He could see the air fading into a new season. Wouldn’t be for a few weeks, but he could see the first glimmer of autumn blurring at the edges of his lens. He sucked in his breath, as if it were the last puff of his last cigarette (no, this time, he had really quit). Good god, what a summer.
Lee fidgeted beside him. Merle knew she didn’t know how to just sit and take in the lake like this. He’d been trying to teach her all summer what mornings were supposed to be. He’d sent her back up the hill more than once for breaking into the silence with plans for the day. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought her here. Aren’t these things supposed to be a measure of something? This place was his family and she didn’t fit in. She was trying, he supposed. He could have been too hard on her. She was beautiful, even dressed down like this and out of her element, but her awkwardness made him, on more than one occasion, contemplate throwing her into the water. He always threw a few rocks instead.
“I’m going to head up and start packing,” she said, finally. “I want to be on the road by 4:00.”
He tossed a rock in the water. “It won’t take that long. You’ll run out of things to do.”
“I’ll wander down to the Logans’ when I’m done. Tammy asked me to stop in before we left. I’ll probably stay for tea.”
That was the one thing Lee had managed to do: make friends with the neighbours. It wasn’t a point in her favour; he didn’t like the summer villagers. “Fine. I’ll see you when you’re back.”
She kissed his forehead as if she could guess the source of his terse responses. Maybe she could. He contemplated reaching up and catching her wrist. Trying one more time to explain why this moment was so much more important than packing up and taking leave. He knew she wanted him to, but he didn’t have enough rocks nearby.
As her footsteps crunched out of earshot, he pulled his camera out of his pocket and flipped through the pictures he hadn’t transferred to his laptop. Lee making faces over fish guts, Lee pouting at the rain, Lee barreling off the end of the dock, Lee trying to pretend she wasn’t scared of the canoe. He began absently deleting the digital recollections. She would sulk when she found out, but he was such a fucking bad photographer. He only got the damn thing because she thought he should have some record of their first summer together. First. She had complicated the one simple place left in his life. It was going to be a long drive home.