The lake was already dark at the edges when she set the duffel on the porch boards. She unzipped the front pocket and read her sister's note again, then folded it twice and put it in her jacket pocket instead of back where it came from. The porch had two Adirondack chairs and a citronella candle in a mason jar, both of which belonged to someone else entirely. She sat in the left one because it faced away from the parking lot and toward something she couldn't name yet in the dark.
She stood at the window so long the coffee stopped steaming. The dock had a cleat missing near the far end, and a rope tied to nothing, and she kept looking at the rope. The refrigerator clicked off and the silence was so complete she could hear a car somewhere she couldn't see. She pulled the note from her pocket - didn't open it, put it on the counter next to the sugar bowl.
She drove the nine miles to town with both windows down and the radio on a station that faded in and out, and when she parked she left the car running for a moment longer than she needed to. The hardware store had that smell, turpentine and sawdust and something older, and a man near the key-cutting machine didn't look up. She found the brushes on a low shelf between wood stain and a box of picture-frame hooks - and she picked the one with the wooden handle worn smooth at the grip, the kind that had already been held by someone who knew what they were doing. The cashier put it in a bag without asking, and she carried it back to the car and set it on the passenger seat like it was going somewhere.
She turned the phone face-down on the dock boards and it rocked once on its corner before settling. The paintbrush lay across both knees and she pressed her thumbs into the worn groove of the handle the way you press a bruise. A dragonfly landed on the rope tied to nothing, then left. The water was the color of old glass and it held a cloud she couldn't find when she looked up.
The heron landed without a sound on the mossy end of the log and pulled one foot up into its feathers and went still. She stopped pressing her thumbs into the brush handle. The sun moved enough to change the shadow of the dock post by a foot and she watched it happen. When she looked back the heron hadn't moved and she hadn't moved and the rope tied to nothing hung the same way it had been hanging.
The bag from the hardware store sat crumpled between the seat and the door, and she hadn't smoothed it out or thrown it away. She passed the grain elevator at the edge of town and the radio found its station again - one song finishing before she could catch the name of it. The sun was low enough to come straight through the windshield and she let it hit her face without pulling down the visor. The brush in its sleeve didn't roll when she took the long curve home.
She found a jar under the sink with a rust ring inside it and filled it halfway from the tap and set it on the porch rail. The watercolor block was still in the paper sleeve from the art supply aisle and she peeled it back and mixed a color that didn't match anything on the water but was close to what the water had been an hour ago. She painted the rope. She painted it twice, and the second time she didn't look at the rope at all.
She left the wet block on the rail and went inside and washed the rust ring out of the jar and set it upside down on a dish towel, which was something she hadn't done for anyone. The note was still next to the sugar bowl. She moved it to the windowsill, not to read it, just to give it the last of the light. When she came back to the porch the painting had dried a shade lighter than she'd mixed it - and the rope in it was the color the rope actually was, and she hadn't tried for that at all.
She ate standing at the counter, crackers from a sleeve and a wedge of cheese she cut too thick, and when she finished she didn't rinse the knife right away but left it on the cutting board with the cheese still on it. The second Adirondack chair had a spider web strung between the arm and the back slat and she saw it catch the porch light and didn't break it. She sat in her chair and pulled her knees up and her socks were the wrong socks for this, striped office socks - and she looked at them for a while. The citronella candle in the mason jar had burned down to a nub and she didn't light it.
She woke before light with no reason to, the blanket twisted around one leg, and lay there listening to the lake make a sound like someone turning a page. The note on the windowsill had fallen behind the sugar bowl in the night and she found it when she reached for the coffee, and she held it a moment and set it back without reading it, because she already knew what her sister had written - and that was enough. She stood on the porch in her striped office socks until the cold boards came through the wool and the tree line separated itself from the sky, and she watched that happen slowly, the way you watch a word come to you.
The bread she'd brought was two days old and she ate it anyway, tearing pieces off over the sink, and a crumb fell into the drain and she watched it sit there. She found a pencil on the sill above the stove - someone else's pencil, the eraser worn to the metal collar, and she turned it in her fingers and then set it next to the painting on the rail. The sun hit the watercolor block and the rope in it went briefly bright, the way a thing does right before it fades.
She turned the painting face-down on the rail and it didn't mean anything, she just did it. The jar with the rust ring was still upside down on the dish towel and she picked it up and filled it with water again and set the pencil in it - which wasn't what pencils were for. A jay landed on the far Adirondack arm and looked at the spider web and left without touching it. She stood there with nothing in her hands.
