Page 10 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

He doesn't interrupt.

"Three hundred sixty-five," he says, when I've finished.

"With the incentive."

"I can do three hundred. That's my ceiling." He sets the wrench down on the ladder step. "And I still can't be at a lawyer's office by Saturday. The credit union's got fifteen more business days on my file and no amount of me being charming is going to change that."

"I know."

"So you should probably sign it."

I look at him.

"That's it?"

"What did you want me to say?"

"Something with more arguments in it."

"What else is there?" He says it plainly.

"You've wanted that land for two years."

"Yeah."

"And you're not going to ask."

"I asked Hettie every spring for two years, so let's not pretend I'm dignified about it." He picks up the wrench again, turns it over, sets it down. Goes quiet. That specific stillness, coming down over him where I can see it now.

"Say it," I say.

"The only thing I wanted," he says, "was for you to taste what that ground actually is before you let it go. Not the cider. The ground." He looks up at the poplars, forty-five degrees off the westerly. "You did that Tuesday. You stood on it and you counted his rows out loud, and Verna Lasko told half the town about it before supper. So I got what I wanted."

The flight is Friday at 6:40 in the evening out of Prince George and the drive is two and a half hours and I am, at 3:15, in the rental car with my bag in the trunk and the engine running in the hotel lot.

I have never missed a flight. Not once. Not in a blizzard, not with food poisoning, not the week after my mother's funeral when I flew back to Calgary on schedule because the schedule was the only thing holding me together.

I sit with my hands at ten and two.

The dash clock goes 3:16. 3:22. The wind takes the bunting across the lot in a long snap and drops it again. I run the drive in my head — two and a half hours, gas at Vanderhoof, bag drop at forty minutes, the whole thing engineered with an hour of slack in it because I engineer everything with an hour of slack in it.

I think about a woman sitting in a car on a road looking at nine acres and then driving away, and about her daughter who never came at all, and about the fact that both of them were, technically, on schedule.

And at 3:40 I turn the engine off, and I go back inside, and I book room four for three more nights on a card that already has eleven thousand dollars on it.

I don't call Rob Teale. The offer's still open until Saturday noon. It's on my phone, unsigned, and I can feel it there like a coal in my pocket.

I don't drive to the cidery either.

I walk down Main Street in the dark with the market bunting cracking overhead and the smell of woodsmoke coming off every chimney in this valley, and I stand outside the tasting room and watch him through the west window — full house, Friday tasting night, twenty people, a man with a bad knee laughing at something, Orrin behind that fir bar being warm at every single one of them.

He looks up and sees me through the glass.

In front of all of them, mid-pour, with a room full of people talking around him, Orrin grins.

six

Orrin