It was a Friday at the start of summer when Drew stopped at Ace to buy Sheetrock screws and spackling. He had to fix the bathroom wall where he’d lost his temper after a conversation with Lucy about her mother. In the same aisle, he spotted his client Mike Khoury angrily fanning a wheel of color chips. “This bloody card lists twenty-seven whites!” he shouted at no one in particular. Mike was thickly built, a windbreaker stretched over his chest, a 49ers ball cap atop his head. He was an eye surgeon.
“You can’t go wrong with Colonial or French Cream.” Drew knew these names because Lucy had just painted the bedroom in their rental, but he felt obsequious making this suggestion to a client. Mike gave Drew a look as though Drew had butted in with this advice. “Do I know you?” He let his mouth remain open. “I wrote the deed restrictions on Bluebird. I’m Drew Moore.” Granted, he hadn’t seen Mike since last summer, and it was his wife, Carol, who had been in Drew’s office daily as they worked through the paperwork adapting the Khourys’ title documents to Montana property law. Drew had noted that their little bit of flirtation seemed a bad idea immediately. “Oh Drew, what’s the matter with me? Of course I know you. The nouns are the first to go. I’m glad I got you—you know that fella we bought the land from? He retained a ‘right of interment’ on the contract. Did you notice that?”
“That’s not what you asked me to look for.” Mike’s instructions were very tight; Drew knew it was because he didn’t want some local running up a bunch of billable hours. All he wanted was the title research and easements.
“You might have given it a glance. The guy plans on burying family members on the property.” Before Drew could say anything, Mike thumbed his collar and wandered off, still gazing at the color wheel. He looked back at Drew without seeming to see him.
While Drew was waiting in line at the cash register, his phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and, seeing it was an 800 number, answered reluctantly. “With God, every loss is a gain. I would like to offer you renewal and restoration, garlands instead of ashes, and healed hearts. Disruption and sadness shall be banished. God will lift you up. Sixty-first chapter of Isaiah.” He had gotten more of these since Lucy’s mother, Kay, fell ill. Kay had been an unrelenting thorn in his side, raising hell way out in California, living in a cut-rate retirement community next to an impoundment lot. When she’d had knee surgery, Drew had bought her a walk-in tub, a brutish appliance that held more than a hundred gallons of water, and he’d upgraded the boiler to run the whirlpool. When his mother-in-law opened its door, letting out all the water, Drew had paid to replace the downstairs ceiling and its soggy shorted-out electrical features. When he gently suggested waiting for the tub to drain before exiting, she replied, “How was I supposed to know that?” He objected mildly that she might have been electrocuted. She said that would undoubtedly make him happy. He knew Lucy’s mother was about to die, but the slow pace of her illness was just wearing him out. Maybe she’d bought medicine online and had given his cell number as a contact. In any case, the buzzards were circling like in an old western. “Renewal and restoration,” indeed. He longed to see Kay in a canister.
*
Drew and Lucy Moore lived on Sylvan, past the green house with all the dogs, in a poky little Queen Anne fixer-upper on a half lot. Next door to the Moores, an unhappy young couple had rented a room on the first floor of an ancient duplex, a house with debris in the yard that included bedsprings and shopping carts. When their dog barked in the middle of the night, the young man came to the door scratching his beard and called, “White dog, mellow out!” The couples shared a landlord, a bachelor and fitness buff named Jocko who lived alone with his parrot, Pontius Pilate. He was tall, lean, and Lincolnesque, with hollow cheekbones and washed-out blue eyes. Drew called him Li’l Abner. Jocko dressed in bib-front overalls and T-shirts with slogans like “Smash the State” or that were relics from antique rock concerts—Mott the Hoople, Captain Beefheart. Jocko and his never-seen mother owned most of the rentals in town. Sometimes Jocko mowed the lawns in a green thong, showing off a small dream-catcher tattoo on his shoulder. One afternoon he was still in the thong when he came to the door and, through a small opening, told Lucy that the rent was past due. Lucy promised to pay up soon. Jocko leaned this way and that, trying to see in, but Lucy didn’t budge—the young wife next door had told Lucy that Jocko offered a rent discount with certain conditions, conditions that she’d decided not to mention to her husband, who “had a record.” There were times when Drew came home from meetings with the city council, the clinic board of trustees, or even a trial and found Jocko loitering around, kicking his Hacky Sack as part of his never-ending fitness program. Drew wanted to drive over him with his old Dodge Dart. The fact that Jocko was their landlord seemed to stand for everything they hadn’t gotten in life.
*
Nineteen miles west of town, Drew’s client Mike and his wife, Carol, summered in a neighborhood of attractive homes along the meandering Bluebird Creek, formerly Bog Creek. The development was known locally as Snob Hollow. While the occupants were not all snobs, there was little time in the accelerated northern summer for mingling with locals, what Bluebird Creekers called “fraternizing.” But the Khourys were different, self-consciously inclusive, inviting often inappropriate local guests—gun nuts, fellow pickleballers, smiling evangelicals, conspiracy theorists, and cabinetmakers—to their gatherings, despite the likely awkwardness. Mike was fond of saying that you can learn a lot by observing fish out of water. “I admire their neolithic lifestyles and the curious pidgin with which they pour out their hearts.” So, Drew decided, he was a snob after all, though proud of his inclusive politics.
This was Drew’s hometown, but it was not Lucy’s. She was from Omaha, and when she grumbled about Drew’s town, he would say that Omaha was nothing to be proud of. They met at the University of Nebraska, he in law school and she in the school of design, industrial architecture specifically: her senior project was portable helicopter hangars for exploration, or war. Drew thought they were minimalist homes informed by Japanese design. Anyway, that’s how they met. They had more than enough love for each other, but after they settled in Montana, the detachment they felt from their surroundings was unhelpful and they worried they’d grown drab.
He’d had more social connections here once, but it was a workingman’s town and his going to law school had converted the friendships to painful acknowledgments. Lucy said that getting somewhere among people going nowhere was a mistake, and she made no secret of her feeling that she was stuck—not only with his car (his last tidbit of continuity; he’d had it since high school), but with a town that she sometimes called, not unreasonably, a dump. She wasn’t excited by Drew’s law work, which was mostly small-scale real estate stuff, nasty divorces, fiery car crashes, and that one shooting at the dollar store with spent 9mm cartridges all over the skin-care section. And while she wished she could leave her job in home health care, here, you took any job you could get. So Lucy was studying for an appraiser’s license, sheer desperation. To appraise what? Drew wanted to know. She was an attractive girl and had only recently said, “I need to take this pulchritude somewhere where it’ll do me some good.” Drew’s eyebrows went straight up at that. Soon after Drew set up his practice, he and Lucy had taken a two-mile stretch of highway under the Adopt-a-Highway program in its name. Nobody in this area was interested in the program and so they didn’t have to compete for a stretch close to home. In fact, the last time they headed out, with their bags and safety vests, Drew had the sense they were seen as risible figures, that it might not have been the best advertisement for Moore Law. A cold wind was blowing from the east and the plastic bags had to be run down, requiring wind sprints the motorists enjoyed. Beer cans made up most of the trash. From the window of a black pickup truck, a diaper was flung, narrowly missing them. Drew picked it up gingerly, remarking that it weighed a couple of pounds, and when he dropped the diaper into Lucy’s bag, she exclaimed, “Oh, Drew, we must think of our future. Let’s freeze my eggs!” A big Greyhound flew by with tiny moon faces in its many windows. They ducked into the following gust and gazed at their almost full bags.
Jocko liked to watch Drew work on his old Dodge Dart, but Lloyd Bell, the retired railroader who lived in the green house with all the dogs, was a skilled shade-tree mechanic; he had helped him replace the starter, its solenoid, the distributor, and the ignition cable over one weekend. Jocko seemed fascinated by all the parts of the motor, once complimenting the curves of the exhaust manifold. When Jocko was in the way, Lloyd pushed him aside saying, “Move over, pervert.” In days long before he met Lucy and still had all his town friends, Drew had filled the car with memories—avoiding pregnancy with dodgy strategies like Saran Wrap. But since he had met Lucy, she had been stranded in the Dart several times. She pleaded with Drew to get rid of it and seemed unsatisfied when he explained he’d never get one again. One morning holding a sheet in outstretched arms, its middle pinned with her chin, she offered to have the Dart towed. “You can’t be serious,” said Drew. “It’s not on blocks!” Whatever kept him hanging on to his old car was probably what kept him in this town, clinging to something that wasn’t there anymore.
Not long after that, Kay got Drew on the phone and told him to work hard and get Lucy out of the house, where she was “suffocating.” “I am working hard,” said Drew. She replied, “Yes, but in the wrong way. You’ll lose your shirt.” Whatever he said must have triggered obligatory counseling because the next day Lucy said, “I’m better off without you.” The flat delivery killed him, but it wasn’t quite the end. Together, they looked up “co-equal agency,” then said, “Fuck this.” Their friends saw what was happening and suggested this, that, and the other: trial separation, talk therapy, microdosing LSD. It just wasn’t working as well as it used to, and they couldn’t get off the plateau.
Then Lucy’s mother went into palliative care. Lucy flew to see her in Atascadero, and got there barely in time for her to die. Lucy came back to Montana a few days later, and once her mother had been dead for a month or two, they were back to normal. It was not easy to realize that things had simply changed. “Mother was angry about dying. She was always angry about something, but death was something she could really get her teeth into.” There it could rest, if not depart entirely. The whole summer had been about Kay’s illness.
*
Now it was September and they were heading to the Khourys’ for a party, the first they had been to since Kay’s death. Drew thought Lucy looked great and told her so. “I spent extra time with the warpaint,” Lucy said. She wore a becoming yellow cotton dress that fit her figure well. She touched the tip of her nose with a finger and asked if he thought the car would make it. But the old flivver was ticking along, reminding Drew of happy hours—leaning on opposing fenders under its hood with Lloyd, contemplating the Dart’s latest ailment. Because of the Dart, the Moores had missed a social event at Mike and Carol’s last summer, and Carol, having heard Drew remark that there was no better news than the cancellation of a dinner party, had demanded to know why he drove “junk cars,” which had given Lucy some pleasure. Now he guided the Dart through gentle sage-covered treeless hills and grassy buttes, into a setting sun. A band of antelope moved across the land like a cloud. He wound down the Khourys’ driveway, through a gorgeous old grove of linden, honey locust, and mountain ash. Each loop of the driveway produced an impassable snowdrift in winter, but by then Carol and Mike were on the coast, watching waving kelp fronds from their living room.
Today there was hardly a cloud in the bold blue sky, or only a few anyway. The creek sparkled between brushy banks filled with birds and aquatic insects. By the time Drew parked among German cars, Mike was at the door of their well-kept mid-century modern house in gaucho pants and a loose sweatshirt. Mike shook Drew’s hand while gazing at his old car. “Still runs,” Drew said drily and by then Mike’s hand was on the small of his back, moving him into the hallway. Lucy scooted ahead, knowing how welcome she would be, and indeed Drew heard the cries of guests at her arrival. Mike trailed his finger over the hall table, checking for dust, as Carol appeared in the doorway to the living room, planting her palms on Drew’s chest in assessment. She wore a loose cotton shirt, baggy peach-colored shorts, and espadrilles, and had pinned her hair to get it out of the way. She wasn’t young and she wasn’t pretty, but Drew and everyone else found her attractive. Mike often said that were it not for Carol he’d be “down at Kaiser Permanente filling out Medicare forms.”
Once, with four mimosas under his belt, Drew had kissed Carol in the spot where the refrigerator blocked the view of the pantry. It had earned him a good-natured tap on the chest with a bright red fingernail. “I think the subject’s covered, remember?” She’d pointed through the door at her guests as though Drew could explain them. Now she said, “Terrible about Lucy’s mum,” and averted her eyes. Drew knew Carol well enough to confide, “Good riddance.” He strode into the living room and made a very conventional round of hugs and hand clutching. He knew everyone. It was the end of the season, and it was easy to see that they’d all had enough. Only Jarvis, the veterinarian who looked after Carol’s horse, had tried Mike’s edible marijuana, and it appeared as though his recreation consisted of rising mental problems. Mike pounded him on the back and cried, “It lasts five hours!” Lucy, the pretty weather girl who’d married Jarvis, now studied his unresponsive face and asked, “Carol, do you have anything that wears this off?” As Jarvis struggled to speak, Mike patted him on the head and said, “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.” Jarvis gaped in response. Carol frowned and said, “He’s been fantastic with my horse.” Two dogs came into the living room to inspect the uproar, mutts from the reservation. Carol and Mike adopted only old dogs that no one wanted, and none of them were around for long; Carol took the losses hard. These two dogs brushed against lawyer Christiansen, in blazer and bow tie, and he leaned away from them, pressing his drink to his chest. When Mike and Carol floated the Smith River, Drew fed the dogs for them, producing another pantry moment when Carol showed Drew where the kibble was stored. He never expected or wanted anything to come of these moments; they seemed to have value all on their own.
Mike showed Drew something on his phone that Drew couldn’t make out, maybe an early typewriter. “It’s an Enigma machine off a U-boat. In my house. Other things of interest. You must come, but first get me out of that provision.” Drew stiffened as Theo Wiggins headed his way. He was a middle-aged, strikingly thin man in a floral snap-button shirt that stretched over his tummy, and jeans with the belt sideways, buckle at his hip. He was always pleased to share unremarkable stories of his forebears in a signature hangdog delivery. It left an impression of the homestead era as a melancholy time of plodding people who lacked the energy to go elsewhere. Mike wheeled off, doubtless to avoid discussing the interment provision. Jarvis bumped shoulders with Drew and, still under the effects of his edible, muttered, “This is so fucking unpleasant. Would it be rude if I slipped into the spare bedroom?” But he lost track of the thought, and when Drew noticed him again, he was staring at a piece of paper towel that had dropped from Carol’s hors d’oeuvre tray.
Dale Cassidy arrived late and on crutches, but had obviously come from somewhere else and was really rolling as he brushed his way through the guests, explaining, “Bad tumble. Fucking hell.” He made it to the bar and poured an extraordinary amount of gin into a glass. “Tasmania.” Carol asked when he had been in Tasmania and Hal, deep into his first mood swing, replied, “I’ll let you know.” Carol returned to the group shaking her hand in the air as though she’d burned it on something. She glanced back as she heard Hal say, “What a bunch of phonies.” It didn’t seem directed at anyone, and she hardly let slip her look of exasperation. But she did ask Lucy, sotto voce, “Who the hell wants to go to Tasmania? I hear it’s awful.” Drew observed Carol guiding Theo Wiggins to the bar, explaining that if he refilled his drink, he would no longer care that their home stood on the site of his great-grandfather’s corral. Theo had come home from Iraq harmlessly maladjusted, and his day-to-day helplessness sent him ever farther from his former wife and fed-up children. “Heritage is all I’m about,” Theo explained as he returned to Drew and led him to the front window, pointing out where he planned to bury his mother. He mused, “You only have one mother. Your dad can be any sonofabitch in the world.” Drew thought of raising the idea of cremation as a way around the provision, but his interest just wasn’t there. Let Mike sweat it out.
With each glance around there were fewer people in the room, and Drew asked Lucy if they ought to think about heading home. But then Mike and Carol asked them to stay for a few minutes, and they did, sitting in the den, side by side while Carol nervously adjusted the books and pictures on their shelves. Mike said, “It’s getting to be about that time, back to the slog, and it’s not going to be a soft landing. I lost my best surgeon. First-rate, same-day kind of guy,” he said. “Some nurse. I warned him: ‘The buck stops at the perineum.’ You know what I mean? Huh? Do you?” Drew noticed Lucy’s sharper attention. “We haven’t had a minute to depart in an orderly manner. Wiggins was looking after things, but frankly, he’s not worth a shit. So, Drew and Lucy, I’m wondering if you could pitch in for us and get this dump winterized.” Lucy’s brow deepened. “And the mice, that’s going to be an ongoing issue. Pipes, of course, and you’re welcome to any of the food. There’s a half pound of Black Diamond cheddar in the fridge. You could either forward the bills, or Carol and I could set up a debit card. Carol, was it Colonial or French Cream for the sitting room?” Drew said, “Couldn’t one of you stay for the winter and see to that? Or alternatively, you could stay and empty the mouse traps, see to the pipes, and so forth. Then Carol flies in to spell you.” Mike said, “I guess that’s a no.” He studied his thumbnail. Carol turned from the bookcase, her eyes blazing, and said, “Colonial.”
Riding in the Dart under the stars toward home, Lucy said, “Carol looked like she was ready to blow sky-high.” “At who?” “That’s a great question,” said Lucy. As they climbed a washboard hill, a dying cottonwood at the crest with stars in its leafless branches, Drew said, “Do you suppose that’s who we are?” Lucy tipped onto his shoulder but didn’t reply.
__________________________________
From A Wooded Shore © 2025 by Thomas McGuane. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
