Hell.This is more than an observation. This is... dangerous.
The next day, while Jace is up the mountain, I work at the kitchen table. Evelyn’s inventory lists consume me as I build a lending catalog on index cards and match titles to households I haven’t visited yet, using her notes. I love losing myself in what people read.
The delivery issue, which has stumped Evelyn, prompts a deep dive. An hour passes, and then another, until a pattern emerges. Why didn’t I see that before? Clustering twelve cabins into one loop negates the need for four separate trips.
As I design the batching system and write it up, my hand cramps, but I don’t stop. This is too important. Once I’m finished, I call Evelyn from the porch.
“Ros,” she marvels, “you just saved me six months and a second driver.”
After we hang up, I settle on the porch, enjoying the fresh mountain air. Success warms me, even if the cabin I’m working in belongs to a man of few words who has barely met my gaze since I arrived. Spool’s paws click on the porch. He sits at my knee.
I scratch behind his good ear. “Don’t tell anyone, but your owner piques my… interest.”
Spool sighs and lies on my foot.
In the afternoon, I study his books for real.
That first night, I was too wet and exhausted to see more than the shelves and the stacks. The second, everything was still too new. Now the books have a hold on me.
The living room shelves are packed three deep in places. Paperback westerns with cracked spines, the paper so soft it gives under my thumb. Thrillers aren’t organized. Literary fiction is shoved in between two volumes of WWII history. A whole shelf of poetry hides behind larger books.
A copy ofLonesome Dovewith worn pages held together with a rubber band captures my attention. I get down onto the rug and pull books out one at a time.
The poetry is the surprise. Wendell Berry. Mary Oliver. James Wright. A first-edition Kenyon on a top shelf.
I’d filed Jace Redmond undergrumpy mountain man, possibly unsafe,and waited for data to confirm or refute. Now I’m not sure what to think.
The front door opens. Boots. Sawdust. Pine and the faint scent of saw oil. He stops in the doorway, my cross-legged form on the floor, holding the McMurtry paperback. The air jams.
I swallow. “You have incredible taste.”
His lips thin. “I read.”
“What are you reading now?”
He pulls off his work gloves one finger at a time, his gaze flicking to me, wary. “Cormac McCarthy.”
“Which one?”
“Blood Meridian.”
“God, that book wrecked me.” My skin prickles. “Two days, and then I couldn’t read anything for a week. Nothing felt big enough to follow it.”
His eyes find mine. Not angled. Straight on, for the first time. Dark eyes, recalculating. Surprise breaks through as if I speak a language he thought was forgotten. Three seconds. Maybe four.
Then he drops his gaze, hangs his gloves on the hook, and walks to the kitchen.
I sit on the rug, and my lungs are tight. I have a feeling I’ll carry those three seconds like a stone in my pocket.
By six-thirty in the morning the next day, the coffee system has become my new skill. The dented percolator. The grounds in the tin above the stove. The burner that runs hot.
As I pour myself a cup, Jace’s boots sound in the hallway. Then he stands in the doorway, silent as usual.
“Morning,” I say.
“You figured out the percolator.” His voice rasps with sleep, then his eyebrows lift, a flash of surprise before his expression snaps back to its usual guard. “Move.”
The kitchen is tight, but I stay by the counter. “I’m almost done.”
