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  Then, into the frame of Miranda’s watery vision walked Dix. He took the tool from her mother’s hand and gently, carefully, showed her what branches to clip. Miranda watched as he pulled at a twig, pointed to the exact spot to snip, used a finger to demonstrate the angle, and then handed the clippers back to her mother. She seemed to be paying close attention, but the burst of effort must have worn her out. She snipped a few twigs, then dropped the shears where she stood and wandered away. Dix followed her, keeping a respectful and watchful distance. Like a well-trained sheepdog, he herded her gently toward the house, through the front door, and in the direction of the hallway that led to her room.

  As he returned, Miranda cleared her throat. Dix came and stood over her shoulder. He made a quick survey of the piles of paperwork spread across the dining room table. Miranda wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  “Looks like you need a lawyer,” he said.

  “It seems I already have several of them,” Miranda replied.

  “Well, your father had quite a few, that’s clear,” Dix said. “But I think you need a lawyer to help you with all his lawyers.”

  Miranda nodded. Dix took up a pen, wrote a name and number on the back of one of the manila envelopes, and then, before leaving her side, let his large, gnarled hand rest over her small, delicate one for just a moment. The feeling—a rough, comforting towel against shower-softened skin—lingered long after he was gone.

  Warren Bessette had always lived within, and rarely ventured out of, the heavily treed and sparsely inhabited six-million-acre Adirondack Park, defined by a light-blue outline on maps of New York State. He’d been to Vermont several times. Blurry events to him now—a relative of his wife’s got married, a client wanted to show him some land he intended to purchase, a friend took him fishing. There were also the few days he and Celine had spent wandering around Burlington’s bricked-in streets and driving the nearby back roads between desultory and inconclusive appointments with specialists. All these exposures left a bad taste in his mouth that he couldn’t quite source but suspected had something to do with the stiff superiority so many of the residents of Vermont expressed toward their own state and its inhabitants. He had also spent time in Albany, the capital, first for law school and then much later, when the doctors there finally diagnosed and tried to treat Celine’s rare cancer. He liked Albany—its unapologetic scruffiness, architectural mash-ups, tree-and-row-house-lined neighborhoods nestled up against one another, and the rowdy political chatter of its pubs and coffee shops. He even forgave the place his memories of watching his wife waste away at the hospital because he remembered how carefully and gracefully they had cared for her.

  He and Celine were both forty-one when she died, and he had never remarried. He had no desire for companionship other than hers. For a while, various women tried chatting him up at the post office or grocery store, a few came into the office to discuss legal matters and quickly tried to turn the conversation to more personal, social topics, but the grave coolness of his demeanor gave them no toeholds for intimate exchanges. He had grown up with Celine. They didn’t become a couple until their last year of high school, even though her long black hair; pale, freckled skin; and thin red lips that readily broke into a sly smile had always been an indelible presence a couple of rows back in algebra class, a few tables over in the cafeteria, or passing him as she strolled up the aisle in the school bus, her stop two before his. Her slender silhouette stayed by his side as they graduated high school, went through college together at Plattsburgh State, and lived for the years of law school on a busy Albany street, in a tiny apartment that smelled of garlic and basil from the Italian restaurant below. They then returned to the mountains, where he opened his practice. Her lithesome grace was so soothing to him, even in memory, that all the doors to intimacy she had nudged open were available only to her. He had enough closeness with her—he felt the residues would last him the rest of his life.

  Warren’s law practice focused on the passages of life. Home purchases, divorces, custody issues, wills. It often troubled him that his services were called upon for far too many unhappy occasions. Somehow he had not considered that when he decided to become a “country lawyer,” as the slicker, noisier, more ambitious classmates in law school had called his sort of practice in light mockery. Most of his clients were locals, and he was sometimes paid for his services with a hind of venison or a season of snowplowing, remuneration he valued as much if not more than money, as his needs for cash were few. Sometimes summer people came to him for work on real estate transactions or for local grievances with a neighbor, and on occasion, for work on things they didn’t want their lawyer back home to know about.

  Charles “Chick” Steward had requested Warren’s services a few times. First, to buy his land, then to try to buy some adjacent land a neighbor didn’t want to sell, and then to get advice on a dispute with the Adirondack Park Agency. They got along fine during the first transaction, but Chick had not liked the answers Warren had given him on the other matters. He wanted Warren to be more aggressive, to represent him more forcefully, to find a way around laws that were intended to protect the park and respect its “Forever Wild” statute. Chick Steward had always expressed disgust with what he called “that damn blue line.” Warren did not share Chick’s opinions. He was respectful and reverent toward what he felt was an admirable, flexible, progressive, and unique process of managing and preserving public lands while allowing for a range of private enterprise and ownership. He once pointed out that they were fortunate to live in the largest park, protected area, and National Historic Landmark in the continental United States. When Chick responded with a dismissive wave of his hand, Warren stopped engaging him in any sort of personal or professional conversation. After that, the two men were cordial when they ran into each other but didn’t strain for politeness. This was no burden, as they didn’t travel in the same circles. Warren didn’t golf, preferring a glass of warm milk with a splash of maple syrup and a convoluted mystery or dense history book to the greens. Warren also had no interest in representing men who were accustomed to using money to get their way. He had heard rumors of Chick’s shady real estate transactions, his unethical and risky business dealings. Most people had. It was a small valley. Gossip traveled on every gust of wind. Most people also just shrugged it off. They’d come to understand that was the way things were done “downstate,” and in “the city.” Warren had met Bunny Steward once or twice. She was a slender, brittle woman who seemed to be under an invisible and yet constant strain. He couldn’t imagine it was easy being Chick Steward’s wife.

  When Dix brought Miranda in to see him, Warren was surprised to find that Chick and Bunny had produced such a lovely, diffident daughter. Miranda seemed so callow, as if she’d never heard a harsh word or suffered a disappointment, even though he knew the last year or so had been full of tragedy. Her hair was honey colored, her eyes faded-denim blue, her build slight but not insubstantial. She was almost beautiful—all that kept her from it was a sense that her features didn’t seem quite reconciled—and she had a gossamer quality to her demeanor that was striking. Warren recognized her as someone who immediately, unknowingly, unintentionally, tapped into a man’s protective instinct.

  He was aware that her father had died when a tree branch had fallen on him in a storm. He could imagine the bluster and bravado that had sent the man on his stupid, ignorant errand to stand under and look up into a groaning, decayed tree while the wind and rain whipped around him. He had heard of the brother’s death in a car accident almost a year before the father’s. He imagined the mother and daughter must be fumbling in grief. There was a washed-out, worn-thin, translucent quality to the young woman’s skin.

  After Dix led Miranda into the office, he started to leave. Miranda looked up at him in alarm, so he sat down next to her instead. Warren waited for them to explain their business. Miranda remained quiet. Dix looked at the empty, expectant face beside him and then took up a thread of brief
, simple introductions. Miranda’s father had left a lot of what appeared to be unfinished business behind, Dix explained. There were no other relatives. Miranda’s mother was . . . he paused before settling on the phrase “not well.” Miranda could use some help sorting through things.

  “Dix says my father respected you,” Miranda told Warren in an unsteady voice. “I am a bit overwhelmed. I don’t know what exactly I’m supposed to do.”

  If her father had respected him, this was news to Warren. Not that it mattered. Miranda was just being polite. She had those highly honed, formally polished, and deeply ingrained manners that kept other people at a slightly uncomfortable distance. Warren knew she was not aware of this; it was just something natural to her sort of people. He also had had enough dealings with her father to suspect the man had left quite a mess behind, and that Miranda might need much more help than she could possibly imagine. He was glad she had a friend in Dix. There was also no way this inexperienced, indulged young woman could suspect what an asset Dix could be to her. Warren knew that he was one of a very few people—or perhaps the only person—who knew just how many subtle, sophisticated, and largely hidden skills and assets Dix possessed.

  Miranda placed a box of envelopes on Warren’s desk. He skimmed the return addresses. All New York City. All a lot of trouble.

  “I will be happy to help you,” Warren told Miranda in a voice he had long practice at keeping neutral. “I appreciate your trust.”

  Miranda nodded.

  “This may take a bit of time,” he said.

  It was a warning to her, but a subtle one. He didn’t want to scare her. Just prepare her. He met Dix’s eyes briefly. In that moment, he knew that Dix suspected just what a large and twisted mess they had to untangle.

  Marshall Dixon Macomb was, by nature and experience, a solitary man. He was an only child of parents who were comfortable enough with each other’s company that they rarely sought any other. They transferred this serene self-containment to him, and he grew up with trees and hillsides, dogs and horses as his companions. Having nature and animals as his ever-present, endlessly interesting, and yet soothingly neutral best friends left him regularly unsure how best to relate to humans. He found people were forever explaining in excruciating and, to him, irrelevant detail what they had done or said or what someone else had done or said. He could never quite understand what all this retelling of things already done and over was all about. Sometimes people would try and plaster some sort of larger meaning onto their stories, but it all seemed like so much regurgitation and a waste of time to him.

  This urge to tell, or “share,” as it was commonly called, often layered with griping about things beyond one’s control, was an impulse he lacked. The sun always came up, but sometimes it was obscured by clouds; a grand tree fell down in a storm and became a nurse log for other trees; a deer died in a hard winter, giving lots of other small animals an important source of protein; cute baby birds also sometimes pushed their siblings out of the nest; foxes hunted both vermin and new chicks; mothers took care of their young simply because hormones compelled them to. He had little philosophy in him other than a dogged desire to do quality work, to be kind and helpful when called upon, to leave things better than he found them, even if that meant simply picking up a discarded can or candy wrapper on a trail. He never considered how rare and decent these qualities made him.

  But others did. Some, anyway. Dix was a man who was either relied upon by people who valued what he offered or underestimated by those who did not. There were a few people, like Miranda’s father, who did both. Dix didn’t mind. He liked caring for things, even if those things belonged to other people. Even if those other people didn’t properly appreciate the things he was caring for.

  Dix had always seen Miranda as someone who belonged to other people. She was from away. She was a little sister in a wealthy family. Dix was dimly aware that her parents, like most summer people, assumed a man like Dix made his way through the world with his hands and had little in his head and less in his pockets. They assumed he was uneducated, unambitious, quaint, like an old farmhouse they admired as they drove by but would never want to live in. Ambition was a quality they defined in a very specific way, having to do with the quantity of financial resources available, square footage of houses owned, brand names of automobiles driven, stature of job titles held. These people never considered that ambition could be directed toward a quieter life, a life that took far less of a toll on a person and a place.

  Dix first met Miranda when she was in high school and he was back home after college and a couple of years working for a land stewardship organization in Albany. He had started mowing lawns and doing odd jobs while he looked for work in the field. Little conservation work was forthcoming, but the handyman, carpentry, and caretaking work was plentiful—the summer people responded favorably to Dix’s reliability, rugged looks that seemed to fit the mountain environment, and ability to speak in accurate grammar and to produce professional paperwork such as estimates and invoices. They never considered where he might have gotten these skills, just saw them as a welcome fluke, like an errant balmy and sun-filled day in the middle of March.

  To Dix, Miranda was a distant thing. It was not so much that he found her unattainable as that he had no desire for her. She was quite simply something not useful in his world. Like her father’s Mercedes-Benz, she was from and for a different sort of place. He noticed how she grew into her looks, how her various features caught up with one another and created a pleasant tableau. Like so many of these summer people, she was attractive but indistinct, well bred but lacking a certain crossbred vigor. Which could also be said of her demeanor.

  However, during the last two years, he’d begun to notice a change emerge in Miranda. It wasn’t just maturation. A serious and assessing expression had entered her face. The automatic adoration that had been there when she looked at her father evaporated. The automatic annoyance that had been in there when she looked at her mother also disappeared. She occasionally came over to Dix while he worked and asked if she could watch while he cut down a dead tree, sharpened the mower blades, or prepped the beds with compost and peat moss for her mother. She took an interest in the garden and asked Dix’s advice on what varieties of tomatoes he’d suggest she get at the nursery. Sometimes she brought him a cup of coffee if he was there in the morning, a glass of lemonade if it was the afternoon. She started working at the local CSA farm and got sunburned cheeks and shoulders, bug-bit arms, chapped lips, and blonde streaks in her hair. She wore these rougher edges well.

  After her brother was killed, he noticed that she became more solemn; after her father died, she seemed bruised in some deeper part of herself. Dix watched her search unsuccessfully for the source of her pain, a dog after a distant scent. When her mother started to decay, he watched Miranda become fragile, a thing in danger of being broken. Given as he was to fixing things, he had an almost continual impulse to step in to her, take her in hand, patch her up. He resisted, reminding himself that emotions were not things his toolbox could address. So he fixed things around her instead. He wanted to give her fewer things to worry about, even though he knew she would not notice, much less fret about, the things his eye leaped to: a loose gutter, a dull blade, a leaning trellis.

  Then she started asking for his help. Not just with the things around the house, but with her mother, with her finances. He knew she had nowhere else to turn, but still he was touched that she reached out to him. He was surprised by the raw tenderness beneath her needs, that the things she asked for required neither his hands nor his tools but his common sense, cool head, and stalwart ways. Slowly, called upon in this way, his heart, which had been for him a mere functional thing, began to make its other uses known.

  Miranda tried to find some way to talk to her mother about their “affairs.” She had almost given up on conversation with her entirely but began slowly wading back in, first with just small observations about the weather, a bird she saw, what she was
harvesting at the CSA farm. Her mother began to respond with a mumble or a nod. A small phrase, “That’s nice, dear,” or “Good for you.” One sunny morning, Miranda tried to lure her mother to sit with her at the kitchen table.

  “I got some of those peach preserves you love, Mum. Come,” Miranda said, patting the cushion on a chair. “Come sit and have breakfast with me.”

  Her mother tottered over, wary, sensing a trap. She rubbed her forehead, raked her fingers through her hair. Miranda remembered that for most of her life, her mother wouldn’t even leave her bedroom until her hair, makeup, and clothing had been carefully arranged. Everything always subtle, tasteful, nothing to attract attention, tightly controlled. Miranda watched as the disheveled woman at the table took a sip of coffee, carefully chewed a piece of toast. Spread the rest with jam and took another bite. This was progress. Her mother swallowed with effort. Washed everything down with more coffee. Miranda poured her some juice. She drank it down. She looked somewhat restored. Her eyes were less cloudy.

  “Mum,” Miranda said tentatively, “we have some things we need to discuss. We have some things we need to take care of.”

  Her mother looked up at her, wide-eyed and childlike.

  At least it was eye contact, Miranda thought.

  “We’ve got to think about the Connecticut house,” Miranda said slowly, enunciating each word as if her mother were hard of hearing instead of broken down. “I don’t know if you want to keep it.”