Page 12 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

The draft is still in my phone. I take it out and look at it in the dark with the engine ticking, and I am not going to lie about how close my thumb gets.

Because if I send it I get on a ferry with no debt, a great job, and a story about an October I'll tell at dinner parties for a decade. That's a real life. I built it alone and nobody handed me a brick of it.

And if I don't I'm choosing a man with a mill running on a small margin, in a valley where the light goes at four in February, and a child who has already been taught by an expert that adults leave slowly. There's no version where I get to test that carefully. You don't put a toe in that water.

I put the phone face down on the passenger seat.

Money is the smallest thing at risk here and I've been letting myself pretend it's the biggest one, because I can put money in a spreadsheet.

The bench is up there in the dark. Sixty-one acres, twelve of them good ground, a creek with frogs in it, and four lilacs in a line where a door used to be. A woman drove eleven hours round trip every May for thirty-one years to stand in front of it, and never sold one acre, and left the whole thing to a granddaughter who couldn't find a weekend.

six

Gideon

It’s too damn early for this.

I've been up since four, running the numbers eleven different ways at that kitchen table, and every one of them says the same thing: I can't go higher without putting Roy's and Marco's jobs on the line to do it, and I won't.

Faye comes in with her hair up and a folder under her arm and an expression I can't read.

She puts the folder on the counter my grandfather built and opens it and turns it to face me. It's a purchase agreement. My number's at the top of it. The fair one. The one I said in this room two weeks ago with sawdust on my collar and no idea what was about to happen to me.

"I turned Northbend down," she says. "It's done. They're not coming back. I made sure the no was ugly enough. I had the yes sitting in my drafts, but I couldn’t do it. I want you to know that, because I'm not going to pretend I'm braver than I am."

I look at the paper. I look at her.

"Faye."

She's got both hands flat on the counter and she's holding herself very straight, and I can see her pulse going in her throat. "The land was never the point. I've known that for about a week and I've been managing it very efficiently. It's what I do. My grandmother died on the ninth of September and I have not stopped moving since, and I came here to close a file."

"I know."

"You don't know all of it." She breathes out. "She held that ground for thirty-one years after my grandfather died and I never asked her one question about it. Not one. I had to stand in your mill and have you tell me she was born up there. And I was going to sell it in a fortnight to a company that puts gates on things, and I'd have called that closure, and I'd have been forty before I understood what I did."

I stand up.

"So it goes to you," she says. "At your number. Because you're the only person in this valley who was ever going to keep it whole."

Two years I've been trying to buy that parcel. Two years of letters to a lawyer in Victoria and phone calls that went nowhere, and I told myself it was about the landing and the expansion and the creek crossing, and it was, and that was never the whole of it.

"I wasn't trying to just buy a parcel," I say. "When my grandfather put this building up there were four mills in this valley. There's one. Everything that touches this ground gets sold to somebody who holds it and flips it and doesn't come here, and the ones who do come put a gate on it." I come around the counter. "I wasn't trying to get bigger. I was trying to keep something whole so there's one left when Rue's thirty."

“I get it now.”

I kiss her.

The folder goes on the floor. I get her up on my grandfather's counter; Rue's at school until three, the crew's out on the far landing till noon, and the office door locks from the inside. Light coming grey-gold through the window and the whole of a Friday morning in front of us.

I take her coat off. Then the sweater. She's in a thin white shirt underneath and I do the buttons one at a time again and she laughs at me for it.

"You do that so slowly."

"I've got all day."

Her breath catches on that. I get the shirt off her shoulders and put my mouth at the join of her neck, and her head goes back, and her hands come up into my hair.

I take my time. I've been taking her fast and hidden for two weeks — against doors, on counters, in the dark of my bedroom with one ear open for a kid down the hall — and I want this one slow enough to remember properly.