Page 10 of Bonfire with the Mountain Man

And then she’s gone up the pass, and I’m standing in a barrel room that smells like the fruit we saved. I’m holding a jar I poured for Billy, with no idea how the best night of my life turned into the sound of her truck getting farther and farther away.

6

MAGGIE

The orchard doesn’t care that my heart’s broken. The trees still need me.

I’m up a ladder in the cold afternoon light, pulling the last of the Arkansas Blacks off the high branches, because the work doesn’t stop for feelings and because if I keep my hands moving, I don’t have to sit with the drive back up the pass, replaying every word of it. The truck starts cleanly now. Beck saw to that. It’s the only thing in my life that got fixed today.

I review my behavior the way I review a bad crate. Cold and honest, with no mercy. I find a woman who walked into that distillery expecting a no and got a yes she couldn’t trust. A woman who spent the whole night waiting for it to turn out to be the no after all.

I let myself believe, for about eight hours, that a man had looked at me and seen something worth keeping. He did keep me. That’s the joke of it. He keeps everything the world throws away. He said so with his own mouth, easy as breathing, and it never once occurred to him it might gut me.

I’m not even angry. That’s what I can’t get past. He didn’t lie. I stood in that doorway and heard him say exactly who he is and exactly what I was to him.

The wind comes down off the ridge and works into my collar and I stop, halfway up the ladder, one hand on a cold branch, and I say it out loud. To the trees. To nobody. the thing I’ve never once said in my whole life—in all the seasons I’ve been the one who stays.

“I want to be wanted.” My voice cracks on it and I let it. “Not kept because I was there. Not taken in because I was cheap. Wanted. On purpose. By name.” I press the heel of my hand against my eyes. “Just once, I want to be somebody’s first choice instead of the thing they settled for.”

The orchard doesn’t answer. Orchards don’t.

But a truck does. Down the hill—the rattle of an engine I don’t know, then tires on gravel. I come down the ladder fast and turn.

It’s him.

Boone’s climbing out of a borrowed truck at the bottom of my rows, no coat, like he left in a hurry and didn’t stop for one. He’s looking up the hill at me like the drive nearly killed him.

“You didn’t let me finish,” he says.

“There wasn’t anything to finish.”

“There was three years of it.” He starts up the row toward me, boots in the frost-bit grass. “Maggie. Stop working a second and let me say it. Then if you want me gone, I’ll go.”

I don’t move. I don’t tell him to go, either. He takes that for the yes it is and stops a few feet off, close enough that I can see how fast he must have driven. Close enough that he doesn’t bother hiding it—he doesn’t care that I’m watching him fall apart.

“You think I bought your fruit because it was cheap,” he says. “You think I took you in the way I take in a condemned building. I heard how it came across, and I’ve been sick about it since your truck cleared the alley.” He drags a hand down his face. “So here’s the thing I didn’t tell you last night because I thought you’d bolt. I’ve watched you come down that pass for three years.”

The cold goes still around me.

“Every October,” he says. “Same flatbed, same rattle, same woman doing the work of two people in the dark before the whole town’s awake. I used to stand at my front window with a coffee going cold and watch you unload in that alley and drive off before anybody said good morning to you. Three years, I did that. And every single time I thought, somebody ought to make it easier for her. And every single time nobody did, and it ate at me.”

“You never said a word to me.”

“I know. I’m a coward about the things I want.” His voice is rough now. “So yesterday, when you walked into my place and I finally got your name and you started pricing yourself to lose right there at my bar, I didn’t say yes because the fruit was cheap. I said yes because it was you. Because it was finally you, standing in my building, and I would have bought a truckload of rocks off you to keep you there another hour.”

I suddenly can’t catch my breath. “You said you keep what the world throws away.”

“I do. It’s the truest thing about me, and I said it to Billy without thinking. I’d give a year of my life to take it back.”

He closes the last of the distance slowly, giving me every chance to step off. I don’t.

“But listen to me, because this is the part that matters,” he says. “Keeping a thing because nobody else wanted it and choosing a thing over everything else in the room are not the same. I’ve spent fifteen years doing the first one. Yesterday was the first time in my life I did the second.”

The tears come, and I don’t fight them. “You don’t know that. You barely know me.”

“You threatened my press over your knives before you’d got your coat off. You’ll break your back on a crate nobody asked you to carry, and you won’t take a kind word for it. You corrected me twice on my own apples and didn’t apologize once, and every step of last night was yours, and you made damn sure I knew it.” He reaches up and thumbs a tear off my jaw with a hand still rough from the crank. “I don’t need three years to know I want you. I needed three years to work up the nerve to say it. That’s on me, and I’m saying it now. I want you, Maggie Lang. Specifically. By name. First choice. Not the seconds. Never once the seconds.”

He’s given it back to me word for word, the thing I said to the trees when I thought only the trees could hear. First choice. By name. I don’t know how he knew.