Page 16 of Autumn With The Grumpy Mountain Man

She came out of the shop a minute later with the old radio off the shelf, an extension cord trailing behind her across the grass.

“Somebody told me once that it probably works,” she said.

It did, after some crackling. She turned the dial past static and a man selling tires until she found a country station. She set the radio on an upturned bucket and picked up the board again like the last ten minutes hadn’t happened.

I’ll admit the music helped. We got through two more frames, and I could feel my shoulders coming down from around my ears.

Then the next song started, and she let go of the board.

“Oh, I love this one.” She reached over and turned it up. It was Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett, that song about quitting time. “This came out the year I was born. My dad used to play it every Friday when he got home from work.”

I knew exactly where I’d been when that song came out. I was fifteen and sweeping sawdust at the lumberyard every Saturday, because my father said a man ought to earn his own money. That radio played it a hundred times that summer. I’d known every word by July.

I didn’t want to do the math. She was twenty-three, and I was thirty-eight. When I’d driven out of Ridgewood Falls at eighteen with everything I owned in the back of my truck, she’d been three years old and probably still napping in the afternoons.

Fifteen years.

She was humming along, sanding down a splinter I’d left on the edge of a frame. It hadn’t crossed her mind. There was no reason it would have.

It was all I could think about.

“Long sides next?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Or do you want to finish the crosspieces first so⁠—”

“Doesn’t matter.”

She glanced up at me. I kept my eyes on the lumber, and I hated myself a little for it.

She tried twice more over the next half hour. Both times I gave her one word, the way I had that first week, before she’d gotten past any of my defenses. By the end she’d gone quiet too, and the only sound in the yard was the radio.

“That’s enough for today,” I said.

“It’s not even dark.”

“We’re calling it quits.”

I packed up the drill and walked up the hill to the cabin. I could hear the radio behind me the whole way. I knew without turning around that she was standing there with a board in her hands, wondering what she’d done.

“Is that peanut butter?”

She was sitting at the paint table with the jar in one hand and a spoon in the other. She’d been at it since breakfast, and the sun had already gone over the barn.

“It’s lunch,” she said.

“It was lunch yesterday too.”

“It’s a very versatile food.”

That apartment didn’t have a working oven, just the two-burner hot plate. I’d told her that on her first day like it was a small inconvenience, and then I’d never once thought about what she was eating up there.

She’d been careful around me since the afternoon in the yard. She still said good morning and still hummed, but she hadn’t brought me any more cider, and she’d stopped asking me questions. I’d done that to her on purpose. I’d done a good job of it, too, and I’d been miserable every quiet hour since.

I went up to the cabin. There was chili left over from Sunday, so I heated two bowls and made two grilled cheese sandwiches in the cast iron, and I carried all of it back down the hill.

I set one bowl and one sandwich in front of her.