Page 4 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

She turns on the stool. Faces me properly for the first time.

"Explain the lifeline," she says.

So I do. I get the ledger out from under the bar. I show her eight years of it. The back porch with the fruit press I bought at an auction for four hundred dollars. The first commercial batch, ninety litres, all of which I gave away. The tank room I built in stages, each stage the exact size of what I could pay cash for.

And then I show her the line that matters: fruit cost, by year, going up like a staircase.

"I don't own a single tree," I say. "Eight years, every apple I've pressed came off somebody else's land at somebody else's price on somebody else's timeline. That's a business built on goodwill and a truck. Nine acres next door means my own block. Cider varieties, not eating apples — bittersweets, the tannic ones nobody grows here because nobody's asked. Fifteen years out, my fruit doesn't leave the property before it goes in the press."

"Fifteen years?"

"Trees don't hurry."

"Neither do banks." She turns a page back. "Your fruit line went up nineteen percent in three years. Your production went up eleven. You've been eating the difference."

"I have."

"For how long can you keep doing that?"

"Four years. Maybe five if two of my growers stay put and neither of them has a bad hail summer." I say it flat. "After that I'm buying fruit at a price that makes me a hobby."

She's quiet. She's got the ledger turned toward her and she's reading it the way she read the survey, top to bottom, and I stand there and let her, and it costs me something to stand still that long.

"Your soil report," she says. "You've got one?"

"Three."

"Because you've been planning this."

"Two years. Since the first spring Hettie told me no." I pour myself half an inch, which I don't usually do before six. "Your grandmother's clause was airtight. Every April I'd walk over there and stand in the poplars and go back with nothing."

"You knew about the clause and you kept applying anyway."

"Yeah." I look at her over the glass. "Ask me why the poplars are in a straight line."

"They're a windbreak."

"Somebody planted them. On purpose, forty-five degrees off the prevailing westerly, which is the correct angle for this valley, which means whoever planted them knew what they were doing." I put the glass down. "That's your grandfather's row, Juneau. He was still telling this town he was right about that land ten years after the town told him he was wrong."

She doesn't answer. She looks out the west window at them for long enough that the light changes on her face, and then she picks the glass back up and finishes it, which she has no professional reason to do.

"You should know I'm not the villain in this," she says. "Storage on serviced land at the edge of a growing town is defensible."

"I didn't say you were the villain."

"You said two hundred steel boxes like it was a body count."

"That's about the boxes. Not about you." I take her empty glass. "You've been here five hours and you've already been more honest with me than the last three people who wanted something off me, and none of them were buying anything."

The market crowd arrives then, six of them, laughing, cold-cheeked, wanting the sweet one, and I go be who I am in this room — I pour, I ask after the woman's hip, I hear about a nephew in Kamloops, I laugh in the right places and mean it.

And the whole time I'm aware of her at the end of the bar with her coat still on, watching me be warm at seven strangers, working something out.

She leaves without saying goodbye.

three

Juneau