I mean, his voice isn’t good. It’s rough, deep, and dark. Smoky. He can carry a tune well enough. But there’s something raw and real in the way he sang, how he sounded.

“I wouldn’t mind if you played another one,” I say. “My dad…he used to play most of the same songs when I was a kid.”

“Thus the watercolors,” he says.

“Thus the watercolors,” I agree, but I don’t know if it was loud enough for him to hear.

“Uh, how about…” A few idle strums. “Ah. Betcha you know this one.”

Three chords in, and I know it.

“Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” John Denver.

God, this one. Dad would hum this one while he puttered in the garage or flipped the venison steaks, and it was always the last one he played before he put the guitar away. It was his anthem, I think.

I laugh out loud. “Good god, did we have the same father, or what?”

He pauses. “Well, I grew up in the backwoods of Louisiana. You?”

“Atlanta girl, born and raised.” I laugh again, and it feels good to laugh. “When I say Atlanta, though, I’m being generous. Backwoods would be a polite term for where I grew up.”

He picks up the melody again, and when he starts singing, I can’t help but sing with him. If you’d asked me ten seconds ago if I knew the lyrics to this song, I’d have laughed in your face—I haven’t heard it since Dad died. But yet, with the melody on that guitar, his rough-hewn voice singing the words, damn if I don’t sing every one.

Is it weird that it feels better to miss Daddy than Adrian? The old hurt is more palatable. It’s a nice break from the raging, gaping wound of missing my husband.

The music fades, and I sigh. Eventually, I stand up; wrap my blanket around my shoulders. “I’m heading in,” I say. “Good night, Nathan.”

“‘Night.”

When I wake up the next morning, he’s put the thermos on my porch again—I’d returned it yesterday. This time, there’s a brown paper bag with it—a blank sketchbook with thick paper suitable for watercolors, a couple different palates of watercolors, as if he had no idea what’s good or not, so he just got the most expensive they had and the cheapest, and a clutch of different sizes and kinds of brushes. Because it wouldn’t fit in the bag, he’d set the easel on the deck beside the bag.

The easel smells…fresh, like newly sawn wood. It almost looks like he made it. Being a carpenter, it shouldn’t surprise me that he’d make one instead of buying it, but the gesture touches me.