2. Owen
two
Owen
The festival grounds take up the field behind the community center, and in the week before opening they turn into organized chaos.
Competition platforms go up. The log-rolling tank gets filled.
Vendors claim their spaces and start building out stalls.
The whole operation requires about forty people and about twice as much coordination as anyone wants to admit, and I've been running the competition setup for the last six years because no one else has the patience for it and because I'm here, always here, the way the mountain is here.
I get to the grounds at six in the morning. Earlier than I need to. I need to move.
The platform lumber is staged by the equipment shed — rough-cut spruce, same as always.
My crew shows up by seven: Dale and his nephew Brody, who is nineteen and useful if you point him at something concrete, and Martin from the mill, who I've worked with for eight years and who communicates almost entirely in hand gestures.
We start building. The axe-throwing lane gets three platforms — competition throw, warm-up, spectator barrier. It takes most of the morning.
By noon the lane is framed and I'm sinking posts for the target mounts.
Physical work is good. It moves the thing that's been sitting in my chest since I walked out of the diner last night.
I can feel it in the set of my shoulders — Dale notices, I can tell.
He's worked with me long enough to read the difference between focused and closed off, and right now I'm the latter, and he gives me space, which is why I keep him around.
I thought I was ready to see her.
I thought: ten years is a long time. You've gone ten years without a problem.
You've dated women, you've been fine. The town stopped mentioning her name around you after the first couple of years.
You've built a life here — a real one, crew, truck, cabin that's fully paid off, the kind of deep-root stability that suits you. You are fine.
And then she walked into the diner and I looked at her face and the decade fell completely off.
She looks different. That's true. City-cut hair, the quality of her clothes, a way of carrying herself that is polished. But her eyes are the same. Dark, steady, the ones I used to see when I closed mine in the first year after she left.
Brody drops a post and swears. I look at him.
"Sorry," he says.
"Plumb it before you brace it."
"Yes, sir."
I go back to sinking posts.
Martin appears beside me with the level at a quarter to two. He holds it against my work, checks it, hands it back without comment. The post is true. He nods.
"You've been off today," he says. Martin doesn't usually speak. When he does, you listen.
"I'm fine."
"Uh-huh."
"Post's plumb, isn't it."
"Post's fine. You're not." He picks up a brace plate. "Callahan girl's back."
I don't say anything.
"Saw her walking on Main this morning," Martin says. "Didn't look like she was staying long."
"She's not."
"Okay."
"Festival, then she goes back."
Martin sets the brace plate and picks up his drill. "Sure," he says.
The afternoon is long and good and physical.
By five o'clock the axe-throwing lane is framed and plumb and solid and I stand back and look at it with the satisfaction that comes from building something that wasn't there in the morning.
The targets will go up tomorrow. I'll practice Thursday morning before the competition opens to the public.
I've won the axe-throwing event four of the last six years. I'm good with an axe. I'm good with anything that requires patience and force in the right sequence, anything where the margin for error is something you can calculate and account for and correct through repetition.
The thing about seeing Grace Callahan is that she got under the armor before I even knew I had armor.
She was twenty years old the first time I talked to her — at a bonfire out at the McCready property, a big August gathering the way Silver Ridge has always done.
She was back from her first year at UBC and she was bright and direct and slightly wry in a way that felt new to me, someone who had grown up with people who were more straightforward, less curved.
I talked to her for three hours that night without noticing the time. That had never happened to me before.
We were together for three years. She was the clearest thing in my life.
Then she was gone.
I load the last of the staging lumber into the equipment shed and lock the padlock.
The festival grounds are quiet now — most of the crews have knocked off for the day.
The mountains are doing what they do at this hour, going all that orange and rose, and the air is warm and smells like pine and sawdust and the dry August heat that means tomorrow will be a good day for building.
She's at her mother's house six blocks off Main. I know because Mara Callahan and my mother used to run the bake table at the summer fair together, back before my mother moved to Kelowna to be near my sister. The town is a grid. There are no real secrets here.
I walk to my truck and get in and sit for a minute.
I told her to go. That's the thing I keep coming back to, the one that still doesn't sit right no matter how I arrange it.
She was offered a position with an event company in Vancouver — good money, real opportunity, the kind of trajectory that didn't exist in Silver Ridge.
And I was twenty-four and stubborn and proud and I loved her in the certain way of someone who has never questioned a thing in his life, and I sat across from her at this same diner and said you should take it.
She asked if I'd come with her.
I said Silver Ridge was home.
She left three weeks later. She cried the night before, and I held her, and I thought she'd change her mind. She didn't. I didn't ask her to. I was too proud to ask. I thought asking was the same as not letting her go, and I wouldn't trap her, not even with the wanting.
Ten years of being certain that was the right call.
Tonight I'm not certain of anything at all.