Epilogue
SOLEIL
The aspens turned the last week of September.
Mae told me they would. I hadn’t been ready for what they actually looked like, which was the whole east face of Hollow Peak going gold at once, the way a room went gold when somebody turned the right lamp on.
I stood on Treyton's porch—our porch—with my coffee in both hands at six in the morning, and I watched the light come up over the ridge and find the aspens. I even cried a little because it was so amazingly beautiful and I’d almost left before I got to experience it.
Biscuit laid at my feet. He was always at my feet now.
He’d abandoned the porch step of cabin three and had decided his post was wherever I was.
Treyton had taken it well, especially since Penny had decided she preferred his workshop over the farm up the road and kept him company every day while he worked.
I drove down to the Switchback at seven-thirty.
Mae stood behind the counter. She slid a Magic Latte across to me before I had a chance to order it and pointed her chin toward the corner of the café where the new shelf sat.
“He finished it Tuesday,” she said. “I made him hang it Wednesday. Go look.”
It was a low shelf, wall-mounted at child-eye-height, built from the leftover black walnut from the rocking chair he’d finally finished in August. Picture books on the top.
Chapter books on the bottom. A hand-lettered sign above it read Switchback Reading Corner. Take one. Bring one back when you can.
I crouched down and ran my hand along the underside of the lower shelf. The carving was a stand of aspens. Five trunks, leaves rendered with his patience for detail, the bottom edge of the carving running down to where a kid's knee would press against it if they sat on the floor reading.
He’d put the carving on the underside. He hadn’t been able to give that up. But he’d also signed his name in small letters at the lower right corner of the side panel, where any kid who tilted their head to look would see it. T. Berg.
Seeing his name there turned my insides to jelly. He’d earned the right to claim his work. I stood up and went back to the counter.
Mae was refilling somebody's coffee when I sat down. She didn’t look at me, just set down the coffee pot and slid a cinnamon roll across the counter. “Eat that, Soleil. Don't make me say anything else about it.”
Treyton was teaching a class at the lodge that afternoon covering beginner woodworking.
Six adults had signed up along with one teen whose mother had heard about it from her hairdresser.
I drove up at three to watch the last half hour.
He had a piece of scrap pine on the workbench he’d set up on the lodge porch.
The teen was working on a coaster with a small leaf carved into it.
The leaf was a mess. The veins were uneven. One of the lobes had gone deeper than the other. The kid was holding the coaster in both hands, gripping it like he wasn’t sure whether he should be proud or disappointed.
Treyton leaned in next to him. He took the coaster, turned it under the lodge light, and ran his thumb along the leaf the way he had run his thumb along the bench at the lookout the day he took me there.
“That's a good leaf,” he said. “You see how the one lobe came in deeper? That happens when you let the chisel decide. That's not a mistake. That's the leaf telling you what it wanted.”
The kid looked at the leaf for a long beat. Then he looked at Treyton like he wasn’t sure he should believe him. He looked at the leaf again.
“It's a good leaf?”
“Yeah. It's a real one. The ones that look perfect are pretend. Yours has the lobes a real leaf would have. Take it home and show your mom.”
The kid shoved it in his backpack and jumped down from the porch.
Treyton came over and stood next to me with his hands in his pockets while we watched the kid get on his bike and pedal away. After a minute he said, without looking at me, “Don't.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You're going to.”
“I'm not going to say anything, Treyton. I'm just going to stand here and think about it for a while.”
He let me. He stood next to me with his hands in his pockets and let me think about it for a while.
We drove up to the cabin at sundown. Biscuit waited for us on the porch.
He stood up when the truck came up the gravel and did a half-turn the way he did when he was pretending he hadn’t been concerned about how long we’d been gone.
Treyton got out and crouched down and let the dog go through the routine, and I went up the porch step and into the cabin to start dinner.
His phone rang while I was draining pasta.
He looked at the screen before answering. “Hey, Mama Mae.”
Then he stood at the kitchen window with his shoulder turned a quarter to the side so I could hear her voice through the speaker.
His side of the conversation was filled with “yes, ma'am” and “no, ma'am” and “Soleil's fine, she says hi” and a long pause while Mama Mae said something that made him close his eyes for a second.
Then he said “I know. We'll see you in May. Yes. Yes, I will. I love you too.”
He hung up but didn’t move from the window. Then he looked over his shoulder at me. “She says hi back.”
“Did she?”
“She said ‘Tell that sweet girl her mountain man finally figured out how to use his words.’”
“That's an accurate quote?”
“Verbatim.”
I laughed against the stove. He came over and put his hand on the small of my back and stood there while I finished the pasta, and we ate dinner on the porch with Biscuit between us and the aspens going gold on the east face of the ridge, and after dinner he said, “I want to show you something.”
We walked out past the workshop, down the trail to where the meadow opened up. A small building sat at the edge. I hadn’t been to this part of the meadow in almost a month.
“Where did that come from?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
He’d built me a studio. It was small, only twelve by fourteen with the ability to open the walls during the summer on three sides with a fourth wall of north-facing windows to let in the light.
The floorboards were oiled pine. A workbench ran along the back wall at the right height for me to stand at and draw.
He’d carved a stool and set my pencils on a low shelf that I could easily reach.
Carvings decorated every surface I looked at.
A glacier lily on the front of the workbench.
A paintbrush bloom on the side of the stool.
A small string of pearly everlasting along the lip of the windowsill.
Anemones on the doorframe. He had carved on the outside this time.
He’d carved where I would see them every morning when I came down to work.
I looked at the roof.
He had joined our initials at the apex of the roof beam where the rafters met. T.B. + S.G. The letters were small but centered. He’d carved deep enough that they would last as long as mountain ash lasted in this climate, which one of Mae’s regulars told me last month was about three hundred years.
Three hundred years.
I sat down on the floor of the studio.
I sat on the floorboards with my back against the workbench, and Treyton sat down next to me without asking what was wrong because he knew what was wrong…
nothing. That’s what made me so emotional.
Everything was exactly right, including how Treyton wrapped his arm around my shoulder while we looked out at the meadow through the north window.
The flowers had faded. A few late columbines lingered at the south edge of the meadow, refusing to acknowledge that the season was over.
The aspens were gold. The light was the gold light that came down at this elevation in late September, the kind that made me appreciate why people stayed up here through the hard winters.
“We’re going to be here in three hundred years,” I said. “On a beam.”
“We’ll outlast the beam. It’s going to need to be redone sometime around the two-fifty mark.”
“Will you redo it?”
“I won't be here, Soleil.”
“Right.”
He kissed the side of my head. “Our grandkids will redo it. Or our grandkids’ grandkids. Whoever's living up here will. Somebody will keep it going.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
I leaned against him as the last light came down over the ridge and the gold settled on the meadow and a single late columbine bent in a breeze I couldn’t feel from inside the studio.
This was what permanence looked like. It looked like a meadow that bloomed for ten weeks a year and then went dormant and came back.
It looked like a man who had spent nine years hiding his carvings on the underside and had spent a summer learning to put them where I could see them, and a roof beam that was going to need redoing in two hundred and fifty years by somebody we would not live to meet.
It looked like a quiet thing that lasted longer than the loud ones.
Biscuit thumped his tail behind me. The columbine swayed in the wind.
Treyton pulled me in against his shoulder, and the light went down behind the ridge, and we sat on the floor of my studio with the carvings around us and the meadow going dark through the window, and somewhere down the valley the first lights of Hollow Peak were coming on for the night.
Up in the rafters, our initials sat in the mountain ash and didn’t move. They had at least three hundred years to go. But Treyton and I had forever.