Page 5 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

"I know."

She goes up for her bath. I stand at the sink with the water running over a plate I've already washed.

There's a thing that happens to a man who's spent three years being one half of a two-person operation. You get efficient. You cut out everything that isn't the kid, the mill, the six people whose mortgages ride on the mill. Wanting something for yourself is a line item you delete, and after a while you stop noticing you deleted it, and that's the part nobody warns you about. Not the loneliness. The forgetting.

I go down to the kitchen and put my hands on the counter and stand there in the dark with the tap dripping.

And I feel my heart starting to thaw.

three

Faye

The obstacle course has rules, and Rue explains them twice because I get them wrong the first time.

"Pile one you jump. Pile two you walk through slow because it's the swamp. Pile three you jump and spin. Then you have to touch the fence post and come back but you can't step on the same footprints."

"How would I know where my footprints are?"

Rue looks at me with the flat pity of a woman explaining something obvious. "You remember them."

It's Saturday, four in the afternoon, and the light is doing the thing October light does here — coming in low and gold under the branches so every leaf on the ground is lit from the side. The maples along Gideon's drive have dumped everything they had. Rue has raked it into three piles with a rake taller than she is.

I am wearing a wool coat that cost more than my first car.

"Okay," I say.

"You have to go first."

I jump pile one. I wade though pile two at swamp pace with my arms out. I jump pile three and spin and land badly and go down on one knee in wet leaves, and Rue shrieks with the specific joy of a child watching an adult fail publicly, and I get up with leaf mould all down my shin and keep going. I touch the fence post. I come back avoiding footprints I cannot see.

By round three there's a leaf in my collar and my hair is out of its clip and my coat is a write-off.

I do not care even slightly, and that should worry me more than it does.

That's when I hear him laugh.

Gideon's on the porch with a mug in one hand, and the sound is low and unguarded and it goes on longer than I'd have guessed he had in him. I've heard him make an amused noise. I've heard him be dry. I have not heard a true laugh, head tipped back, a man laughing at his kid and the woman his kid has conscripted.

I stand in the wreckage of pile two with my hands on my knees, breathing hard, and I look up at him.

"You're supposed to be timing us," Rue yells.

"I lost count at the spin," he says.

"You always lose count."

"I do."

He comes down the steps and hands me a mug. Coffee, black, too hot. Our fingers cross on the handle and neither of us makes a production of it, and I take a sip and hand it back and he drinks from the same side.

Rue is already rebuilding pile three. Rue has, apparently, unlimited fuel.

"She's been doing that course since Tuesday," Gideon says. "You're the first person who ran it right."

"I ran it wrong twice."

"Wrong is different from not trying." He watches his daughter fling an armful of leaves at the sky. "Most people crouch down and do the voice."