Page 7 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

I crouch down beside it without deciding to. The figure in the grain moves when you shift your head — a ripple that isn't there and then is, like water under ice.

"That's not a pattern," I say. "That's stress. The tree was leaning."

He looks down at me.

"Most people say it's pretty."

"It is pretty. It's pretty because something was pushing on it for a hundred years."

He doesn't answer that for long enough that I stand back up.

"What's it for?"

"Don't know yet." He turns it toward the window so the light rakes across the figure. "You don't cut something like this until you know."

That's when I get it.

I've been running this whole thing as a transaction. Motivated buyer, adjacent parcel, obvious synergies, close it and go. I put him in the box marked acquiring neighbour on day one and I've been negotiating with the box.

This isn't a man protecting an asset. This is the last working mill in a valley that used to have four, and he's third generation, and he's got six people on payroll and a seven-year-old upstairs with a jar of graded sawdust, and my grandmother's sixty-one acres are the ground his landing needs to expand onto without touching the creek.

I'm holding a piece of something that has to stay whole.

"Why do you want it?" I ask. "The land. Really."

He sets the slab back. Takes his time.

"Ask me at the end of the week," he says.

"That's not an answer."

"No."

He's close now. Neither of us stepped, exactly — the aisle between the stacks is narrow and we've both drifted into it. I can smell sawdust and cold air and the coffee on him. There's a curl of shaving caught in the cuff of his sleeve and I reach out and take it off, and I don't take my hand back right away.

Half a second. Maybe less. My fingers on the canvas of his sleeve and the pulse in my thumb doing something ridiculous.

He looks down at my hand.

He doesn't move toward me. That's the thing that undoes me — he holds absolutely still, and the stillness is not indifference, it's a man with both hands on the wheel. His jaw works once. His breath comes out slower than it went in.

"Faye," he says.

Only that. My name in a room full of dust and low sun, and the sound of it goes through the floor of me the way the saw did.

The porch door bangs. "DAD. THE WATER'S TOO HOT."

He steps back. I take my hand off his sleeve.

"Coming," he calls. He looks back at me. “Faye is with her mom this weekend, if you’d like to stop by for dinner.”

He’s asking me out for a date without really asking.

“Sure.”

I drive back to the rental cabin with the heater roaring and the shaving from his sleeve still between my fingers, and I put it on the dash where I'll see it.

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