Page 4 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

I stop stacking.

Faye doesn't laugh at her and doesn't do the voice adults do. She sets down the survey map, turns so she's facing my kid square on, and takes a breath like she's actually going to answer.

"Because somebody planted the tree I sat under when I was your age," she says. "And they never met me."

Rue goes quiet. It doesn't happen often. She looks off at the treeline like she's checking the math on it.

"That's a good reason," Rue says.

"It's the only one I've got."

I go back to the lumber because I have to do something with my hands.

Here's what I know. A woman being kind to my daughter is not a message. Rue is seven and relentless and easy to be charmed by, and people are decent to her all the time, and I've learned to be grateful for it and leave it there. That's the discipline. Three years of it.

And I'm standing in my own yard reading into it anyway.

Because it isn't the kindness. It's that she stopped. She put down the map. Nobody puts down the map.

She's got her hair pushed back with the arm of her sunglasses and there's a smear of creek mud along the hem of that useless city coat, and when she leans over the tailgate to trace a line on the survey her whole spine goes into it, and I notice that. I notice the shape of her hand on the paper. I notice her mouth when she's working something out and doesn't know anyone's looking.

I've got a rule about this. The rule has held for three years without me having to think about it, which is the only reason it's held.

She catches me. That's the trouble. She looks up mid-sentence and I'm not fast enough getting my eyes back on the lumber, and something moves across her face — not offence. Not that.

"Your pins are twelve feet off from the old survey," she says, and her voice is a half-step lower than it was. "On the east line."

"They've been off since 1974."

"Do you want them fixed?"

"Depends who ends up owning them."

She holds my eyes for a beat. Then she looks back down at the map and I watch her hand go still on the paper.

The wind comes up off the bench and takes the corner of the survey with it. We both reach. My hand lands over hers on the paper and stays there a half-second past the point where the map is secure.

Neither of us moves it.

She's got cold hands. I've got the other kind. I feel her fingers register that under mine and I feel the small breath she takes because of it, and I take my hand back and put it in my coat pocket, and I go back to the lumber like a man with somewhere to be.

She doesn't leave for another hour. I don't turn around again the whole time, and I know exactly where she is in that yard the entire hour, the way you know where a stove is in a dark kitchen.

Rue comes out at four with two apples and gives her the bigger one.

At six they're still at the tailgate with a flashlight and the survey, and I have to go out and tell them it's dark and cold and there's a school night involved, and Rue argues on procedural grounds, and Faye says "she's got a point about the pins" with a completely straight face, and my daughter looks up at her like she's been handed the world.

I stand in my own driveway getting ganged up on by a seven-year-old and a woman from Victoria, and my chest does something it hasn't done in three years, and I have to look at the treeline until it passes.

"Faye says you can put a tree in the wrong place and it takes ten years to find out."

"Faye came to look at the creek and I showed her where the frogs are in the summer and she wrote it down."

Faye has been hanging out with Rue, and I don’t mind. Rue can use a woman’s influence since her mother, my ex-wife, left us. My daughter doesn't hammer in a thing she wants, that's not how she works — she salts it in. A comment at breakfast, a question in the truck, something at bedtime when she knows I'm least defended.

I don't say anything for a second. Ada Corrigan's parcel has a creek on it that runs clean off the bench and joins mine at the culvert. Two years I've been trying to buy that ground, and the first thing the woman does is note down where the frogs are.

"That's true," I say. "About the frogs."