Cleo
Dottie Callahan is not what I expected.
I expected gruff. I expected suspicious.
I expected small-town wariness that makes a journalist work for every sentence.
What I get is a woman behind a dark wood bar who looks at me over the top of her reading glasses, sets down the inventory sheet she's working on, and says, "You must be the writer. Coffee or whiskey?"
"Coffee," I say. "For now."
She almost smiles. "Smart girl."
The Summit is exactly what my research promised and nothing like it at the same time.
Mounted elk heads. A jukebox in the corner that looks like it hasn't been updated since Clinton's second term.
The smell of old wood and something frying in the back that makes my stomach tighten with professional interest. I set my recorder on the bar and give her my best version of the look that says I'm harmless, tell me everything.
She starts talking. Not fast — Dottie Callahan does not do anything fast — but steady. The bar. Her regulars. Thirty-one years in the same building while the town changed shape around her.
I'm leaning in. My pen is moving. The story is breathing.
Then the door opens.
He doesn't come in quietly. There is nothing quiet about this man. He comes through the door with his jacket half on — one arm in, the other sleeve trailing — and says to Dottie without looking at either of us: "Road's going to close tonight. She needs to know."
Dottie says, "She's right there."
His eyes find me and he is enormous. That's the first thing.
Wide jaw, broken nose, hands that look like they were built for a different century.
He brings the mountain in with him — cold air, pine resin, something underneath both that smells like wind and exertion.
He fills the doorframe the way some men fill silence — completely, without apology.
He looks at me. Actually looks — and for half a second the order dies in his eyes and something hotter takes its place. His gaze moves over me once. Fast. Not casual.
My heart kicks hard enough to spill the coffee I'm not holding.
The bar was warm ten seconds ago. Now it's small.
He is taking up all the air in it and I am suddenly, irritatingly aware of the width of his shoulders and the way his half-on jacket exposes the line of his chest through his shirt and I did not come to this mountain to notice the chest of a man who hasn't said hello to me.
Then it's gone — whatever crossed his face — and he's talking.
"You're going to be stuck here for three, maybe four days. Road closes in this weather, it closes."
I put my recorder down. Very deliberately. "Hello to you too."
"I'm telling you so you can leave before it does. You've got maybe two hours."
"And if I don't?"
He blinks. Like nobody has asked him that before. "If you don't, you're stuck here. Three days minimum. No road out, no signal, no way to leave until the plows come through."
"I heard you the first time."
"Then why are you still sitting there?"
"Because I have an interview to finish and you're interrupting it."
His hand grabs the trailing sleeve of his jacket and shoves his arm through it — hard, deliberate. I watch him struggle with it. The visible effort of a man who is not used to being dismissed trying to figure out what to do with a woman who just did it to his face.
He crossed fifteen feet of walkway from the SAR base with his jacket half on. In sub-zero weather. A man who runs search and rescue in these mountains does not forget how to dress for the cold.
He was in a hurry.
I don't think about that yet. I'm too busy enjoying the look on his face.
I turn to Dottie. "Can I see the room?"
Behind me, silence.
I pick my recorder back up. She is already reaching for a key.
Boots on floorboards. Heavy. Deliberate. The door.
Dottie watches him go and then looks at me with an expression that contains about four things I can't untangle yet.
I say, "He's always like that?"
Dottie says, "Generally worse."
I almost laugh. I don't. I take the key instead and ask what time is good for dinner.
The wind picks up outside. Snow ticks against the windows.
Somewhere behind the bar, the jukebox hums to life on its own — a crackle of static and then something slow and country and inevitable.
Dottie glances from the door to the jukebox and back, and the corner of her mouth curves up — slow, knowing.
I wiggle my toes inside my soaking suede boots. They are freezing. I am completely unequipped for this storm and I am not going anywhere.
I'm staying. The road can do whatever it wants.