“Hey, there’s a sunset,” Gail says. 

No one was expecting this. We’d spent the last few hours of the afternoon with rain dropping pleasantly on the screen house tent, water spattering our arms through the netting. When it came time to cook dinner we’d all made multiple scurrying trips in raincoats to our various trucks. The bears were shredding tents in earnest this summer so we locked  everything up, ferrying supplies back and forth to the makeshift camp kitchen set up in the big open air shelter. This final night was a cozy, drizzly last dinner, the end of a camping weekend we’d all been dreading for a year, ever since Kerry died last July. 

For going on 30 years Kerry and Bruce had pulled together an all-inclusive, mish-mash of friends, acquaintances and family, for a full-blown camping festival in the north woods where the Appalachian Trail ends. Kerry’s touch was all over this. Would Bruce even have the heart to go forward without her? It was impossible to imagine a hike with no Kerry making sure everyone made it, happy to hang back with the slow pokes nursing their ailing knees, ready to escort the overcome back to camp while everyone else forged on. How could there be camping without Kerry? Impossible to conceive. But Kerry had made her position on Baxter clear before she passed: carry on. 

But what about the hand sanitizer? Who’s going to hang the hand sanitizer in the outhouse? (No one would.) Getting ready for this camping trip I was wildly worried about small things. My brain was un-equipped to accommodate the unacceptable mystery of no more Kerry. I missed her with such abiding disbelief of her nowhere-ness. And I felt with ferocious regret all of the years Gary and I had flaked out on these camping trips. I  am not an entirely enthusiastic camper. 

But this year was different. In honor of all that we’d missed and all that was now and forever more missing, we went. And it was fun! It was fun even with the tears that sometimes leaked down my face. After a full day of hiking and cavorting about in the out-of-doors, there is just something that feels right with the world about a big circle of people in lawn chairs, drinks conveniently stashed in the chair arms, a big communal spread of chips and crackers & cheese in the middle. 

That last afternoon gathered together, the conversation ricocheted from wastewater treatment to romance origin stories. I wanted to hear Bruce and Kerry’s one more time. It’s a good story. I’d never heard Bruce tell it.  

“You were a bouncer when you and Kerry met, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. One weekend Kerry and her friends came in. They wouldn’t leave at 2 am when the bar closed. I had to go over and throw them out.”

Bruce said that like a person who expected to have the responsibility of setting people straight which is not far from the truth. Over the course of his working life he’d graduated from bouncer to lawyer to judge, sitting on the bench for the last 23 years of his career. 

“A couple of nights later Kerry shows up with a friend to see the band playing. On her way out she hands me a scrap of paper with her number on it and says, ‘You can call me sometime.’”

This kills me. I can’t imagine having the swagger for that.

“How long did it take you to call?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” Bruce said. “A week later Kerry shows up by herself.” 

“By herself?” I knew this but want to linger a moment and work this through. It’s a flirty move but a practical one. The practical part was easy to see. Kerry was wildly competent in her ability to see the way through pretty much everything. (She’s English so first get yourself a cup of tea..) The flirty part…that would have been more under-the-surface by the time I came to know her when our kids were in grade school together. She did have a kind of low-key way of swishing around, stirring up general good feelings and joie de vivre. Does that count as flirting? With who? And how is it that I was only now fully registering the swish of those hips?

“Yeah, she came by herself. I thought that was a little suspicious,” Bruce said. “She goes and sits at the bar for a while then comes back to me and asks where the restroom is. Bruce gets a yeah, right look on his face.

“I give her a look and point to the big red neon sign straight ahead in full view that says, ‘Restrooms.’”

On her way out she stops and says, “You didn’t lose my number did you? Why haven’t you called?”

I can hear it, her playfully prodding him to get on with it and ask her out.

This is also the point I begin to pick up on a slightly confused tension building in Bruce’s storytelling between a need to be in command of himself and the possibility that he’s perhaps a touch intimidated by Kerry’s command of herself.

“I told her, ‘No, I didn’t lose your number. I just didn’t take it too seriously.’”

“What, are you shy?” Kerry had asked. She could always get right down to the bone of reality.

“Do I look shy?” Bruce had responded. As he told us this he gestured to the 6’4” length of him. I can picture him standing there, drawing himself up in front of Kerry with an expression of “Shy? Don’t kid yourself,” on his face. He has the perfect face for that, features that look like they could be chiseled out of stone. With his curly gray hair and sculpted visage he can look a little like Aristotle when he wants to. 

That would not have intimidated Kerry. She would dish it right back. I can picture her in court arguing cases before any judge, standing her ground with unshakeable reason and good cheer. She was the best kind of lawyer, ushering her divorce clients toward common ground and away from bloodshed, especially when kids were involved. 

“Well why didn’t you call her back then?” I asked. 

“I was going to but…” Bruce pauses, looking a little sheepish. “…I just didn’t know for sure if she was messing with me.” 

“Oh, so you were intimidated!” If he was intimidated it wouldn’t have been unwarranted. Kerry was beautiful. 

“She may have been a little out of my league,” Bruce conceded with a grin. 

What he hadn’t known at the time is that Kerry had instantly seen something in him that did it for her in a way so deep there was no question about what needed to be done. It wasn’t like she gave her number out every weekend. Or ever.

“Well, did you call then?” I demanded. 

“I called,” Bruce said. 

And the rest, as they say, is history. It goes so fast. And then the sun sets.

……………………………….

With the weekend winding down and the dishes done, we’d been lingering in the shelter after dinner, picking at a bowl of M & M’s.

All of a sudden, Gail says, “Hey, there’s a sunset!”

“A sunset? Really there’s a sunset?” I ask Gail in confusion. It was so cold and drizzly, the dark already on its way down, the idea of anything but the final blanket of night seemed far fetched.

But Gail is sitting on the side of the picnic table facing west so she would know. I look over my shoulder and see a spectacular flush of salmon at the seam line between sky and earth. Kerry had a sweater in exactly that color. She would wear it with a scarf that now hangs over my banister.

It gets quiet for a moment while we all look out at the sky. “How can there be a sunset if it’s still raining?” I ask. I don’t know these things. 

Kim wanders out to check. “It’s still raining a bit but it’s nice!” She says. “Come on out!” 

We gather outside. Heads tilted, we stand there in stillness looking up into the sky, trying to square the rain with the unexpected show of brilliance. We stand there in our smallness, taking it all in. The moment feels bigger than we know what to do with.

Then Kim says, “Hey, there’s a rainbow.”

We turn the other direction and there it is, all the colors arching across the sky like a gateway.

The sublime has us surrounded. It’s a moment of stupefying wonder. And then I know.

Kerry is everywhere, in the thinness of air.