3. Faye
three
Faye
The obstacle course has rules, and Rue explains them twice because I get them wrong the first time.
"Pile one you jump. Pile two you walk through slow because it's the swamp. Pile three you jump and spin. Then you have to touch the fence post and come back but you can't step on the same footprints."
"How would I know where my footprints are?"
Rue looks at me with the flat pity of a woman explaining something obvious. "You remember them."
It's Saturday, four in the afternoon, and the light is doing the thing October light does here — coming in low and gold under the branches so every leaf on the ground is lit from the side.
The maples along Gideon's drive have dumped everything they had.
Rue has raked it into three piles with a rake taller than she is.
I am wearing a wool coat that cost more than my first car.
"Okay," I say.
"You have to go first."
I jump pile one. I wade though pile two at swamp pace with my arms out.
I jump pile three and spin and land badly and go down on one knee in wet leaves, and Rue shrieks with the specific joy of a child watching an adult fail publicly, and I get up with leaf mould all down my shin and keep going.
I touch the fence post. I come back avoiding footprints I cannot see.
By round three there's a leaf in my collar and my hair is out of its clip and my coat is a write-off.
I do not care even slightly, and that should worry me more than it does.
That's when I hear him laugh.
Gideon's on the porch with a mug in one hand, and the sound is low and unguarded and it goes on longer than I'd have guessed he had in him.
I've heard him make an amused noise. I've heard him be dry.
I have not heard a true laugh, head tipped back, a man laughing at his kid and the woman his kid has conscripted.
I stand in the wreckage of pile two with my hands on my knees, breathing hard, and I look up at him.
"You're supposed to be timing us," Rue yells.
"I lost count at the spin," he says.
"You always lose count."
"I do."
He comes down the steps and hands me a mug. Coffee, black, too hot. Our fingers cross on the handle and neither of us makes a production of it, and I take a sip and hand it back and he drinks from the same side.
Rue is already rebuilding pile three. Rue has, apparently, unlimited fuel.
"She's been doing that course since Tuesday," Gideon says. "You're the first person who ran it right."
"I ran it wrong twice."
"Wrong is different from not trying." He watches his daughter fling an armful of leaves at the sky. "Most people crouch down and do the voice."
"I hate the voice."
"So does she."
He reaches over and takes something out of my hair. A maple leaf, half a handspan across, red going brown at the tips. He looks at it, then hands it to me instead of dropping it, which is a small thing and lands like a large one.
"You're cold," he says.
"I'm fine."
"Your hands are purple."
"They're always like that."
He takes one anyway. Turns it palm up in both of his and rubs the heat back into it with his thumbs, methodically, the way you'd work oil into a board, and he does it looking down at my hand and not at my face. His hands are enormous and rough at every contact point and warm all the way through.
I stand in a driveway full of wrecked leaf piles and let a man I've known nine days warm my fingers, and I don't say anything, because if I open my mouth I'm going to say something I can't take back in front of his child.
"Other one," he says.
I give him the other one.
Rue yells that we're wasting daylight, and he lets go, and my hand stays hot for twenty minutes.
Later — Rue inside with a bath and a book and the specific outrage of a child sent in while it's still light — he takes me through the mill.
The saws are off. That matters. In the quiet, the building has a smell like a church that got into carpentry: cedar, fir, chain oil, cold concrete. He walks me down the length of the carriage and the light comes through the high windows full of dust.
"Grandfather put this up in '52," he says. "Head rig's newer. Everything else is his or my father's."
"You were the second family up here, then."
"Third." He says it like a man handing over something he assumed I already had. "Corrigans cleared that bench in 1911. Your great-great-grandfather. There was a house on it before there was a mill down here — my grandfather milled the shakes for its roof in '58 and got paid in beef."
I stop walking.
"There's a rectangle up there," I say. "And four lilacs."
"That's it."
"I thought it was a barn."
"Your grandmother was born in it." He turns to face me.
"Ada lived up there till '94. Your grandfather got sick — something they could only treat on the coast — so they went down to Victoria for the winter and he died in the spring and she never came back to live.
House stood empty nine years and went in under snow load in '03.
Came back every May regardless. Walked the line and went home. "
Thirty-one years. She kept a collapsed house and a fence line she couldn't do anything with, and she drove eleven hours round trip every May to look at it, and she asked me to come the entire time I was old enough to say yes.
I was born three years after she left. I have never once thought about that as a fact with a reason attached.
"She never told me any of it," I say.
Gideon doesn't fill the silence, which is the kindest available option.
I run a hand along a beam. Hand-hewn. Old growth, tight-ringed, the kind of wood you cannot buy now at any price.
"You can't get this," I say.
"No."
He stops at a stack of slabs against the far wall, pulls the top one out and stands it on edge with one hand like it weighs nothing. Live edge, maybe four feet across, figured through the middle in ripples. "Big leaf maple. Off the Dunlop place before they logged it. Been drying six years."
I crouch down beside it without deciding to. The figure in the grain moves when you shift your head — a ripple that isn't there and then is, like water under ice.
"That's not a pattern," I say. "That's stress. The tree was leaning."
He looks down at me.
"Most people say it's pretty."
"It is pretty. It's pretty because something was pushing on it for a hundred years."
He doesn't answer that for long enough that I stand back up.
"What's it for?"
"Don't know yet." He turns it toward the window so the light rakes across the figure. "You don't cut something like this until you know."
That's when I get it.
I've been running this whole thing as a transaction. Motivated buyer, adjacent parcel, obvious synergies, close it and go. I put him in the box marked acquiring neighbour on day one and I've been negotiating with the box.
This isn't a man protecting an asset. This is the last working mill in a valley that used to have four, and he's third generation, and he's got six people on payroll and a seven-year-old upstairs with a jar of graded sawdust, and my grandmother's sixty-one acres are the ground his landing needs to expand onto without touching the creek.
I'm holding a piece of something that has to stay whole.
"Why do you want it?" I ask. "The land. Really."
He sets the slab back. Takes his time.
"Ask me at the end of the week," he says.
"That's not an answer."
"No."
He's close now. Neither of us stepped, exactly — the aisle between the stacks is narrow and we've both drifted into it.
I can smell sawdust and cold air and the coffee on him.
There's a curl of shaving caught in the cuff of his sleeve and I reach out and take it off, and I don't take my hand back right away.
Half a second. Maybe less. My fingers on the canvas of his sleeve and the pulse in my thumb doing something ridiculous.
He looks down at my hand.
He doesn't move toward me. That's the thing that undoes me — he holds absolutely still, and the stillness is not indifference, it's a man with both hands on the wheel. His jaw works once. His breath comes out slower than it went in.
"Faye," he says.
Only that. My name in a room full of dust and low sun, and the sound of it goes through the floor of me the way the saw did.
The porch door bangs. "DAD. THE WATER'S TOO HOT."
He steps back. I take my hand off his sleeve.
"Coming," he calls. He looks back at me. “Faye is with her mom this weekend, if you’d like to stop by for dinner.”
He’s asking me out for a date without really asking.
“Sure.”
I drive back to the rental cabin with the heater roaring and the shaving from his sleeve still between my fingers, and I put it on the dash where I'll see it.