try to pull her hand away. But he didn’t

let go.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry about your grandma. Ada was . . .”

He swallowed.

Dulcie’s stomach cramped into the ache she’d been keeping

down with too much worry and work. She pulled her hand from

his and pressed the back of it to her eyes, feeling the winter sting of tears starting. She refused to cry; she hadn’t yet and she wasn’t going to start in front of him.

Travis made his lips into a circle. The whistle that came

out was long and loud. For a second, she thought he was whis-

tling at her, but then she heard the sound of paws through

the snow. A short black and brown dog appeared, his legs so

short or his ears so long that the tips of them brushed against the snow.

“Agate,” he said, when the dog bounded up to brush against

his legs. “Meet Dulcie.”

When Travis looked at Dulcie, she thought she saw that his

dark eyes were wet at the edges, too. “Agate’s good for sadness,”

he said. Agate ran around Dulcie’s legs twice, and then licked a bit of snow from her boot. “And a little comic relief.”

Dulcie put her pail down and went on her knees to pet Agate,

and when the dog licked her face, she knew what that other

smell was on Travis. Not wet wool, but clean wet dog.

Dulcie could have stayed there all day, with the warmth of

Agate’s fat back beneath her hands and his nose stuffed into her neck, but eventually she stood.

“Thank you.” She raised her pail. The way it sloshed was how

her stomach, her whole body really, felt. She tried to keep her
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voice light. “I’d better get moving. Maples to go before I sleep, isn’t that what Frost said?”

“Something like that.” He smiled before he reached down

and gave Agate a scratch. The dog whined, low and soft, her

belly against the snow. “How goes the maple syrup business?”

“I have no idea,” the words came gushing out of her, as though

his question had opened a tap she didn’t even know she had.

“I’m sure I’m driving it into the ground, and it’s only my first season. The sap’s not really running yet. Not cold enough. And I nearly broke my thumb putting the taps in and I can’t remember

how to do this and there’s the money and does anyone even buy

handmade maple syrup anymore?”

“Whoa,”
Travis said. “Breathe.”

Dulcie took a breath. “Holy crap,” she said. “I don’t know

where that came from. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Sure you do,” he said. “You know, you can tap all the trees

on our land if you want. We always told Ada that, too, but she

never did. I don’t know why.”

Dulcie knew why. Never burden, never borrow, never beg.

That was Ada’s philosophy, and she’d lived it until the day she’d died. Didn’t matter that she’d freely give maple syrup to every neighbor within a five-mile radius. It didn’t matter that Travis’s offer might have been the one thing that could save the business—even from here, Dulcie could see the sugar maples across

the property line, just waiting to be tapped—her grandma

would have said no.

“That’s really sweet,” she said. “But I don’t think I can.”

“Well, if you change your mind,” he said. “Or I could give

you a hand with the boiling when you’re ready. I forced Ada to

let me help her the last couple years.”

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Dulcie swallowed down the bit of guilt that was rising in her.

Those last few years, when Ada had been falling sick. Sure, she’d never let on to Dulcie how sick she’d been, but Dulcie hadn’t

come back to check, either. Not until it was almost too late.

Never burden, never borrow, never beg.

“Thanks,” she said. “But I have to do this on my own.”

It wasn’t until she saw his face change that she realized she’d said the same words when she’d left him to go to Syracuse. Why

had she gone anyway? Sometimes it seemed she couldn’t remem-

ber. She’d wanted to be independent, to prove that she could

make it outside the small world of her grandma’s syrup farm

and the tiny town where she’d been raised.

She started to say something—sorry or how she hadn’t meant

it, not now, not then—but Travis had already tucked his hands

into his coat pockets and was turning away. The wind picked

up, blew a fresh round of snow off the trees between them. “See you around, then,” he said. “C’mon Agate, time to go.”

The dog gave Dulcie’s boots one last lick and then bounded

off after Travis. She watched them go, Travis with his long

strides and Agate with his short, quick ones, and she couldn’t

shake the feeling that, once again, she’d managed to screw up

something important.

For the next week, Dulcie hit that stand of trees three, four times a day in the hopes of seeing Travis again. Once, she thought

she’d heard Agate bark; it was only a little yip though, and she couldn’t be sure.

She hadn’t seen Travis again, not once, not even a footprint.

She hated to admit how much that had bummed her out. She

told herself it was about his trees, that she did want to tap

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them; she’d worked out a plan, to offer whatever he could

use—deadfall for firewood, syrup, her grandmother’s canned

peaches—in exchange for the trees. She knew it was more than

that, though. It was his smile, the way he’d choked up about

her grandma, the way he’d called Agate in for comfort. But

most of all, the way her body had felt, standing in front of him in the woods, and the way that it felt after she’d turned him

down.

She couldn’t bring herself to go to his house, stand on his

porch steps and tell him that she was sorry, that she wanted him in her life. Besides, what if he had a wife, a family?

So she wrote a note. Simple. “I’d love your help with the syrup, but only if you let me pay you back somehow,” and she slipped

it into a Baggie and tacked it to the maple tree. Every time she went back, the note was still there, in its plastic bag. Every time, she took it down. And every time, she put it back up.

She’d gathered more than enough sap to do her first batch

of syrup days ago but hadn’t been able to bring herself to start the process until this morning. Doing a batch meant spending

the next two days in the kettle shed, boiling and stirring the sap into syrup. It meant no possibility of running into Travis in the woods.

But it had to be done. If she waited any longer, the sap would

spoil, and she’d waste the best sap of the season. She’d spent the morning stacking wood beneath the huge kettle in her grandma’s syrup shack. Dulcie loved this syrup shack, this small shed where she’d spent so much time as a child. Nothing in it but

the huge black kettle, a blue-flowered love seat that had to be a hundred years old, and the bodice rippers her grandma had read

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while she’d boiled the sap. She’d kept bags of them out there

that she bought up from garage sales and then traded back and

forth with her friends.

Dulcie lit the edges of the kindling beneath the kettle and

fanned her fire to life. The fire had to stay at a steady temperature: too cold and it would die, too hot and it would burn itself out.

The first fire licked at the bottom of the kettle and went

out.

“Damn it.” She got down on her hands and knees to rearrange

the wood. Was she going to fuck everything up her whole life?

Some days it felt like it. She’d come home too late to be any real comfort to her grandma, not arriving until she was having more

bad days than good. She was fine as a teacher, she’d guessed,

but her life in the city felt like she was acting poorly in a bad play. Pulling on skirts and stockings and keeping herself in the prim style of teacher hood. And, now here she was, back in her

childhood home, potentially flubbing not only the business her

grandmother had taken years to build, but also a friendship—a

friendship was all she’d allow herself to imagine—with a man

who’d been her best friend from the time she was eight until

she’d gone away.

Finally, she managed to get a fire going that stayed. Inside

the big black kettle, the sap heated and began to boil. Dulcie

stood, stirring it with one hand, reading one of her grandma’s

old bodice rippers with the other. Dulcie used to laugh at the

descriptions—all the euphemisms and clichés—but, now when

she read it, she kept imagining Travis. She kept thinking there were parts of the story that didn’t seem so bad.

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The shed smelled of sweet water and woodsmoke, and the

air shimmered with heat. After all the time she’d been spend-

ing in the snowy woods, Dulcie had to admit that it was nice to be inside, surrounded by warmth. It wasn’t long before she was

sweating over the fire, though. Every time she turned a page of the book, her fingers were so sweaty they smudged the ink. The

big wooden stirring paddle was making her hand sweat. Was

she supposed to stir it constantly? She couldn’t remember, so she did, just in case. But standing over the fire was killing her.

“Jesus, Grandma,” she said. “How did you do this every

day?” Dulcie layered off her jacket and sweatshirt. Her boots

and socks went next; it felt incredibly good to keep her bare

feet on the cool floor. As the sap boiled, she felt herself sweating through the fabric of her shirt.

She could take her shirt off—her grandma had often worked

in her bra. One of those big white ones that Dulcie always

thought made her breasts look like big eggs. But Dulcie’s bra

was a purple lacy thing, what she’d worn under her teacher’s

outfit when she wanted to feel sexy. She couldn’t make syrup in purple lace, could she?

It only took another few degrees to convince her that she could.

Who was going to see anyway? She was in a syrup shack in the

middle of nowhere. She stripped her shirt off and sighed. Better.

It felt odd to lean over the kettle half naked, but who cared?

The sap was boiling away happily, the fire had stayed lit. Maybe she was getting the hang of this, after all.

Dulcie was halfway through a book set in the moors of some

foreign country when she heard the jingle of a dog tag. And then his voice: “Hello? Dulcie?”

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Her body reacted to his voice, to the way he still called her

Dulcie. “Yeah, in here,” she hollered before she even had time

to think. The jingle came closer, and then she could hear the

crunch of boots on snow.

“Oh shit,” she whispered. She dropped the book into its bag

with all the others and tried to hide the bag behind the rocking chair. “Crap, crap.” Dulcie grabbed her T-shirt and slid it over her head just as she heard Travis outside the door.

She wiped the sheen of sweat off her face with her sweatshirt

and brushed her short, wet hair back off her face.

“Dulcie?”

She opened the door just a little, feeling the surprise rush of cold air against her face. Travis, dressed in just jeans and a blue T-shirt, stood outside. His arms were crossed over his flat belly.

She wondered how he wasn’t freezing; the temperature differ-

ence was making her shiver. Agate rolled in the snow behind