Page 2 of Harvest Moon Mountain Man

"No. Cortland holds. You know that." A beat. "You said it wrong on purpose to see if I'd correct you."

I don't deny it.

"I will always correct you." He starts walking again. Something buried in the set of his jaw that might be amusement, the kind you'd miss entirely if you weren't already looking for it. "Waste of both our time otherwise."

The light starts to fade. Low, slanted, catching dust and the first drifting leaves until the whole orchard goes the color of the fruit hanging in it — every branch backlit gold, the ground between the rows striped with long blue shadow.

I stop mid-sentence, notebook forgotten, and tip my head back. Branches interlocking row to row into a ceiling of red and gold and green, dense enough that the sky only shows through in coin-sized gaps.

For one full minute I forget the words I owe my editor by Friday. I forget the flight home in five days. I just stand there and look up, the way you'd look up at the inside of something built on purpose, for you.

I don't notice Rourke's stopped too until I catch him watching me instead of the trees.

"You're supposed to be interviewing me."

"I got distracted." I don't apologize for it. "It's beautiful. I wasn't expecting that."

"What were you expecting?"

"Rows of trees. Not this." I gesture at the canopy, useless and honest, unable to land on a better word than this. "Like being inside something magical."

He doesn't answer that. Doesn't look away either, and the quiet holds, comfortable, stretching out longer than professional distance usually allows.

Once I’m back at the hotel, I check my messages.

I never once checked my phone the whole time I stood under his trees. I check it now — eleven missed messages, three from my editor — and feel nothing about any of them at all.

I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time before I open my laptop, trying to figure out how to write eight hundred words about apples when what I actually want to write about is the particular gray of a man's eyes when he's deciding whether or not to trust you.

two

Rourke

The city girl is back before I've finished my second morning coffee.

Her boots are already muddy from cutting across the field instead of taking the gravel. Notebook already out, like she's been up since five running through questions she didn't get to yesterday.

"You said you'd walk me through a full day."

"Didn't say that."

"You implied it."

I didn't. But I hand her a bag anyway, because arguing with a woman who's already decided how her morning's going to go costs more energy than I've got to spend before eight a.m., and because some part of me wants to see if she'll actually use it or just carry it around for a photo she never takes.

She's bad at it at first. Grips too hard, bruises the skin under her thumb, the mistake every green hand makes on day one. By the third row she's fixed it without me saying a word — watching how I hold the fruit, matching it without being told twice. I notice that. You can tell more about a person from how they work a row than from an hour of talking at them, and what it tells me about her is that she doesn't like being bad at something and doesn't quit until she isn't.

"McIntosh first." Mostly to herself, checking the tree against her own memory. "Because it won't hold."

"Right. You remembered that."

"I remember everything you tell me." Plain. Not flirting. Fact, the way she says most things. I keep picking so I don't have to think about how I sort of wish she was flirting.

I’ve had reporters over the years. Polite, gone within the hour, notebooks already full of what they'd decided to write before they showed up. None of them could've named a varietal with a gun to their head.

We work most of the morning without much talking, which suits me fine. Every so often she asks something that isn't for the piece at all — how long before a graft actually bears fruit, what happens to the ones that don't take, whether I've thought about grafting onto old rootstock instead of pulling a tree and starting from nothing. Good questions. The kind that means she's looking at what's actually in front of her instead of what she came here to write, which is rarer than you'd think in someone carrying a recorder.

Around noon, I find her stopped again. Head back, staring at the canopy the way she was yesterday afternoon. Doesn't matter that we're an hour into the pick and the crew's two rows ahead waiting on her hands to catch up. She just stands there, apple forgotten in her palm, looking up like the trees are doing something worth watching, something that hasn't gotten old in the twenty-some years I've been climbing ladders under them.