Page 4 of Harvest Moon Mountain Man

"Taste this." He draws a cup straight from the barrel before I can even answer, cider running dark gold in the low light.

It’s sweet, but also sharp and tangy. I don't reach for a magazine word, don't try to compose the sentence I'd actually print. I just say what's true.

"It tastes like patience." Unrehearsed, not the version I'd write. "Like something that took longer than it needed to, and got better because of that, not despite it."

Rourke pauses with his cup halfway back to the barrel, eyes on me instead of the cider, like I've said something he wasn't braced to hear from a stranger, something closer to the truth than small talk usually manages.

"Most people say it tastes like apples."

"It does. That's not all it tastes like."

"No." Low. "It's not." He chuckles softly.

The light through the barn's high window has gone the color of the cider itself, gold going amber, dust turning slow in the shaft of it. Neither of us moves toward the door. I've got four questions left on my list, good ones, the kind my editor will want quoted directly. Instead I ask him what his grandfather would've thought of the barrels lined up along that back wall, chalked with dates, waiting on a decision two years unmade.

"He'd have told me to stop stalling." A beat. "He wasn't patient about anything except the trees. Everything else, he wanted settled yesterday, no negotiation."

"And you?"

"I'm patient about everything." He looks at me when he says it, not the trees, not the barrels lined up behind me. "Until I'm not."

I don't have an answer ready for that. I don't think he's waiting for one either — the words sit there between us, plain, unhurried, the kind of thing a man says once and lets land instead of chasing it with an explanation nobody asked him for.

We stand there in the gold barn light a while longer, cider going warm in the cup between my hands, neither of us in any rush to be the one who breaks it first.

"Can I ask you something… not for the piece?"

He nods once.

"Why me? You've had reporters out here before. You said so yourself. Why does this feel different than that?"

He's quiet long enough that I think he isn't going to answer at all. Then: "Because you stopped taking notes and you're still here."

I don't have a comeback for that, not a real one. As a journalist, I prided myself on my notes and never giving up the story.

At some point today, I’m not sure when, I stopped caring about the story and started caring about him.

four

Rourke

She keeps coming back. Four days past what the article needs. Five interviews' worth of notes for an eight-hundred-word piece. We both know it. Neither of us says it, like naming it out loud might scare it off before it's had the chance to become whatever it's already becoming between us.

I tell her things I haven't told my best friend Orrin, and I've known him since we were kids fishing the same stretch of river behind the mill. About my grandfather teaching me to graft at nine years old, his hands over mine on the knife, patient in a way he wasn't about much else in this life. About the two years circling the cider decision and backing off every time, because selling it means strangers drinking something I made without me standing there to say what it cost, why it tastes the way it does, what two hundred bottles a year actually means to a man who's spent two decades making it for no one but himself.

"You're afraid of being misunderstood."

"Maybe."

"That's not a flaw, Rourke. That's just true of anyone who makes things by hand instead of buying them ready-made off a shelf somewhere."

We're in the barn again, late, the crew long gone home for the night, lanterns doing what the one overhead bulb never quite manages. She's got cider on her mouth from the second taste I poured her, and I'm looking at it longer than I should, and she catches me at it and doesn't look away, doesn't pretend she hasn't noticed exactly where my attention's gone.

"You're staring."

"I know."

"You gonna do something about it?"