Chapter 8
SOLEIL
I found the seventh carving in the kitchen of my own cabin.
I’d been opening the drawer by the sink to look for a teaspoon and my fingers brushed against the underside of the drawer face.
There it was…a small leaf, three veins, the lobe slightly curled.
I recognized it as a mountain maple, the kind that grew in the lower elevations around Hollow Peak and turned the canyon below red in fall.
He’d carved it in a cabin he rented to strangers four months out of the year, where the previous tenants had probably never noticed that the underside of a kitchen drawer in a vacation cabin had been thought about by anyone at all.
I held the drawer open with my hip and ran my thumb across the leaf while I counted.
There had been a carving on the bench at the lookout, the drawer in my cabin, and the vine under the seat of the chair at the Switchback.
I’d loved the meadow scene under the shelf in his workshop, and the pine sprig he’d put inside the soap boxes.
The last time I’d been at his cabin, I’d found a grain pattern on the underside of the windowsill above his kitchen sink.
And now I’d found a maple leaf in the drawer of cabin three.
Twelve days had passed since we spent the night at the miner’s cabin.
And it had been four days since he’d brought me coffee on my porch at six in the morning without being asked.
He’d set the cup on the railing next to my sketchbook, then walked back to his workshop without saying a word.
Two days ago I’d fallen asleep on his porch with my sketchbook open on my chest and woken up with his jacket draped over me.
We didn’t talk about any of it. We hadn’t mentioned the night at the miner’s cabin. Or the carvings. Or the time that was slipping away quicker than I wanted it to. We’d built a small, mutually-agreed-upon silence between us. It had been working, but it couldn’t continue.
I opened the drawer and picked up a teaspoon. Then I went and stood at the kitchen window with my coffee and looked down the ridge at the gravel turnout where his truck was parked. In that moment, I made a decision I had been making in pieces for days.
I wasn’t going to tell him I’d found the carvings. Not the bench. Not the drawer in my cabin. Not the chair at the Switchback. Not the windowsill, not the soap boxes Gibson had told on him about without knowing what he was telling, not the meadow under the shelf in his workshop.
He hid beauty inside everything he built. He hid it from everyone, and he’d been letting me find it on my own. He hadn’t pointed me at any of them except the columbine under the side table in the workshop. He’d been letting me look.
I wasn’t going to tell anyone about the carvings. Mae would have liked to know. The world that bought hand-built furniture from a man named Berg had no idea what they had on the underside of their pieces.
I was going to leave it at that. I was going to let him keep what he was hiding, but I was going to draw the columbine into my book so I could take a tiny part of him with me when I left his ridge.
I picked up my sketchbook and walked down to his cabin.
He was on the porch with Biscuit. He had a mug of coffee in one hand and the other hand on Biscuit's head, scratching slow, and he was watching the meadow do what the meadow did in mid-morning, which was breathe with the wind. He saw me coming and didn’t stand.
He just slid sideways on the step to make room.
I sat down next to him and opened my sketchbook.
“Working?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
He didn't ask what I was working on. He never asked what. He’d figured out within a week that my answer would be whatever I was doing right then, which was sometimes a flower, sometimes him, sometimes nothing in particular.
I drew. He scratched Biscuit. Down the ridge a hawk was working the updraft on the east face and the wind moved in the columbines and we sat on his porch step shoulder to shoulder for what was, when I checked my phone later, an hour and fourteen minutes.
His phone rang. He looked at the screen before deciding to answer. “Hey, Mama Mae.”
I should have left then, but I didn't want to move.
He walked to the porch railing and stood with his back to me, looking down the ridge, and I heard him say “no, ma'am” and then “yes, ma'am” and then a long pause during which someone in Broken Bend, Texas was saying something that he was letting wash over him without interrupting.
Then he said, “she's fine.” Then “Bison's coming through at the end of the month, I know. I know.” Then, after another pause: “Yes, I'm eating. I gotta go.”
He hung up.
He stood at the railing for a beat longer. Then he came back and sat down on the step next to me and put his hand on Biscuit's head again. He didn’t offer an explanation, and I didn’t ask. The wind moved in the columbines.
After a minute he said, “Biscuit ate two of Mae's rolls again. She knows. I'm going to pay for it.”
“How did she find out?”
“She has a network.”
“A roll network?”
“Yeah.”
I went back to drawing. He went back to scratching the dog. We didn’t talk about Mama Mae, and we didn’t talk about Bison coming through at the end of the month. We didn’t talk about a lot of things.
He took me into the workshop late that afternoon because I asked him to.
I had asked him without asking him. I had walked down to the shop after lunch with my sketchbook under my arm and looked at him in the doorway and tipped my head toward the inside, and he had set down the chisel, stepped aside, told Biscuit to stay on the porch, and shut the door behind us.
The shop was warm in the afternoon. Cedar shavings covered the floor.
The light through the south-facing window was the gold mountain light that came on at four in the afternoon at this elevation in this part of summer.
He’d been working on a rocking chair he’d been ignoring for a month, and it was almost done.
I set the sketchbook on the workbench, then crossed to stand in front of him. I put my hand on his chest, making him stop where he was.
I was taking the lead and he was letting me.
The storm shelter had been weeks of holding back exploding on a tarp by a fire while hail fell down around us.
This was different. This was me walking into his shop in the late afternoon on a Wednesday in July and putting my hand on his chest and watching him not breathe for a beat and then breathe again on my terms.
He was already shaking before I touched the buttons on his shirt.
I unbuttoned the shirt. Slowly. He let me.
His hands were at his sides and then at my hips and then back at his sides, like he was trying to figure out where they were supposed to go.
I caught one of his hands and put it on my waist and he stopped trying to figure it out.
I undressed him in his own workshop in the late afternoon with cedar shavings on the floor and the gold light on the side of his face and his back against the workbench, and he watched me the whole time. He didn't take his eyes off me.
When I had his shirt off, I put my mouth on the scar on his knuckle, and he made a sound that sounded like relief and release all at once.
I told him to sit down on the workshop stool.
He did. I climbed into his lap with my dress bunched up around my hips and his hands on the small of my back and his forehead against my collarbone, and the workshop was quiet.
The only sound came from the wind outside, and his breathing under my ear ,and the small, careful sound of me undoing what was left of his belt.
I took my time the way he had taken his time with me at the cabin.
I took my time on purpose. I let him watch my face.
I let him see me the way he’d let me see him in every room he had ever brought me into.
I didn’t look away from him, and I didn’t let him look away from me, and when he was finally inside me with his hand spread across my back like he was trying to hold me to him without claiming me, he said it.
“Mine.” The word vibrated against the bone at the base of my throat.
It was different. It was the same word and the same mouth, but this one wasn't a claim he had been suppressing and let out by accident, and it wasn't a confession he had made because he could not, in the moment, choose not to make it. This one was him saying it because he had decided to say it. This one meant “I’m yours” and I knew the difference because I’d heard the other two and I was learning his language fast.
I held his face in my hands and kissed him slow.
I didn’t say it back because it was implied.
The room knew. The shop knew. Even the cedar shavings on the floor knew.
I rocked against him on the stool in the gold afternoon light and he held me through it, and I held him through it and when it ended, it ended quietly, the way quiet things ended, which was without anyone having to announce that they had.
We sat there for a long time after.
His forehead rested against my chest. My hand tangled in his hair.
The light through the south window turned from gold to honey to the deep amber that came right before the sun dropped behind the ridge.
Outside the door, Biscuit was either asleep on the porch or had given up on us and gone exploring.
“I made you something.” His voice came out low and rough.
I didn't move. “What?”
“In the cabin. I'll show you tonight.”
I held the back of his neck and closed my eyes. I should have asked him what it was. I should have asked him a lot of things, but I didn’t. The wall of silence between us was still working, and I wasn’t going to be the one who brought it tumbling down.
We had dinner at his cabin that night. He’d made stew earlier in the week and warmed it up.
We ate on the porch with Biscuit begging for scraps between us.
After dinner he took me inside and showed me what he’d made.
It was a small wooden box with a hinged lid made out of mountain ash.
He’d carved the underside of the lid with a single columbine.
He didn't say anything when he handed it to me. He let me open it and waited while I looked. Then he let me close it again without naming what I’d seen.
My hands shook as I handed it back to him. He set it on the table by the door.
I drove down to the bookstore in the morning to check in with Evelyn. Part of my residency involved making a presentation at the end and we’d been making plans for a few weeks. After we wrapped up, Evelyn pulled me aside.
“Soleil. Do you have a minute?”
“Sure.”
“I wanted to ask you what you’re doing in September. A friend of mine runs a winter artists' residency on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Six months, a full stipend, a gallery show at the end. She's looking for a name for this season, and I gave her yours. She'd like to talk this week.”
“Maine over the winter?”
“I know it's a lot. I'm just floating it. Think about it, will you?”
A customer came in and pulled her attention to the front of the store. I stood by the coffee pot for a beat with my hands wrapped around a mug I’d been holding for the entire conversation. Maine in winter. Mount Desert Island. A residency I hadn't asked for, in a place I’d never been.
I set my mug down on the counter and turned to leave. Treyton stood in the doorway of the back room. From the look on his face, he’d been standing there long enough to hear at least part of the conversation.
We drove back up the ridge in different cars. By late afternoon, the wall was back.
He came up to my porch the next day with a cinnamon roll from Mae's, set it on the railing without knocking, and walked back down the ridge before I could open the door. When I called after him, he didn’t stop and didn’t turn around.
I picked up the back and went back inside. Standing in the kitchen, I looked down at the drawer below the sink where the seventh carving lived and made a different decision than the one I’d made earlier in the week.
It was time to go. Whatever was going on between the grump of Hollow Peak and me had to end. I pulled the empty boxes out of the closet and started filling them with sketchbooks and my finished illustrations.
I packed them one at a time, with paper between each one, hoping he would walk back up the ridge before I was done.