6. Rafe
RAFE
Amalfunctioning woodstove is a genuine hazard, and that's the whole reason I'm standing in a strange kitchen at eight at night with a toolbox in my hand.
Carbon monoxide doesn't care whose cabin it fills up, and Dot Higgins would never let me hear the end of it if something happened to the new hire and her kids because I couldn't be bothered to drive eleven miles.
Good reasons, solid and defensible, the kind that hold up if anyone asks me to explain myself.
Nobody's asking. I don't examine too closely why the toolbox in question is my own, the good one from the loft, the one with the level that's actually calibrated and the screwdrivers that don't strip out halfway through a job, and not the roadside kit that's been rattling around in the truck bed since spring.
"It's the flue," I tell her, crouched in front of the open iron door with a flashlight between my teeth. "Damper's stuck half shut. You've been trying to burn wood in a box that can't breathe."
"Is that bad?"
"It's why you've got more smoke than heat." I work the lever free with the heel of my palm, feel it give, and swing it open the rest of the way by hand. "There. Try it now."
She crouches next to me, close enough that I catch the smell of her shampoo under the cold and the woodsmoke, and feeds in the kindling she already has stacked and ready, because whatever else is wrong with her fire-building, her prep work is solid.
The flame catches on the first try and holds, small and orange and finally behaving like it's supposed to.
"Oh, thank God." She sits back on her heels, staring at the fire like it personally wronged her for two straight days and she's still deciding whether to forgive it. "I was fully prepared to sleep in my truck tonight."
"Wouldn't have recommended it. Gets down into the twenties up here this time of year."
"See, this is exactly the kind of information that would've been useful before I moved to a mountain town with two kids and zero relevant skills.
" She stands, brushes soot off her knees, and looks at the fire with the suspicion of someone who expects it to betray her the second her back is turned.
"I can read a spreadsheet standing on my head.
I can talk a divorce lawyer down off a ledge.
Anything requiring physical labor, I am a genuine liability.
Ask anyone who's ever watched me try to parallel park a moving truck. "
"Fifteen minutes."
"What?"
"That's how long the damper took. You could've fixed it yourself with a screwdriver and a YouTube video."
"Sure, if I had a screwdriver, or knew what a damper was, or had any confidence whatsoever that I wasn't about to burn the cabin down.
" She fills two mugs from a kettle that's already whistling and spoons instant coffee into both without asking if I want any, which tells me she's decided I'm staying whether I meant to or not.
"Fair warning, this stuff tastes like a campfire had a bad opinion of itself. "
"I've had worse."
"That's not the endorsement you think it is."
"I've had MREs that came with their own apology letter. This is fine."
"Now I need to know what an MRE is and I'm almost certain I don't."
It's genuinely terrible, the coffee, bitter and thin and somehow both burnt and watery at once, and I drink it anyway because she made it and because leaving now, fifteen minutes into a job that's already done, would require an explanation I don't currently have.
"This is an insult to coffee," I tell her.
"I know. I bought the cheapest jar at the General Store out of spite, because the good stuff felt like admitting I was staying somewhere with a leaking roof and a woodstove that hates me.
" She wraps both hands around her mug and leans against the counter, looking more at ease than I've seen her since the day she walked into my brewhouse with two kids and a resume.
"Turns out spite doesn't taste great either. "
"Noted for future reference."
"You're really not going to let the U-Haul thing go, are you?"
"I watched you back a twenty-six-foot rental into a gravel lot at a forty-five-degree angle on your interview day. It's not something a man forgets."
"I got it in eventually."
"After four tries."
"Three." She points the spoon at me like it's a weapon. "And I'd like the record to reflect that nobody died."
That's the part that gets me, low and unexpected, before I can see it coming.
I laugh, actually laugh, the real kind I haven't used in a long time, and it catches me off guard on the way out.
It surprises both of us. She goes still for a second, watching me with an expression I can't quite name, something between delight and disbelief, like she just witnessed a solar eclipse.
"Was that a laugh?"
"Might've been."
"I'm putting it on the record too. Rafe Montgomery, laughing at my parking skills. I should frame this moment."
I don't tell her it won't last. It doesn't seem worth ruining the moment over.
We end up at the little table by the window, mugs of bad coffee between us, and somewhere in the next hour the conversation stops being about woodstoves and roofs and drifts sideways into easier territory, her stories about the twins, mine about hop yields, both of us circling things without quite landing on them.
She tells me about the divorce attorney's office, the exact color of the carpet she stared at for three years, and I tell her about the first batch of beer I ever brewed, which came out tasting like a wet sock, a story Gunny still brings up whenever he wants to win an argument.
She asks how I learned to fix a flue that fast, and I hear myself answering before I've decided to.
"My grandfather taught me. He ran cattle on this land before it was a brewery, and every building on the property had at least one thing that didn't work right, so you learned fast or you froze.
" I turn the mug in my hands, watching the coffee slosh, feeling the words come easier than I expect them to.
"He used to say a man who can't fix what's broken in his own house has no business calling himself the one in charge of it. "
"That sounds like a man with a lot of opinions."
"He had exactly one opinion, repeated in forty different ways.
" That gets a real smile out of her, and some tight knot behind my ribs eases another half inch, dangerous territory I haven't been in for years.
"He taught me the damper trick on this exact kind of stove.
Same brand, even, if you can believe that. My grandfather taught me..."
The front door bangs open before I can finish it, cold air rushing in behind two kids already mid-argument, Eli waving a small cardboard box like a verdict and Josie right on his heels insisting on something with the total conviction of someone who knows she's right and hasn't lost an argument all week.
"Candy Land is a baby game," Eli announces, to the room at large. "Maggie only had it because it's for her granddaughter."
"You still lost."
"I let you win because you were going to cry."
"I was not going to cry."
Maggie's right behind them in the doorway, hands on her hips, delivering a look at both kids that could strip paint.
"He absolutely lost, and he is absolutely still working through that.
" She catches sight of me at the table and her eyebrows climb with obvious, unhidden interest. "Well. Isn't this cozy?"
The room fills up fast after that, coats coming off, backpacks dropped, Eli already narrating the entire game in exhaustive detail to nobody in particular, Josie climbing into a chair at the table like she's been doing it her whole life, the whole cabin suddenly loud and warm and full in a way it wasn't fifteen minutes ago.
It should feel like nothing. Kids coming home.
A house getting noisy at the end of a day.
It hits me instead like something coming loose behind my ribs, a sudden ache that has nothing to do with the actual volume in the room and everything to do with how much I want to stay in the middle of it.
I know this feeling. I've spent twenty years training myself not to want things this much, because wanting something this much is how it guts you when it gets taken away.
"I should get back," I say, already standing, already reaching for the toolbox like it's a life raft.
Jenna looks up, something shifting fast across her face, disappointment covered over almost before I can read it. "You don't have to run off. There's more coffee. Terrible coffee, but coffee."
"Early morning. Brew day." Both are true. Neither is the actual reason.
"Right. Of course." She walks me to the door anyway, arms crossed against the cold coming in through it, and Eli calls out a goodbye without looking up from his cardboard box of vindication, and Josie waves at me with the same open, unguarded ease she's had since the day she handed me a weed like it was worth something.
"Thank you," Jenna says at the door, quieter now, just for me. "For the stove. For staying."
"Wasn't a big job."
"That's not what I meant."
Nothing comes to mind worth saying back, so I let it go. I get in the truck, pull out onto the gravel road with my headlights cutting a narrow tunnel through the dark, and drive the eleven miles back to the brewery a lot faster than the road actually allows.
I don't go up to the loft. I go straight to the brewhouse, turn on every light in the place, and lose myself in inventory work that doesn't need doing tonight, doesn't need doing until next week at the earliest, recounting hop shipments I already counted twice this month because my hands need something to do that isn't remembering the sound of two kids arguing about a board game in a kitchen that smelled like bad coffee and woodsmoke.
It's past two in the morning before I finally stop, and I stand in the middle of my own quiet brewhouse, furious in a way I can't fully explain at myself, at the whole evening, at how badly some stupid, starved part of me had wanted to stay in somebody else's warm kitchen and listen to somebody else's kids fight over Candy Land like it was the only thing in the world worth having.
Biscuit watches me from his spot by the door, unimpressed by the hour, unimpressed by the noise, offering nothing in the way of an opinion on any of it.
I sit down across from him on the cold concrete anyway, because apparently that's where we are tonight, a grown man explaining himself to a dog at two in the morning over a woodstove repair that should never have taken longer than the fifteen minutes it actually needed.
"It's not the kids," I tell him. "I like the kids fine."
He thumps his tail once, which is either agreement or an invitation to stop talking. I don't take the hint.
"It's the rest of it. The noise. The whole thing feeling like a place I used to know how to belong in.
" I rub a hand over my face, over the two days of stubble I haven't gotten around to shaving, and look up at the ceiling like there's an answer written there that I've somehow missed for twenty years.
"I'm not equipped for that. I built a whole life around not being equipped for that. "
Biscuit doesn't have a response to this either, which is about the level of comfort I deserve at this hour. I don't have a list for any of it. I'm starting to think I'm running out of paper.