Page 6 of Harvest Moon Mountain Man

"How bad?"

"Bad enough I need every tree that isn't picked, picked, before four a.m., or I lose whatever's still hanging." He's dialing before he's got the second boot on, phone against his ear, already talking to someone about the east block. "You don't have to be here for this."

"I know."

Sixty acres left standing, unpicked, at maybe four hundred dollars a bin once it's sorted and boxed. I do the math without meaning to, still catching my breath from ten minutes ago, watching him become a different man in front of me — the one who runs a crew, not the one who just had me against a workbench. If the whole crop gets hit tonight, that's most of a year's income gone between now and sunrise, gone the way a bad hand of cards is gone, no getting it back after the fact.

My editor wants the piece filed by morning. I have more than enough to give her — four days of notes, more color and detail than I know what to do with, a quote from Rourke about patience I've already built the whole opening paragraph around in my head. I could walk back to the inn right now, write the whole thing in an hour, file it clean, and be asleep before his crew's even finished the second row.

I stay anyway. It isn't even a real decision by the time I make it.

Trucks start pulling in within twenty minutes, headlights swinging across the yard, gravel popping under tires. Five guys pile out, half of them still zipping jackets, one of them carrying a thermos in each hand. Nobody asks why I'm here. Nobody asks why my hair's still damp at the temples, why I smell like cedar and cider instead of whatever I smelled like this morning. They've got a crop to save. That's the whole conversation.

Rourke doesn't ask if I want the job either. He just shoves a pair of gloves at my chest — two sizes too big, the leather cracked at the knuckles — and drops a headlamp over my head that smells like someone else's sweat. I pull the strap tight and don't say anything about either one.

"Row four," he says, already moving past me. "Start where the tape's tied off."

The first tree's fine. I can see what I'm doing, the beam catching red skin against dark leaves. By the third tree the beam's not reaching past the first foot of canopy, and I'm picking by feel — fingers finding the stem, twisting, checking the give of the fruit against my palm before I trust it into the bag. My hands go stiff around row six. Not cold exactly. Past cold. My fingers stop feeling like fingers and start feeling like something borrowed.

I keep going. Somebody's got to take row four if I stop, and everybody else already has a row, and the last thing I want tonight is to be the reason two rows sit half-picked when the frost comes down.

"You should go warm up," Rourke says, passing me on his way down the row, voice pitched low enough that the crew a few trees over doesn't catch it.

"I'm fine."

"Zara."

"I said I'm fine." I meet his eyes in the dark, headlamp catching the frost already starting to silver the grass between the rows, turning every blade of it faintly luminous. "This is your whole year, Rourke. I'm not going to sit inside and write about it happening while it's happening twenty feet away from me."

He doesn't argue the point any further. Just looks at me a second longer than the moment strictly requires, some calculation moving behind his eyes that I don't have time to read before he's moving again, calling out to the crew about the east block, about which trees still need clearing before the temperature drops the final few degrees that'll cost him the fruit for good.

Somebody passes a water bottle down the row around two, and I drink from it without asking whose it is. Nobody stops working long enough to make small talk. Every so often someone flexes their hands against their thighs, shakes them out, goes back to it. I do the same. My knuckles have stopped bending right — they just sort of lock, curl around a stem, release, lock again.

By four the sky's still black but the frost is everywhere now, thick on the grass, furring the edges of every leaf I can see in the headlamp beam. My back's been bent so long it's stopped complaining and gone somewhere past that, a dull ringing ache that's less pain than static. I haven't felt my toes in an hour.

The last bin goes up on the truck at four-fifteen. I hear it before I see it — the low grind of the forklift, the thud of wood settling into the stack — and then Rourke's voice, pitched to carry across the whole yard.

"That's it. That's the last one."

Nobody cheers. Everyone's too tired for that. But I watch the crew straighten up one by one, watch shoulders come down all around me.

Rourke walks out past the last row and just stands there. Looking at it. Frost catching every bare branch, silver all the way down the line, nothing left hanging. His shoulders drop last, slowest of anyone's — like he needed to see it with his own eyes before he'd let himself believe the count was real.

"We got it," he says, mostly to himself, like he's checking the fact against reality one more time before he lets himself believe it fully.

"You got it."

He looks at me then, like he's recalculating something important and doesn't mind at all what the numbers are telling him this time around. "You didn't have to stay for this."

"I know."

"Your deadline—"

"I have everything I need for the piece. I've had it for two days now, if I'm honest." I pull my hat lower against the cold, hands too numb to manage it well on the first try. "I stayed because I wanted to be here. Because I couldn't imagine being anywhere else tonight, watching this happen from a hotel window instead of from inside it, in the cold, with everyone else who actually cares whether this year holds."

He doesn't say anything to that right away. But something shifts in his face — the last of whatever careful distance he's been keeping since the barn, since the first taste of cider, finally giving way entirely. I understand, watching him watch me in the gray predawn light, that he's stopped waiting for me to prove this is real. He just believes it now, plainly, the way he believes a tree's ready to come down or a frost is going to hit. I can see the exact moment it lands in him, settling somewhere behind his eyes like something finally allowed to rest.

"Come inside," he says, rough with exhaustion and something warmer underneath it. "You're freezing, and it's not fair to either one of us if you get sick before I've even figured out what I'm doing about you."