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9

NIKKI

Iwake before my alarm with a smile already on my face. That should have been the first warning.

Opening day. I lie in the gray light with the whole night still humming in me—the sky he cut, the stump, the flannel, the way he told me to be louder. My shoulders sting where the bark caught them, and I press back into the mattress on purpose to feel it. Proof it was real—a man’s hands and an open sky and somebody who came back across town twice for the quiet version of me.

I let myself have thirty full seconds of it before I get up. I don’t station a single joke in front of the happiness. I just let it be happiness.

That’s the last easy breath I take for a while.

I get to Punkin’s before six, sky barely pink, thermos of coffee in hand, ready to light my kettle and be the first thing open on Prospect for leaf season. His truck isn’t at the curb. That’s fine. That’s nothing. He has a regional at dawn, he told me. I knew that. I’ve known it for three days.

Then I come around my own counter and see the wood.

A fresh stack. Split fine, dry at the cut ends, laid up in a tight cross-hatch at the back corner where I found the first one, kettle-sized, enough for opening and the weekend both. My own pine, off my own nightmare tree, bucked and split down small by a man who did it in the dark before dawn so I wouldn’t run short while he was gone.

For one breath, it’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done.

For one breath, I stand there with my hand pressed to the top round, sap gone tacky in the cold, and warmth floods my chest, and I think, He was here. He came before his own contest. He thought about my kettle before he thought about his title.

Then the breath ends, and the rest of it hits me.

He was here. He was right here, in the dark, thirty feet of split pine’s worth of time, close enough to my house he could have walked the three streets and knocked. And he didn’t. He stacked wood in the black of morning and got in his truck and drove down the valley to his real life, and he didn’t say one word. Not a note. Not a text. Nothing but a pile of my own dead tree cut small, sitting where a goodbye should be.

I take my hand off the wood.

I know this. God, I know this cold. I’ve stood in exactly this spot before—eight years old in a kitchen that was one person emptier than it had been the day before—and nobody said the first word about it then either.

My father didn’t slam a door. My father was a quiet man, a steady man, a man I’d spent my whole small life reading as deep. One morning, the quiet just got up and left, and the only thing it left behind was the evidence it had been there.

He mowed the lawn the day before he went. I remember that. He mowed the whole lawn, careful, tidy, and then he was gone, and for years I thought if I’d just read the lawn right I’d have known.

I read the lawn wrong. And I’ve always, always read the quiet wrong.

Here I am at twenty-three, first thing in the gray, reading a stack of wood as I’ll be back when a stack of wood is just the tidy thing a man does on his way out the door. The lawn, mowed. The wood, stacked. Same message. I was here. Now I’m not. Fill in the rest yourself, since I couldn’t be bothered to say it.

My eyes burn. I don’t let it go further than that. I have a business to open.

I light the kettle. My hands are steady, which is its own kind of awful. I crack the propane slowly the way he taught me, hold the flame low and patient to the kindling, and I use his wood because it’s the wood I have and I’m not going to make a statement by letting my cider go cold on opening day over a man.

It catches right away. Of course it does. He’s good at the things his hands do. That was never the question.

The question all along was whether he wanted me or just enjoyed me. Now I know. I was the fun part. The good few days before his real life called him back to it. He got the pumpkin girl and a night in the sawdust, and at dawn he went back to what actually mattered to him and left me the kind of goodbye you don’t bother making out loud.

The strip wakes up around me. Merchants roll up their awnings, wave, call good luck on my opening. I wave back. I flip my sign to OPEN at seven on the dot and the first customers come—tourists up for leaf season, a couple with a dog, a family with three kids who want cider and want to know why it’s called Punkin’s. I tell them, and I smile, and I’m good at this. I’m so good at this.

I watch myself do the thing I swore last night I was done doing.

I turn it down. I hear my own voice come out of me a notch quieter, the edges filed off, the too-much tucked away. I don’t tell the food-blogger story. I don’t do the bit where I threaten to make them weep. I ladle cider and take four dollars and say, “Enjoy the color, drive safe,” and I’m pleasant and contained. I’m exactly as much as a person is supposed to be and not one drop more.

Because here’s what a night in the sawdust teaches you, when the morning takes it back. Be as loud as you want. Be as much as you are. Pour all of it out under an open sky for a man who says be louder. And then wake up and find out that be louder was a nice thing to say in the dark, and the daylight version of him got in a truck and drove away from all that much without a backward look.

Tone it down, Nikki. My mother’s been right my whole life. You give people the whole loud heart of you and they take a night of it and leave you a woodpile.

Somewhere down the valley a horn goes off, faint, carried up on the cold air. Seven o’clock. The regional, starting. The whole town’s headed out there this morning to watch Wade Barlow defend his title, chop and saw and climb, be the best in the valley at the thing his hands do.

I hope he wins. I mean that, which is the worst part. I hope he wins his contest. I hope he never once wonders whether the pumpkin girl figured out what the wood really meant.