Page 9 of Every Little Thing She Orcs

“People will love this place,” I tell him, walking backward so I can see his face.

“Watch the root.”

I step over the root without looking. “See? I have good instincts.”

“You got lucky.”

“What is luck but another word for instincts with good PR?”

The corner of his mouth twitches, and he looks away quickly. I’ve started collecting those: his almost-smiles, his almost-laughs, his almost-answers. The collection grows every day, and I’m ridiculously proud of it.

The footbridge turns out to be a real problem. It crosses a side creek on two old logs, and when I kneel to look underneath, one of them is soft with rot.

“That won’t support a crowd,” I say.

Holt crouches beside me, his knee nearly touching mine. Heat rolls off him like a woodstove, and I have to stop myself from leaning into it. He pushes a thumb into the log, and it sinks in like cake.

“No,” he agrees. “It won’t.”

“We could replace it here, but the banks are steep.” I look up and down the side creek. “What’s it like upstream?”

“Flatter. Fifty yards up, there’s a gravel bar.”

We walk up to look, and he’s right. The banks are low and solid, the creek is wide and shallow, and a bridge here would be shorter, cheaper, and easy for a stroller to reach. I sketch it in my notebook, and Holt points out the high-water mark where the spring floods reach, so I move the abutments back a few feet.

We stand side by side, looking at my sketch. It’s a good plan, and it’s ours.

“Huh,” I say. “Look at us, being a team.”

“Anything you say, little bird.”

On the way back, the sky clouds over, and I stop at a low spot on the trail where the mud has dried into a cracked brown crust. I take out my penetrometer, a steel rod with a dial on top, and push it into the ground.

“It measures how firm the soil is,” I explain. “If we’re going to put a few hundred festival visitors on this trail, I need to know if the base will hold or turn into soup the first time it rains.”

“And?”

I read the dial. “Soup. We’ll need gravel here.”

He nods and writes it in his own notebook. It’s small, green, and battered, and he tucks it into his shirt pocket before I can sneak a look.

Thwack.

A pinecone bounces off Holt’s head and lands at his feet.

I look up. On the branch above us sits a gray squirrel with a white belly and a torn ear.

Holt doesn’t even look up. “Ignore him.”

“Did that squirrel just attack you?”

Another pinecone hits his shoulder.

“Holt,” I say seriously. “Why is it mad at you?”

“Moved his acorn stash off the trail. Three years ago.”

“And he’s still mad?”