Page 14 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

Quiet.

"That's incredibly specific," she says.

"A general one is a way of not saying anything."

"Mm." She turns a stick over in her hands. "So, mine."

"Yes."

The fire ticks. Down the hill the creek keeps doing what a creek does. She has her chin down and her hair stuck to the side of her face and she is going to say something now, and I have built enough with enough people to have some sense of what an honest one sounds like before it arrives.

"The hitch," she says.

I stop moving.

"I got the hitch wrong. On the far spruce. I dressed it too fast and I should have set it against the load before I walked away, and if it had slipped in the night we would have been wearing that tarp." She looks up, and her face is doing a thing that would be very convincing to almost anybody. Rueful. A little wince. "So. That's mine."

The hitch was the one correct piece of work on this site today.

It was correct in a way that took me by surprise and that I said out loud in front of a camera, which she was standing four feet from. It is at tension right now, eleven feet above her head, holding a roof in a rising wind, and it will still be at tension in the morning.

She has handed me an error that does not exist, attached it to the single thing she actually earned today, and delivered it with a small self-deprecating wince at a woman-sized volume, and every part of it is beautifully made.

She is very good at this. That is the first thing. She is so good at it that if I had not tied ropes for twenty-three years I would have taken it.

The second thing is that she has been on this mountain for one day and she has already worked out that the safest error to confess is a fake one, and a person does not arrive at that in a day.

I could say it. It would take five words. The hitch was good, Junie.

And then what. Then it is day one, and she has been caught, in the dark, on infrared, by a stranger the size of a door, and the twenty days after that get built on that footing.

You do not put load on a joint the same hour you cut it.

"All right," I say.

Her eyes come up.

"That is yours." I stand and bank the fire the way I bank a fire, ash over the coals, the good split laid aside under the eave for morning. "Sleep on the inside tonight. The wind is coming around."

She does not move for a second.

"That's it?" she says.

"That is it. Twenty more nights."

I go to the far end and lie down with my boots out in the weather, and I put my forearm over my eyes, and I am awake a long time.

Twenty days of this.

Twenty days of a woman who has already priced every person on this mountain and shown none of them a card, and one of those people is the woman who signs the checks, and the checks are the roof.

The estimate is in the dry bag by my head. They let me keep it after an argument at gear inspection that I won by being extremely boring about it. Forty-one thousand, one hundred and change. Second quarter of the sheet is the sill, and the sill is the part I have not said out loud to anyone, because a roof is a job and a sill is a countdown.

Vessik stood in the kitchen door the morning I left with a dish towel over her shoulder and told me not to come home with a bad back, at full volume, at seven in the morning, in front of the neighbor.

The neighbor jumped. Vessik carried on down the porch steps after me with the towel still on her shoulder, because she has never once in her life adjusted her volume for me, and that kitchen is the only room on earth where I do not have to stand out of the doorway.

There are four buckets in that hall. In hard rain there are six.