3. Zara
three
Zara
The crew clears out around six. Trucks pulling off down the gravel in a loose line, taillights winking through their own dust. I expect Rourke to call it too.
Instead he tips his head toward the barn at the edge of the near field and says, "Come see the rest of it," like it's nothing, like he hasn't spent all week acting like a man who genuinely forgot he agreed to any of this.
I follow without asking what the rest of it means. Something about the way Rourke goes quiet during work has stopped feeling like a wall over the last two days and started feeling like the opposite. A door I haven't earned yet. Except now, apparently, I have.
I worked it out somewhere on the walk over, the gravel crunching under both our boots.
The quiet isn't shyness. It isn't rudeness either, whatever I assumed that first afternoon climbing down off the ladder.
It's focus, and he gives it to the trees because that's the only kind of attention worth giving, the only kind he trusts.
When he hands a piece of it to me instead, it means something.
It means more than four hours of quotes ever could.
The barn smells like apples before I'm even through the door — sharp, sweet, rot-and-sugar, cider somewhere mid-process, wood gone dark with decades of soaking it in.
A press sits in the middle of the floor, hand-cranked, older than either of us by a wide margin.
Oak barrels line the back wall. Two dozen of them, maybe more, each chalked with a date in handwriting too neat to be his.
"This isn't in the press kit."
"Wasn't meant to be." He runs a hand along the nearest barrel — not inspecting it, just touching it, the way you'd touch something you've touched ten thousand times and still aren't tired of.
"Small batch. Whatever's left over after the sale fruit's gone.
Two hundred bottles most years, give or take. Mostly I drink it myself."
"Mostly?"
"Orrin's been at me to go commercial with it. Two years now." He shrugs. "Haven't decided."
Rourke talks more here than he has all day.
Sentences that don't stop the second they've delivered whatever I asked for.
He tells me about the press itself, about his grandfather's hands on the same crank forty years back, about the one disastrous year he tried adding pear to the blend and how fast, how completely, it went wrong.
I stop taking notes without noticing I've stopped.
It isn't for the piece anymore, hasn't been for a while now if I'm honest with myself.
I just want the rest of it, whatever the rest of it turns out to be.
"Taste this." He draws a cup straight from the barrel before I can even answer, cider running dark gold in the low light.
It’s sweet, but also sharp and tangy. I don't reach for a magazine word, don't try to compose the sentence I'd actually print. I just say what's true.
"It tastes like patience." Unrehearsed, not the version I'd write. "Like something that took longer than it needed to, and got better because of that, not despite it."
Rourke pauses with his cup halfway back to the barrel, eyes on me instead of the cider, like I've said something he wasn't braced to hear from a stranger, something closer to the truth than small talk usually manages.
"Most people say it tastes like apples."
"It does. That's not all it tastes like."
"No." Low. "It's not." He chuckles softly.
The light through the barn's high window has gone the color of the cider itself, gold going amber, dust turning slow in the shaft of it.
Neither of us moves toward the door. I've got four questions left on my list, good ones, the kind my editor will want quoted directly.
Instead I ask him what his grandfather would've thought of the barrels lined up along that back wall, chalked with dates, waiting on a decision two years unmade.
"He'd have told me to stop stalling." A beat. "He wasn't patient about anything except the trees. Everything else, he wanted settled yesterday, no negotiation."
"And you?"
"I'm patient about everything." He looks at me when he says it, not the trees, not the barrels lined up behind me. "Until I'm not."
I don't have an answer ready for that. I don't think he's waiting for one either — the words sit there between us, plain, unhurried, the kind of thing a man says once and lets land instead of chasing it with an explanation nobody asked him for.
We stand there in the gold barn light a while longer, cider going warm in the cup between my hands, neither of us in any rush to be the one who breaks it first.
"Can I ask you something… not for the piece?"
He nods once.
"Why me? You've had reporters out here before. You said so yourself. Why does this feel different than that?"
He's quiet long enough that I think he isn't going to answer at all. Then: "Because you stopped taking notes and you're still here."
I don't have a comeback for that, not a real one. As a journalist, I prided myself on my notes and never giving up the story.
At some point today, I’m not sure when, I stopped caring about the story and started caring about him.