Page 7 of Autumn With The Grumpy Mountain Man

“You drink your coffee black.”

“Mm.”

“So how did you know I was out?”

He cut the wire and set it aside. He didn’t answer. I stood there holding the mug and waiting for him to say something else, and he picked up another strip of wire like I wasn’t there at all.

I drank the coffee. It was exactly right.

I’d been in Ridgewood Falls for two weeks. I’d sanded what felt like a mile of lath and mixed enough paste to wallpaper the courthouse. I hadn’t minded any of it. But every morning I came downstairs hoping that today would be the day he let me touch the actual pumpkin.

“Wash your hands,” he said. “You’re doing paper today.”

I almost dropped the mug.

He showed me once what to do from across the table. He tore a strip of newsprint, dragged it through the paste, and laid it over one of the wooden ribs. It went down so smoothly it looked like he was painting with it. Then he went back to his own section of the armature and left me to it.

My first strip went on crooked. The second one wrinkled. When I tried the third one, it slid halfway down the rib before it stuck.

“Again,” he said.

I kept at it. It wrinkled again, and I made a small, frustrated noise I hadn’t meant to make out loud.

I heard him put his brush down. Then he came around the table and stood behind me.

He didn’t touch me. But he was close enough that I could feel the heat of him at my back, and close enough that I could smell cedar over the paste. He reached past me, his forearm right beside mine, and pressed his thumb into the center of the strip I’d botched.

“From the middle,” he said. “Out to the edges. Don’t pull it. Let it lie down.”

He drew his thumb out slowly to one side, then the other. The wrinkles disappeared.

I forgot to breathe. I’d been near plenty of men before. I’d dated boys in college and been kissed at parties and once let a guy from my printmaking class hold my hand through an entire movie. None of it had felt like this, standing still with a man who wasn’t even touching me.

“Your turn,” he said.

I dragged a fresh strip through the paste and laid it over the rib. My hands weren’t as steady as I wanted them to be. I pressed my thumb into the middle and smoothed it out to the edges, slowly, the way he had.

It lay flat.

“There,” he said, very quietly, right beside my ear.

Then he stepped back, and I could breathe again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

I put both hands flat on the table and stared at my strip of newspaper until my heart calmed down. When I glanced across the armature, he was already back on his side, working like nothing had happened.

Maybe nothing had, for him.

We worked side by side the rest of the morning. Around eleven, he spoke without me asking him a question, which had never happened before.

“Those drawings on the bins,” he said. “Where’d you learn to draw grain like that?”

“Nowhere, really. I just draw everything. I always have.” I laid another strip down and smoothed it. “My mom used to find sketches on the backs of her grocery receipts. She’d tell me they were wonderful and then remind me I’d need a backup plan.”

He didn’t say anything to that. But he stopped working for a second, and I felt him look at me.

“They are good,” he said. “The drawings.”

It was five words. I held on to them all day.