But the main room—that was a different matter altogether. For this he had removed a partition and turned two rooms into one. He scraped and sandpapered and rubbed and waxed the old blackened interior logs until they shone with a mellow golden glow, walls and rafters. “Taffy,” Addie Barnett said, viewing the rich patina of the wood. “Or cream caramels. It looks as if you could eat it with a spoon. What in the world did you put into that waxing formula, Thor? Molasses and melted gold and a few strands of Chris’s hair? It’s like—like—it’s almost apricot, like—–”

“Like Chris,” Ross Guildenstern said. He sometimes came in and helped Thor with certain mechanical jobs, he was very good at this, he could take apart or put together any kind of mechanism. Paul Barnett was not much good at these manual or mechanical tasks but he puttered about amiably, he sometimes brought the children with him, he said that Addie could drive a nail straighter than he could, but he was better at keeping the kids from falling into the water.

Ott Decker, too, got into the way of dropping by, ostensibly to see what progress Thor was making, and to admire his handiwork. Usually he took off his coat and fell to work. Thor was, in fact, rather embarrassed by the number of Baranof young men who seemed suddenly to take an interest in his handiwork.

“Chris coming back?” they asked, casually, as they drove home a nail, painted a bedroom wainscoting. “You’re fixing this up for her, aren’t you?” It was as though, in working for her comfort or delight, they somehow moved closer to her life.

“No sign of her coming back,” Thor replied. “I’m planning to live here myself until somebody else moves in. Live here as I always have, in that one room there at the back. I’ll move out altogether if—when—someone else takes over.”

“You will! That’ll seem funny. Where?”

“There’s a one-room cabin down by the water, I bought it a couple of years ago.”

Paul Barnett said, one evening when the late-summer daylight still lingered in the midnight sky, “Furniture. Addie and I wondered where the furniture was coming from to go with all this Devonshire cream.”

“Blue, don’t you think?” Addie suggested. “The couch and cushions blue, or maybe a pair of chairs. Blue against all this golden wood. Heavenly! And Chris being so blond.”

Surprisingly, Paul Barnett disputed this. Usually he was too wise to battle the ironclad Addie. “She isn’t a blonde at all. She’s tawny, like a leopard, like a lioness.”

“Like an apricot,” Ross Guildenstern said again. He was down on the floor tinkering with an electrical outlet. “Blue is too washy for Chris.”

“Just a minute, you two boys.” Addie laughed. “I’m kind of a tawny type myself, if you can spare me a look, but I don’t see anybody battling about whether I’m a lion or a tiger or an apricot.”

Thor was installing bookshelves on either side of the fire-place. He spoke, now, over his shoulder, quietly. “Christine is in Seattle, and likely to stay there. So don’t fight about whether she’s flora or fauna. I’m the one who’s living in this log house.”