“Forty dollars,” Dale said. “For an afternoon.”

He said it with his hand resting on the splitter. The way a man rests his hand on something that belongs to him.

It did not belong to him.

It was a red twenty-seven-ton log splitter with a Honda engine. My husband bought it at Fleet Farm six years ago for fourteen hundred dollars. He made the last payment on it with money from selling firewood to the cabin people on the lake. Jim’s own handwriting was on the side of the hydraulic tank in white paint marker. I could see it from where I stood in the doorway of Dale’s shed.

“Forty dollars,” I said.

“The rental place in Rhinelander gets ninety a day,” Dale said. “And you’d have to drive all the way up there to get it. Forty’s a family price.”

He was grinning a little.

Not a mean grin, exactly. It was the grin of a man who has practiced a thing in his truck on the way over, and is relieved at how smoothly it came out.

It was a Saturday in the middle of October. Gray. About forty-five degrees. The kind of day up here in the north woods of Wisconsin when you can already smell the snow that’s still two weeks off.

My son was sitting out in the pickup in Dale’s yard with the heater running.

Cole was sixteen. He had his father’s shoulders. And that fall, he had none of his father’s patience. I’d told him to stay in the truck for exactly that reason.

My name is Becky Thorson. I’m forty-four years old. I drive a propane truck for the co-op.

And I need to tell you how that splitter came to be sitting in my brother-in-law’s shed in the first place.

Jim died in April.

He was forty-eight years old. It was ten minutes to five in the morning. He was sitting at the kitchen table lacing up his boots, getting ready to go sit in a log truck he couldn’t drive anywhere, because the spring road bans were still on.

He put his hand down flat on the table.

He said, “Beck.”

That was all he said.

The doctor told me later it was his heart. He said there was nothing I could have done with the four minutes I had before the ambulance came.

I’ve decided to believe him.