Page 20 of Autumn With The Grumpy Mountain Man

“Printed in the paper.” He was quiet for a second. “I came home for a month to figure out what to do next. That was six years ago.”

I thought about the trash pile in the shop and the magazine page I’d laid face down on top of it. I thought about him at the top of a ladder every fall, making beautiful things for a town and then letting them go on a burn pile, so nobody could ever take them from him.

“She was wrong,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“She was wrong, Shepherd. I wrote a whole paper about it.”

That got a sound out of him, almost a laugh. It rumbled against my back.

“Your turn,” he said.

“My turn for what?”

“What do you want to make? After all this.”

Nobody asked me that. People asked what I was going to do with an art degree. They asked whether I’d thought about teaching, or graphic design, or something with benefits. Nobody had ever asked me what I wanted to make like the answer mattered.

“I want to create art that makes people feel something,” I said slowly. “Like your pumpkin did for me. I saw it at two in the morning, and something in me just went, there. That. I want to make people feel the way your work made me feel.”

I took a breath. “My parents are wonderful. They love me. But every time I tell them about my projects, they smile and ask if I’ve looked into a backup plan. Just in case.”

He was quiet. The sun came up over the far ridge, and the whole valley filled with light.

“You’re not the backup plan kind,” he said.

My eyes filled up so fast I had to look at the valley so he wouldn’t see.

He tightened his arms around me, and we sat there in the sun until the town below us woke up.

“Can I help?”

“You can sit down.” He pointed at an old kitchen chair.

His cabin was one big room, with a stone fireplace on one end and a kitchen on the other and a wide table in between. It was neater than I expected. There were books stacked on every flat surface and a carved walnut bowl full of apples on the table. A quilt that had to be older than both of us lay over the back of the couch.

He’d asked me up for supper as we pulled back into the drive that morning, gruffly, like it had just occurred to him. I’d said yes before he finished the question.

He had a pot of stew going on the stove. He stood at the counter cutting bread with his sleeves pushed up, and I watched his hands, his forearms, the line of his shoulders under the flannel.

Then I saw the refrigerator.

There was a sticky note on it, held up by a magnet shaped like a pumpkin. It was a tiny drawing of a grilled cheese with a smiley face.

My sticky note. He’d kept it.

I sat there at his table and felt it happen. It wasn’t a slow thing. It was like stepping off the edge of a stair in the dark, where the ground isn’t where you thought it was, and there’s no going back up.

I was falling in love with him.

I wasn’t scared of it. That surprised me more than anything.

He turned around with the bread and caught me looking at him. He stopped. For a long moment he just stood there, looking back at me sitting at his table in his cabin, and the way he looked at me made my breath catch. It wasn’t hungry, or not only that. He looked at me like I was supposed to be there. Like I’d always had a chair at that table and had only just found it.

Then he set the bread down and ladled out the stew, and we ate. We talked about nothing, about the festival and Walt’s barn and a book on his shelf I’d read twice. We laughed. It was the easiest dinner I’d ever had.

It was full dark when he walked me back down the hill. He carried a flashlight, and I didn’t need it, because he held my hand the whole way.