Walker
One Year Later...
The ridge trail is gold and rust instead of green. The lodgepole pines are dropping needles onto a carpet of birch leaves that crunch under our boots, and I've had the ring in my jacket pocket since breakfast, sitting against my ribs like a second heartbeat.
Porter doesn't know. I've been careful. I told her the leaves were peaking this week and she said we had to go see them, which was exactly what I was counting on, because Porter Lane has never once turned down a reason to go up this trail.
"You're doing the thing," she says, three switchbacks up, not even looking back at me.
"What thing."
"The quiet thing. You go quiet when you're planning something."
"I'm always quiet."
"Not this quiet." She stops at a break in the trees where the whole valley opens up, gold and orange running down the slopes toward town, and turns around, hands on her hips, sizing me up the way she sizes up a room she's about to redesign. "What are you planning, Walker Danes?"
"Keep walking. You'll see."
She keeps walking.
That's the thing about Porter — she'll push, and then she'll trust me, in that order, every time, and I've spent the last year learning how much I like being trusted like that.
It's a different kind of good than being loved.
Quieter. It shows up in small places — she hands me her coffee to hold without asking if I'll spill it, she leaves her sketchbook open on the counter where anyone could look, she fell asleep on my shoulder in the truck last week without checking first whether I minded.
I minded exactly none of it. I've spent my whole life minding nothing about her.
We reach the first lookout as the light starts going low and orange, catching the turned leaves so the whole ridge looks lit from inside. She stops at the edge, the way she always does, and looks out at it. I watch her instead of the view. Old habit. Best one I've got.
"This never gets old," she says with a happy sigh.
"No."
She turns to say something else, and I'm already down on one knee, ring box open in my palm, and whatever she was about to say just stops in her mouth.
"Walker."
"I bought this the day after you moved in," I tell her.
"Took one look at your boxes in my front hall and drove to Kelowna before we'd even finished unpacking them.
I've been sitting on it for a year, waiting for the right trail, the right light, the right version of asking you this.
Turns out there wasn't a right version. There was just this one.
" I close my hand around the box, open it again, steadier than I feel.
"I don't want to keep count of the good years anymore, Porter. I just want all of them. Marry me."
Both her hands go over her mouth. For a second she doesn't say anything at all, and the wind moves through the birches and drops a handful of leaves down around us like it planned it on purpose, and I think, distantly, that I could not have written this better if I'd tried.
Then she's crying, laughing at the same time, and it comes out wrecked: "Yes. Yes, obviously — Walker, yes."
I laugh, and I get the ring onto her shaking hand. She pulls me up by the front of my jacket and kisses me with the leaves still coming down around us.
"A year," she says against my mouth. "You had this ring for a whole year and didn't say a word?"
"Wanted you settled first. Didn't want you saying yes to a ring before you'd said yes to the town. Me. All of it."
"That's very strategic of you."
"I run a hardware store, Porter. I like a solid foundation before I build anything on top of it."
She laughs at that, head tipping back, and swats my chest lightly with her free hand — the one now wearing my ring — and I catch her wrist and kiss the inside of it instead.
"You could've just asked me in June," she says. "Saved yourself four months of hardware metaphors."
"And miss this?" I nod at the ridge, gold and burning around us, her hand in mine. "Not a chance."
"You're insufferable."
"You're marrying me anyway."
"Apparently."
We walk down the trail as the light goes fully orange, her hand in mine, the ring catching the last of it every time she moves her fingers.
Neither of us is in a hurry to get back to town.
Somewhere behind us the leaves keep falling, and ahead of us Silver Ridge is waiting, warm-lit and familiar, the same as it's always been and nothing like it was a year ago.
I used to measure my life in the space between one August and the next. I don't anymore.
Now I've just got Octobers like this one, and springs, and every ordinary Tuesday in between, and somehow those turned out to be the part I'd been waiting for all along.