When they bought the cabin, he could no longer deny that they had become survivalists. The called it a cabin, but it was just an old double-wide on a disused strip of ranch land north of Granite Shoals. It had an appendage on one side that had once been a porch, but that had been walled-in by some tasteless prior owner, forming a kind of combination mud room and storage shed. It was ugly, but it had a big tank to catch rainwater, and hook-ups for a generator.
Their Amazon order history slowly filled with non-perishable food and winter clothes. They bought hand-crankable flashlights with built-in radios, and tools, and other strange-but-eminently-practical things that they hadn't known existed. They learned that the phrase "off the grid" has many nuances of meaning, each with its own on-line messageboard harboring a cult of True Believers.
On their many trips to Cabella's, they made a point of buying things decorated in camouflage patterns or blaze orange. At first it was just a joke, but after a while it became their thing, a bond between them. To the cabin they added a wind turbine, solar panels and battery storage, and an electric heat pump and a wood-burning stove for winter. They blew insulation into the walls, and replaced the windows with double-panes. The storage room looked like an ad for The Container Store.
Two huge pecan trees overspread the yard in front of the house. One shaded the solar panels on the roof, so they had it cut down, leaving a pile of fresh logs. The other tree became their patio. In its shade they kept a stackable set of red plastic adirondack chairs, and a small metal firepit for cool nights. They started spending weekends there, dividing their time between making the place livable and taking the boys to Inks Lake Park and Longhorn Caverns and Enchanted Rock. He noticed that she didn't cry in the mornings when they were there.
"You boys almost done out here?" she called from the cabin door. It was the first hot day of April, one of those days that started out cool, then got hot, then cool again. The edges of the property were afire with blanketflower and bluebonnets.
He was splitting pecan logs by the fire pit. The boys were helping. The axe and chainsaw were his favorite of all their survivalist purchases. First, he had sawed all the logs to fit in the woodstove. Now he would spend some time every weekend splitting them. At first he could only manage fifteen minutes of such labor, but over the weeks he had worked up to an hour. Logs became halves, then halves became quarters. As the quarter-rounds fell into piles alongside the stump he used as a plinth, the boys would carry them off to stack along the fence at the edge of the property. Each boy did his part according to his size. The big one would take a log under each arm, and little one would struggle after him holding a single quarter-round in both arms.
She called again. "Boys! Come wash up, then ice cream and bed." She'd been inside painting the walls, and she had that home-improvement-goddess look that had always been his favorite: white tank top, camo cargo shorts, hair up in a long, thick braid, a light sheen of sweat bringing into relief the lines of her face and neck, the ropy muscles of her forearms. He had told her this before, but she never believed him.
"Hey sexy," he said.
She waved him off. "Boys! Lets go!"
"I'll stay out here and finish up," he said.
He split the last four logs in his pile, then covered the axehead and hung it up with the tools. He carried the last quarter-rounds down and stacked them with the others, shoring up the loose spots left by the boys. Then he returned to the pecan tree, turned one of the adironacks toward the sunset, and let himself down into it like a tire deflating. He'd worked hard and now it felt good to sit. The wildflowers seemed to glow of their own light.
She came up behind him with two bowls and two spoons. "The boys are down," she said. "What's going on out here?"
"Just sitting." He pulled another adironack around next to his and she sat and handed him a bowl and spoon.
"I saved you the strawberry," she said.
"Bet the big one didn't like that."
"He'll live."
It was the ice cream of the gods. The sun had set and high clouds streaked in backlit neon strokes across the western sky. They ate in silence until their spoons clinked and rasped on the bottoms of the bowls. Then he set his bowl on the ground and reached over for her hand, and she let him take it. It got dark and the first quarter moon came out above them.
"I like it here," she said, and he almost saw her smile.
In bed that night, he lay waiting for sleep to take him. A dry breeze from the west was in the open window and their bedroom bathed in the smell of mesquite and juniper. Without a word, she slipped out of her clothes and slid atop him. Unsure when he would ever get another chance, he ran his hands along her in the darkness and tried to memorize every detail—her ribs and hipbones beneath his thumbs, the little smooth cups behind her collarbone.
He did get other chances, not that often, but more than he had hoped for. Each time it was she who came to him. And each time it started slowly but finished in a frenzy, mad and desperate, that left them spent. And each time, her face was solemn like she was partaking of a sacrament.
