Harvest Moon Mountain Man (Autumn Harvest in Silver Ridge #1)

1. Zara

one

Zara

Nobody at Harding Orchards has heard of me or the appointment I made.

I've knocked three times. The woman who finally answers is in her sixties, flour on her forearms, a pie cooling on the porch rail behind her. She looks at my press badge like it's written in a language she used to know.

"Rourke's in the rows," she says, pointing with a wooden spoon. "Good luck getting five minutes."

I thank her and follow the gravel down past an equipment shed with its doors hanging open, past a stack of bins three high, until the trees swallow the farmhouse behind me.

Thirty-eight acres. Three generations. I know the numbers from the press kit — 1961 planting, four thousand trees, a wholesale contract with two Calgary grocers that covers about sixty percent of the crop.

The other forty percent is what he sells direct, at the Saturday market, at a premium he apparently doesn't advertise because he doesn't have to.

I did my homework.

I find him by sound before I find him by sight. The knock of an apple hitting canvas. Over and over, underneath the low call of men trading row numbers somewhere off to my left. He's up a ladder, picking bag slung crosswise, hat pulled low against the sun. He doesn't look down when I call his name.

"Rourke Harding?"

Nothing. Hand over hand.

"I have an interview scheduled. Two o'clock." I check my phone. 2:04. "Zara Okafor, Northern Table. Your assistant confirmed the date in June. I've got the email thread if you want to see it."

One glance. Gray eyes under the brim, sun-cracked at the corners, three days of stubble. He looks at me the way you'd look at a raccoon in your kitchen — mild interest, zero recognition, a faint sense that this is going to take longer than it should.

"Don't know anything about that."

"You emailed. Twice."

"I believe you." He climbs down, unhurried, like nothing about my presence has changed the shape of his afternoon at all. Broad through the shoulders, hands stained dark at the knuckles with tannin worked so deep it's probably permanent. "Doesn't mean I remember it."

"You always forget interviews you agreed to?"

"I don't forget the trees." He empties his bag into a bin. "Everything else is negotiable."

"I was promised an hour."

"You'll get it. Today's harvest, so you'll get it walking." He's already moving down the row without waiting to see if I follow. I lengthen my stride to catch him, notebook banging against my hip. "I talk while I work or I don't talk."

"I can work with that."

He doesn't smile. Doesn't do anything I'd call welcoming.

But he starts giving me full sentences by row three instead of the clipped four words he opened with, and somewhere around row four I decide I like him.

I decide not to let that show on my face, because men who look like they'd rather be up a ladder than talking to anyone tend not to respond well to being liked out loud.

I ask about rootstock first. I spent four hours on the drive up reading everything printed about this place since 1987, because I wanted him to know, without saying so, that I hadn't shown up having glanced at nothing but a press kit.

I ask about the '61 planting versus what's been grafted in since.

That gets the longest answer yet — Gravenstein on the east slope, his grandfather's choice, never explained.

Twenty years of guessing at a dead man's logic, one harvest at a time.

"You did your homework," he says, around row nine, like it genuinely surprises him.

"I always do."

"Most people who show up with a recorder ask what it's like to live somewhere slow." He says slow like it's someone else's word, not his. "Like the place is a postcard instead of a business that clears maybe eight percent margin in a good year."

"Eight percent?"

"On a good year." He doesn't elaborate. I don't push, not yet.

I ask which trees come down first, and whether the order changes in a wet September, and how close he cuts it to the frost line before he pulls the whole crew in early.

McIntosh first, he tells me — it won't hold, turns soft and mealy within days if you leave it hanging.

Cortland can wait, stubborn thing, holds its shape on the branch for weeks past when it should come down, which makes it either the easiest apple in the orchard or the one most likely to get forgotten, depending on the year.

I feed it back to him wrong a few rows later, mostly to see what he'll do with it. "Cortland's your first pick, though. Since it turns so fast."

He stops walking entirely. I watch him recalculate something behind his eyes, and for a second I think I've overplayed my hand.

"No. Cortland holds. You know that." A beat. "You said it wrong on purpose to see if I'd correct you."

I don't deny it.

"I will always correct you." He starts walking again. Something buried in the set of his jaw that might be amusement, the kind you'd miss entirely if you weren't already looking for it. "Waste of both our time otherwise."

The light starts to fade. Low, slanted, catching dust and the first drifting leaves until the whole orchard goes the color of the fruit hanging in it — every branch backlit gold, the ground between the rows striped with long blue shadow.

I stop mid-sentence, notebook forgotten, and tip my head back. Branches interlocking row to row into a ceiling of red and gold and green, dense enough that the sky only shows through in coin-sized gaps.

For one full minute I forget the words I owe my editor by Friday. I forget the flight home in five days. I just stand there and look up, the way you'd look up at the inside of something built on purpose, for you.

I don't notice Rourke's stopped too until I catch him watching me instead of the trees.

"You're supposed to be interviewing me."

"I got distracted." I don't apologize for it. "It's beautiful. I wasn't expecting that."

"What were you expecting?"

"Rows of trees. Not this." I gesture at the canopy, useless and honest, unable to land on a better word than this. "Like being inside something magical."

He doesn't answer that. Doesn't look away either, and the quiet holds, comfortable, stretching out longer than professional distance usually allows.

Once I’m back at the hotel, I check my messages.

I never once checked my phone the whole time I stood under his trees. I check it now — eleven missed messages, three from my editor — and feel nothing about any of them at all.

I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time before I open my laptop, trying to figure out how to write eight hundred words about apples when what I actually want to write about is the particular gray of a man's eyes when he's deciding whether or not to trust you.