Friday I went back out in the daylight with Wes’s cordless drill and a box of deck screws.
I am fifty-eight years old. I was not about to sit eight feet up a tree in the dark on a ladder I had not checked with my own hands. I put my full weight on every rung. The fourth one gave a little, so I went back to the shop and cut a new one from a board Wes had left leaning against the wall, and I screwed it on myself. Four screws each side. I shook the rail. I stood up on the bench and bounced a little.
It was as sound as the day he built it.
I left the sign where it was. I left the metal stand alone. I did not want anything to look different when they came.
Saturday morning I was up at four.
I filled Wes’s steel thermos. The dented green one that rode in the cab of a county road grader for thirty-one winters, rolling around on the floorboards every time he hit a drift. I put on long underwear and two pairs of socks. Then I took his brown chore coat off the hook by the back door, where it still hangs, where I have not washed it, because it still smells like him. Diesel and cold air and that soap he used.
I put on an orange stocking cap. I was not hunting, and the law does not make a person wear orange just to sit in a tree. But on opening morning there are rifles in every draw in Boone County, and I was not going to give anybody a reason to mistake me for anything but a woman.
I did not take a rifle. I had no use for one.
I took three cups.
I don’t know exactly why I took three. I just thought of Wes, who never in his whole life let a man stand in his yard without offering him something. A cup of coffee. A cold beer. A seat on the tailgate. That was who he was.
I left the pickup in Don’s yard, behind his machine shed, so there would be no truck sitting at my gate to warn anybody off. His kitchen light was on. He came out onto the step in his sock feet with a cup in his hand.
“Schmitt’s at the corner,” I told him. “If you hear anything you don’t like, you call him. Don’t wait for nine.”
He nodded slowly. “It’s twenty-two degrees, Marlene.”
“I’ve got his coat on.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just stood on the step and watched me go.
I crossed the road with a flashlight. And when I got to my gate, I stopped.
The chain was hanging loose. The padlock was open, hooked through one link of the chain, the way you’d leave it for somebody coming behind you.
Somebody had already been by. That morning, or the night before. Somebody with a key had come and opened my husband’s gate for strangers.
I knew there was only one person that could be.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.