Tess

Tess woke up an hour or two before me, which wasn’t at all unusual.

By some weird and fortunate twist of fate, we’d closed on our house of thirty years and placed the proceeds in the money market fund our financial advisor suggested, two days before the fund was swallowed up in one of those new breeds of mega-merger. By the end of the week the fund had multiplied ten times, and we pulled $2.5 million out, our one and only foray into the market, just three days before it all caved in on itself.

And suddenly, miraculously, we could retire.

We moved to the mountains, about two hours north of Denver, into a remote valley where our nearest neighbor was two miles away, though we had yet to meet him. Plowing our long driveway was a bitch that first winter, but the Jeep plow that came with the house never let us down, and we reveled in the solitude and isolation we’d both dreamed of for all those years as we raised our children and watched them start families of their own.

Tess tiptoed from the bedroom and went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee and read part of the morning paper, the only connection we had to the real world anymore, a reminder of all we were so grateful to leave behind: shady dealings by politicians, problems with gangs, potholes and boompa-boompa cars.

She probably stopped reading after she’d finished her daily bowl of oatmeal, both of us battling cholesterol now. Who knew it would ever be like this? We’d made it through the problems with my prostate and her scare with breast cancer. We took multivitamins and glucosamine and actually began trying to eat those five helpings of vegetables a day, measuring our time in the new aches and pains and difficulty accomplishing tasks that once were so easily completed. Recently, Tess had begun having those damned bladder problems TV commercials so obliquely describe in their adult diaper ads, and her sudden dashes to the bathroom had become almost comical.

I don’t believe either of us ever realistically imagined that we’d get old, something about the Baby Boomer imperviousness, I suppose. But we were, and we knew it. Tess was going to turn sixty that summer, a threshold I’d passed a few years before.

But we knew how fortunate we were, too. How sheer luck had saved us from our lifetime of no planning, no preparation, living in one of our kid’s converted garages, probably.

The night before, we’d grilled steaks on the redwood patio that faced west over the rolling valley that spread out and away from our house. The first of the spring flowers waved in the breeze as the sun set, and we shared a bottle of inexpensive but tasty red wine. A mule elk led his harem across our valley, the blue and purple wildflowers reaching up for the last of the orange and red sun.

Later, we made love in the chaise lounge, the cool air tickling our sweaty backs and limbs as we curled up in a blanket afterward and watched the moon rise huge and yellow.

She rinsed her breakfast dishes and set them in the sink, then showered and dressed, pulling on what she called my “old man” sweater, a moth-eaten wool cardigan with suede elbow patches that I’d worn for years while reading or watching TV in the evenings.  She and the kids would tease me, calling me Mr. Rogers or offering to buy me canes or those folding walkers.

Strange, though, isn’t it, that I’d stopped wearing it after we’d actually retired and moved to our paradise in the mountains.

Tess might have stuck her head in to check on me before leaving, but I don’t remember waking.

She pulled her Toyota from the garage and shut the door, then headed down the long dirt driveway to the forest service road and toward town twenty miles away along a winding series of switchbacks and blind curves we’d both learned by then to navigate even in the nastiest of conditions, though we’d been terrified at first. The steep and craggy rock-face of the mountainside so close around the corners, the sheer dropoffs into the valley far below, into oblivion it seemed.

And later, early in the fall, if I remember correctly, the deputy sheriff I’d come to know during that long summer stopped by for a beer and a chat on the deck, the breeze coming from the north by then, the first smell of snow in the air. Soon, but not yet.

Between us, he said, but he wanted me to know, now that enough time had passed. And he showed me pictures I hadn’t known about, six or eight of them taken one right after the other.

There had been no skid marks, none at all. But if I looked closely, he said, pointing with his finger, I could see where she’d accelerated.

He’d seen it before, he said, turning his face to the valley, the pink of the setting sun shining in his face, his half-finished beer dangling loosely from his fingertips.

I followed his gaze to the top of the first of the undulating hills and thanked him and told him I knew.

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