Page 13 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

When she comes, she says my name into her own forearm. I go over right behind her with my forehead between her shoulder blades and both arms locked around her middle.

We lie there sideways across the bed with the window still open and the cold moving over us in a slow tide.

"Shut it," she says eventually. “I’m cold.”

I pull the blanket up over both of us instead. "Say it again."

"I'm staying."

seven

Juneau

"That one's punky," a small girl says, to a man three times her size. "You can't burn punky. My dad says it's basically a wet sponge."

The man looks at the log in his hands like it's betrayed him. Behind the girl, an enormous quiet man in a canvas coat declines to intervene.

"She's not wrong," he says.

"I'm never wrong about firewood."

"Once."

"That was maple and it was nearly dry."

The woman with them takes the offending log off the man with an apology in her face and a laugh she's holding at the back of her teeth, and stacks it on a separate pile that appears to be a discard pile, and appears to have rules. She's got a tape measure hanging out of her coat pocket like she's wandered off a job site. Six days here and I already know that's Faye Corrigan, that she's been surveying the sawmill's new yard all week, and that nobody expects her back in Victoria. Nobody announced it. Silver Ridge doesn't seem to require announcements.

The fire's built by four and lit at six and by six-fifteen there is a seven-year-old standing between two hundred people and their firewood.

The field behind the market square is full. Last night of the last weekend, forty years running, and the whole valley's out with thermoses and folding chairs and children in snowsuits three weeks ahead of any snow. From the top of the field you can see the layout for what it is — vendor tables on the flat, fire in the centre, everything organized around it in a ring nobody drew. In my professional life I have spent eleven months trying to engineer a public space that does this on purpose. Here it happens because people put their chairs where the heat is.

I'm behind Orrin's tables, pouring, because I offered and because it turns out I want something to do with my hands.

A truck backs up to us and drops its tailgate. There's a case in the bed with no label on it.

"Twelve bottles," the driver says. "That's the whole run."

"You said you weren't decided." Orrin's already reaching for it.

"I'm decided." Rourke Harding is broad and weathered and about as comfortable with this as a man walking into cold water. "Bottled it Thursday. The Spy came out clean."

"I told you in September it was ready."

"You did."

A woman comes around the far side of the truck with two glasses she's already liberated from our table, and hands one to him without asking whether he wants it, and he takes it without pretending he didn't.

"He rewrote the label copy four times," she says.

"You wrote the label copy."

"I wrote it once. You rewrote it four times." She turns to me. Zara Okafor, who I've been told about twice today already. "My piece runs in the December issue. Not the one they commissioned. A better one."

"She stayed for the frost pick," Rourke says, to nobody, into his glass.

"He tells people that," Zara says. "Constantly. To strangers."

"It's the only interesting thing that's happened to me."