“I don’t think you’re coming out here tomorrow.”

I thought about what to say. There was a distant humming on the line. “I think I can still make it.”

“Don’t be a dope,” she said. “You’ll kill yourself.”

Out of a hundred different feelings I can have in one minute when I’m talking to her, one feeling in particular came into focus now. It was not the first time I’d felt it, this little nagging doubt, that maybe I wanted something out of all of this. Something real. And that maybe she had woken up that morning not wanting anything at all.

And then the thing that always came right after that. The certain realization that I was being a complete ass.

“Besides,” she said. “Don’t you have people staying in your cabins? If it’s snowing all day, don’t you have to stick around to plow them out?”

“I’ve got one family,” I said. “The rest of the cabins are empty.”

“Okay, but even so. That one family will need you around, won’t they?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “If there’s a lot of snow falling, yeah. I can’t be away for too long.”

“So maybe it’s time to try out your idea.”

I opened my eyes. “What’s that?”

“You know, about me coming to your place.”

“Here?” I looked around the cabin. This was my idea? To have her come here?

“Yeah, why not? I’ve got four-wheel drive. And I’ve never even been there yet. You always come out here. I’m starting to feel guilty.”

One single bed. The old couch, sagging in the middle. Two rough wooden tables. This sad wreck of a place, after fifteen years of living all by myself. This is what she’d see. My God.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This cabin-”

“You don’t want me to see your bachelor pad?”

“I’m not sure I’d call it that.”

“Yeah, I don’t think anyone says that anymore. Bachelor pad, that was from the seventies, right?”