Page 9

“You’re not a lot,” he says, each word measured. “You’re the right amount. Everybody else is quiet.”

The fire drops out of my attention. The cider drops out of my attention. There’s just his face across the low flame, closer than it was, close enough that I can see the copper’s real. I lean too, drawn on a line I didn’t decide to be on, and his gaze drops to my mouth and stays.

“Wade,” I say.

It isn’t a question. It isn’t a joke. It’s just his name with nothing dressed on it.

He lifts a hand. Grazes my jaw with two rough knuckles—the same two fingers he says goodbye with. Tilts my chin. The gravel bites my knees and I don’t care. I’m halfway across the fire to a man I can’t read and have stopped needing to, and his mouth is a breath from mine⁠—

The cider goes over.

Forty gallons hit a rolling boil all at once, foam surging up over the copper rim, hissing down into the fire in a cloud of sweet steam and spit. We break apart. Wade’s on his feet before I am, hauling the kettle off the ring by the iron handle with a rag doubled in his fist, swearing low—“damn, hot, back up”—and I’m grabbing the propane starter, killing it. For ten loud seconds, we’re both entirely occupied with not letting my livelihood scald us.

It settles. The foam recedes. The fire steams and sulks. Wade sets the kettle on the flat stones, flexes his hand where the handle caught it, and looks at me across the wreck of my first batch.

I’m breathing like I ran here. My mouth is still a breath from where his was. Neither of us finishes the sentence the cider interrupted.

“You have to watch it,” he says finally in a low, but unsteady voice. “When it heats. You can’t look away.”

“I got distracted,” I say.

He holds my eyes. Doesn’t apologize for being the distraction. Doesn’t close the gap again, either, though I can see him want to. Can see him decide the middle of Prospect Street in broad daylight over a boiled-over kettle isn’t where this happens.

“Weekend,” he says, which makes no sense, except it makes all the sense, because it’s the only promise he trusts himself to make out loud. He’ll be back. That’s the word in the work.

He climbs into his truck. I stand in a cloud of cider steam with my knees printed with gravel and my whole skin still leaning toward a man who drove across town to check a fitting that didn’t need checking. There’s no joke for this. I’ve got nothing.

I make a second batch. I watch it the entire time.

6

WADE

The Hendricks spruce fights me all afternoon, and it’s got nothing to do with the spruce.

Straightforward pull. Dead crown, clean lean away from the roof, a ditch to drop it in. I’ve done a hundred like it. But my head keeps sliding off the cut and back down the mountain to a woman crouched over a fire with cider steam in her hair and her mouth an inch off mine.

A man doesn’t run a saw with half his attention. So I slow down. I make myself watch the wood. I get it down clean and I don’t feel a thing about it, which is the tell, because dropping a tree is the one thing that’s always been enough.

“You’re somewhere else,” Deacon says, feeding brush into the chipper. “All day. You missed a notch angle twice, and you don’t miss.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re at a pumpkin stand.” He grins. “You went back at lunch. Don’t lie to me. You came back smelling like cider, and you’ve been useless since.”

I don’t answer that. Answering means saying it out loud, and I don’t understand it yet myself.

The certain part I’ve got. It hit fast, three days ago, and it hasn’t moved since. She’s the one. I knew it in my heart before my head caught up.

The knowing isn’t the trouble. The trouble is she can’t see it. The only proof I’ve ever trusted is the kind you do with your hands, so that’s what I’ve given her—the wood, the floor, the fixed kettle. And she looks right past all of it to the quiet and hears a door closing.

Somebody taught her that a quiet man is a man on his way out. I heard it under everything she said at the fire today. Tone it down. You’re a lot. The ones worth being seen by are the ones who back away.

I’m not backing away. I just don’t know how to say so in the only language she believes, which is out loud.

We load out at six. The wind’s come up off the ridge, that dry evening pull that funnels down the valley this time of year. I feel it shove the truck on the county road, and I think about forty square feet of canvas staked into gravel with nobody left to hold it down.

I don’t decide to go back. I’m just going back.