Page 29 of Autumn With The Grumpy Mountain Man

An actual art studio. In Sedona, Arizona.

It was everything. It was exactly what I’d come up this mountain to prove I could earn. My parents would never say “just in case” to me again. My brothers would stop asking whether I’d thought about teaching. For once, nobody would smile at me like my dream was a nice little hobby.

I should have been jumping up and down.

Instead I got up and went to the window. The one that looked down into the shop.

Shepherd was on the ladder with his back to me. He was working on the seam near the top of the big pumpkin, with the radio playing and his sleeves pushed up. As I watched, he leaned over to look at something on the inside of one of the ribs. Then he shook his head, slowly, and I knew he’d found my smiley face.

He was smiling. I could see it from up here.

I thought about packing up my car and driving two thousand miles away from this mountain, and this barn, and that man on the ladder.

And for the very first time, I let myself wonder whether I could stay.

I could finish my last semester in the spring. And then I could come back. I could build something here. I didn’t know what, yet. But I could.

I didn’t go downstairs and tell him.

I wanted to. I stood at that window for a long time wanting to. But every time I imagined telling him, I imagined him saying, You have to go. This is your chance. He’d say it because he was a good man, and because he’d never once stood in the way of my work.

And somewhere underneath that, there was a smaller fear I didn’t want to look at too closely. That I’d tell him, and he wouldn’t ask me to stay.

I didn’t think I could stand that.

That evening I walked up the hill for supper. When I came through the cabin door, I saw he’d moved my chair. It had always been across from his. Now it was at the end of the table, closest to the woodstove.

“You’re always cold,” he said, without turning around from the stove.

I sat down in it. The heat from the stove warmed my back, and I watched him cook, and I didn’t say anything about the call.

I just smiled at him and held my secret close.

Chapter Ten

Shepherd

“You look like a mountain man,” Deb said as she climbed out of her car. “I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”

“Good to see you too, Deb.”

She came across the gravel and hugged me, quick and hard, the way she always had. She’d cut her hair short since I saw her last, and there was more gray in it. Otherwise she looked exactly the same. Reading glasses on a cord around her neck, a canvas bag over one shoulder, and the expression of a woman who’d already noticed three things you hoped she wouldn’t.

Hazel had reminded me at breakfast that the site visit was today. I’d told her I didn’t know anything about it. She’d pulled up the agreement on her phone and shown me.

Page five. Another page I hadn’t read.

“Six years,” Deb said, stepping back to look at me. “You said you’d come for a visit in a month.”

“I know. It’s been too long.”

“I drove you up this mountain myself. You slept the whole way and snored like a chainsaw.” She looked past me at the barn, the open doors, the big pumpkin glowing orange in the morning light. Something in her face softened. “Look at you, though.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I never had, with her. Deb had been the one to find me in that empty studio in Asheville the week everything fell apart. She’d sat on the floor with me among the packing boxes and told me I was going home. Then she’d put me in her car and driven me here. I’d never been able to pay that back.

Sending me Hazel had been her way of collecting. I was starting to think she’d done me the favor instead.

“Dr. Mills!” Hazel came out of the shop wiping her hands on a rag, her braid coming loose and paint on her cheek. She was practically bouncing. “You made it. Come see. You have to see everything.”