The Cartographers(63)

“You’re so late!” Eve cried over the rumble of the stove. “We were about to eat without you!”

“We come bearing gifts to make up for it,” Romi said, and held up the case of wine in her arms.

Eve came to retrieve the box immediately, eager, overhelpful, saying how Romi didn’t have to carry that, she could take it, and how kind it was to buy it for us. Romi smiled back, as bemused as ever as to why the longer they knew each other, Eve only seemed to get more shy around her, rather than less. If anything, Eve should have felt freer to come out of her shell with her, Romi often said, since they were so alike.

She didn’t know about the almost kiss. And I pretended I didn’t, either.

“Franny boy!” Daniel called. “Get out here! Does this look medium-rare to you?”

I sprang for the back door and immediately turned their propane down, and then Tam came out, you still in Bear’s arms, and turned it back up, plus more. “None of you know how to grill,” she laughed. “Go get the plates and cutlery ready.”

All of us were in such a jovial mood—still loopy from the party the night before, drained from the long drive, and happy to be all together again, in a new place, with our new project—I remember the energy of that night. The possibility, the excitement. It was like we could all feel that something momentous was about to happen, even then. We just didn’t know what it was.

Eventually, Daniel and Wally wrestled control of the grill back from Tam, determined to prove themselves, and I went inside to help Romi and Eve finish up some side dishes and collect you and Bear. Tam, happy for the break, was sitting at the table already drinking some of the wine and laughing about something when we all came back out onto the deck.

“It was just a dollar!” she was saying.

“We’re supposed to be saving every penny!” Daniel returned, laughing just as hard. “That’s why we’re all the way out here, away from the temptations of the city!”

“What’s all this now?” Bear asked, already nervous he’d been left out of something.

“It turns out that our beloved geniuses Tam and Wally are no better cartographers than we are,” Daniel said.

“One single dollar!” Tam shouted, waving something over her head, and they all laughed again.

Daniel was teasing her, it turned out, because she and Wally had been talked into buying some little piece of junk from an antiques store because the owner had been so friendly. I took it from her as they continued to joke, opening it up.

He was right. It was an old road map—a worthless little thing. Faded, tattered, out of date, and something we likely could have found in the glove compartment of any old truck sleeping in a retired couple’s garage.

“It’s more than half a century old,” Daniel guffawed, so loud that Wally almost dropped the tongs by accident.

“That’s the great thing about places like this,” Tam fired back. “Nothing changes, so the map’s probably still completely accurate!”

This earned her much laughter and a toast from all of us. Then something happened to the grill’s fire, and Daniel bent down beside Wally, their faces far too close to the flames, investigating the issue.

“Here, take it, before they burn themselves to death,” I gasped, and tossed the map at Tam so I could pull them both back by their collars. Tam scooted over so Romi, Eve, and Bear could sit down, and they began pouring the wine.

“What about here?” Romi asked, looking at the half-refolded thing. “Where we are now?”

“I bet we can find it,” Tam said.

Wally had given Daniel and me the tongs and gone over to the table, now bored with the grill, and held Tam’s glass for her as she used both hands to lay the paper flat on the table. “What are we doing?” he asked, taking a sip.

“Finding where we are on our map,” Tam smiled. She emphasized the word our, as if the little scrap was actually precious and the rest of us just couldn’t see it, which drew a round of chuckles. Wally grinned, and drank more of her wine. “Okay, what did we drive up? Interstate 17?”

“Yeah, to County Road 206,” I called.

Tam put her finger on the page and traced one of the snaking lines. “Hey, there’s Rockland,” she announced triumphantly, pointing at a tiny white dot. “That’s the last town we all passed before reaching this house,” she said. “Where we got the groceries.”

“Where we got the wine, too,” Romi added.

“So that’s been here for at least sixty years, then,” Wally said, shrugging.

“And this house is just past the town, so we’re what, five miles north?”

“No more than that, for sure,” Eve agreed.

We all watched vaguely in between sips of wine as Tam continued to trace her finger up the 206 past Morton Hill Road, where our new home was nestled into a little grove just before the land fully turned into the wild Catskills.

“Wally,” she said suddenly, and he looked down at the map, to where she was pointing.

Right in between both places, there was another dot along County Road 206.

A little town called Agloe.

“Do you remember another town between this house and Rockland?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, brow furrowed. “Just fields. We would have seen it out the car window if there was.”