The Other Shoe by Matt Pavelich Page A

once one day there was the enclosed porch they’d use in all but the worst weather for their dining room.
    Karen guiltily preferred those times when Henry wasn’t feeling well because that was their time for talk and for the routines that were theirs, their experiments—serviceberry tea, the works of Charles Dickens, her embroidery. It was the first reliable intimacy she’d ever known. Their tuneless, easy little jokes were mother’s milk to her, and in the beginning, and for a long time after that, Henry was horizon enough, and it was just as well because, as they discovered before they’d been together a month, anywhere they might go together as a couple—the grocery store, the post office, ten minutes at a gas pump—these were all to be stations in a hell of swiveling chins, and checked glances, and mean and tawdry giggling. Henry and Karen Brusett caused, especially among women, an unmistakable disgust wherever they went, either that or some weird glee, and Karen wondered if it would have been so if they were not timid, if they’d flaunted their arrangement. When together in any public place, they could not avoid constant, naked staring, and neither of them enjoyed being an abomination, though it was, if anything, better than being mistaken for daughter and father. In time, they began to make most of their trips away from Fitchet Creek alone. Their pleasure in each other was odd, they knew, and must necessarily also be private.
    But they did often fish Flathead Lake that first summer. Out on the water they could be two people seen distantly on a boat, of no particular sex, or age, or relationship, and the mackinaw fishing was very good that year in the channel between Wild Horse and Cromwell islands. Also in that season their farmstead burst into production, and they were eating fresh eggs every morning and an eventually obscene abundance of zucchini and the fancy pods from a Chinese pea vine. They built the roof over the trailer and rolled out asphalt roofing overit, a redundant forest green. Cordwood accumulated on the rise, cabbage grew. Henry, with a new tan over his faded and ancient one, was looking better, too.
    â€œWouldn’t it be great,” she asked one day, “if the ground never froze? That would be a dream of mine.”
    â€œYeah, but it does,” said Henry, “up here it freezes hard, and long about February, we’ll be like twins in somebody’s belly. A person’s only got so many secrets and tips, you know—you could run out of things to say. There’s only so much. You probably better have a hobby.”
    â€œWe’ll talk,” she said. “We just do, don’t you think? Like we’re makin’ up for lost time?”
    â€œYeah,” he said. “But there’s only so much a person can say.”
    He saw the dust on every surface, the rust in every mechanism, and his resignation would at times wear on Karen until she noticed that her husband was too old for her. It was not as though she never noticed.
    Hunting alone that fall, she filled both their deer tags. Henry said he was feeling a little used up, feeling like he’d better not try the woods again for a while, and he’d started spending many of his days doing some secretive thing at his shop. So she hunted alone, and she toured the National Bison Range in her Triumph, which she also drove to Missoula one Saturday to hear a droopy, famous folk singer. She drove well into cold weather with the top down, and every mile of it put her that much farther from high school and her time as Miss Dent. They could have their Jesus and their periodic tables—she had Henry and her little income and her luxuries, and so, she supposed, she could let bygones be bygones.
    On their first Christmas together, Henry gave her a hammer dulcimer with a rosewood sound box and hammers worked in yew. “Those pegs,” he said, “I had to buy. For those I had to