Page 25 of Resisting the Lumberjack

The bell jangles. October light swallows her up. That sensible sedan pulls away from the curb without a glance in the mirror.

"Sal." My eyes don't leave the street. "Make me a fresh turkey club. Wrap it nice."

"For her?"

"For her." Hat goes back on. "Don't know where she's headed yet. But it's a small town. I'll find her."

Chapter Two

Selene

Agranola bar from my glove box passes for lunch because I'd rather chew cardboard in a parking lot than give that man the satisfaction.

The parking lot belongs to Shelton's Feed & Supply. The feed store belongs to my new life. My new life was supposed to be boring.

Boring. That's what I asked for. That's what I drove fourteen hundred miles to find. A town so small it doesn't show up on GPS until you're already in it. A job that needs nothing more complex than inventory counts and knowing sweet feed from scratch grain. A rented cottage at the end of a gravel road with a porch that faces the mountains and zero surprises.

Wild Peak got picked off a map. Eyes closed, finger down, opened to a dot in eastern Oregon I'd never heard of. Population forty-something, depending on who's counting and whether the ranchers up in the hills answer the census. That felt right. No history. No memories ambushing me around corners at the grocery store. No well-meaning friends with that careful head tilt asking how I'm doing, really, because they saw Richard at the fundraiser and he looked fine, did I know he looked fine, wasn't it interesting that he looked so fine.

How am I doing? Eating a Kind bar in a gravel lot at twelve-fifteen and screaming at strangers over turkey clubs. Thriving, clearly.

My phone vibrates against the center console. Claudia. Best friend, only person in Portland who knows where I went when I packed my car and disappeared. She texts every day. Short ones, nothing heavy. Thinking of you. Saw a sunset you'd love. Your cactus is alive against all odds.

It rings out. She's gonna ask if I've met anyone nice, and the only person I've met is a lumberjack with curly hair and a grin that suggests he's never had a bad day in his life and doesn't plan to start now. Wanted to strangle him with his own flannel. Specifically the rolled-up sleeves. Specifically the forearms inside them.

Except that's not entirely true, and being honest with myself in a parking lot is what I'm supposed to be doing with this fresh start. He offered me the whole sandwich. Set it down and backed off the second he saw something under my anger that had nothing to do with turkey clubs. Read me like a page he'd already bookmarked.

That's the part that made me leave. Not the theft. The seeing.

Richard didn't see me for eight years. This stranger managed it in thirty seconds over deli meat.

Richard. Thirty-seven when I married him at twenty-five. Stable, established, impressive on paper and in person and in the photograph his mother hung over the mantle three days after our wedding, which she organized because she said I didn't know how. He was twelve years older, which my mother called mature and my sister called jackpot and I called comfortable. Comfortable was supposed to be enough.

He didn't hit me. Didn't cheat. Didn't drink too much or gamble or disappear for days. Nothing dramatic enough for a good story at brunch. He just compressed me. Slowly. Over eight years. My opinions became suggestions he'd consider and discard over dinner. My passions became phases he'd wait out with a patient smile. My joy became a volume control he kept turning down, one notch at a time, until the room was so quiet I couldn't remember what music sounded like.

Spontaneity was childish. Excitement was for people who hadn't matured. Love wasn't supposed to make you feel alive. Love was supposed to make you feel settled. And settled looked exactly like the house he chose and the friends he curated and the life I disappeared into.

When I finally said I was leaving, he looked over his reading glasses and said, "You'll be back. You don't know how to want anything for more than a week."

Eleven months ago. Haven't gone back.

Haven't figured out what I want, either. All I know is what I don't: intensity, surprise, a man who takes up all the oxygen in a room and leaves you gasping.

Boring is the plan. Boring is the granola bar, the feed store, the quiet little life built one predictable day at a time. If I just keep my head down long enough, the person I used to be might stop looking for me.

The bar goes down in three tasteless bites. Teeth get checked in the rearview. Shelton's front door swings open.

Alfalfa. Leather. Dusty warmth from a building that's older than anyone alive can remember. Rows of feed bags stacked to the ceiling in towers that lean slightly and have probably leaned slightly since the sixties. Tack wall on the left with bridles and halters hanging in neat rows. Seed display on the right. An enormous orange cat asleep on the register counter, sprawled across the receipt paper, not moving for anyone or anything.

"You must be Selene." A woman in her sixties rounds the corner with a clipboard and reading glasses pushed up into gray curls. "I'm Bev. We talked on the phone."

"Thank you for giving me a chance." Handshake, meant sincerely. "Ready to start whenever you are."

"Good. Because Cal's out with a bad back, I've got six ranch orders waiting, a pallet that came in wrong from the distributor, and that cat hasn't done a useful thing since the Obama administration. You're my whole afternoon."

Bev walks me through inventory with the brisk efficiency of a woman who's been doing this since before I was born and doesn't plan to slow down now. Paper system, not digital, with a ledger sporting coffee stains from three separate decades and handwriting that shifts between at least four different people's. Feed types. Regular accounts. Which ranchers call ahead and which ones show up expecting their usual without a word.

"Wild Peak's our biggest account." She flips pages, finger tracing down a column of numbers. "Standing weekly for bulk feed, mineral blocks, fencing supplies, veterinary basics. They run cattle, horses, and now goats because Luke's girl Anna decided they needed goats." A fond headshake. "Kid named Kidd handles most of the pickups." She chuckles at her own joke, the same way she probably has every time she's said it for four years. "Sweet boy. Hard worker. Tips his hat to everything that moves."