I remember Dale taking off his cap and rubbing the back of his head. He wasn't convinced, and it would have been dishonest for any of us to be convinced. A question was not a market, and an intriguing grain line could disappear inches beneath the surface. He told her that if she wanted to know what she owned, she would eventually have to open the log. She agreed. Neither of them said how she was supposed to pay for that.
On the drive home Maren stopped at a grocery store and counted money in the parking lot before buying chicken, carrots, and a carton of milk. She told me later that she stood for a minute in the aisle with a bag of good coffee in her hand, then put it back because the cheaper one would do. That is the part of business stories most people leave out. Risk rarely arrives as a glamorous table of potential returns. It often arrives as a woman returning coffee to a shelf because she bought a tree that morning.
Annie was doing fractions when her mother reached the rented house. She looked up and asked whether Maren had bought anything at the auction. Maren said she'd bought the largest piece of wood she had ever owned, possibly the largest in the county. Annie asked whether it would fit through the shop door. Maren said no. Her daughter thought about that for a moment and then asked the kind of question children ask before they learn how expensive it can be to sound foolish: "Then why did you buy it?"
"Because there's something in it I want to see," Maren said.
Annie accepted this as perfectly sensible. She had spent her childhood around unfinished furniture, and to her a pile of rough boards often contained a kitchen table or a staircase before anybody else could see it. She wanted to know if the new wood was red like the trim on the little jewelry box her grandfather had made her. Maren said it was redwood, yes, and that some parts might be very beautiful. She didn't say that beauty wouldn't pay a trucking bill unless somebody could be found who wanted it.
They ate dinner at the small table by the kitchen window. Annie told her about a school project on the history of northern California and asked why everybody in the old photographs looked so serious. Maren said cameras had been expensive and being photographed used to feel important. Annie said she thought the log should have its own photograph before anybody cut it. Maren promised to take one, and her daughter made her repeat the promise twice.
When Annie went to bed, Maren spread the transport estimates across the table. She wrote numbers until one in the morning, penciled them out, wrote them again, and eventually opened a shoebox containing her father's old notebooks. There were sketches of logs he'd cut, measurements from jobs nobody remembered, and observations written in the thick-handed script of a man who worked outdoors. On one page, next to a drawing of a burned tree, he had written, "Recovery wood carries the history of what it had to grow around. Don't trust the face; look through the turn."