Epilogue
The sign arrived yesterday.
It’s leaning against the front window of the shop, waiting for Drew to mount it this afternoon. Hand-painted wood, dark green letters on a cream background. Cross Country Outfitting. Terrain Consulting. Guided Adventures. Copper Peak, CO.
My shop. My name. Mine.
I run my fingers along the edge of the frame and feel the grin spread across my face before I can stop it.
Four years in business, and I still get this way about the sign.
The first one was a laminated printout taped to the window.
The second was a vinyl banner that blew off during a November storm.
This one is permanent. Drew had it commissioned from the woodworker in Ridgway without telling me, and when he brought it home last night, I cried into his shoulder for ten minutes while our daughter ate crackers on the kitchen floor and watched us like we’d lost our minds.
“Mama. Up.”
I turn around. Jani is standing in the middle of the shop with her arms raised, her dark auburn hair sticking up in three directions.
She’s two and a half, and everyone says she’s just like me.
The stubbornness, the certainty, the complete unwillingness to be talked out of something once she’s decided.
Drew says it’s like watching me handle a difficult client, except smaller and louder.
I pick her up and settle her on my hip. She grabs a fistful of my shirt and tucks her head under my chin. She smells like the maple oatmeal Drew made her this morning.
“You want to help me open?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. First we unlock the door.”
“I do it.”
She can’t reach the lock. She can barely reach the handle. But I crouch down and hold her close and let her put her hand over mine while I turn the key, and she beams like she just summited a fourteener.
The shop is small. Smaller than the chain store outfitter I used to manage, which is still in the Trading Post with a new manager who calls me for advice more often than corporate probably wants to know about.
I leased a space on the far end of Prospect Street, close to the station, and built it from nothing.
Gear wall, trail map display, a consultation table where I sit with clients and plan routes.
The terrain guides I put together for the fire district are framed on the wall behind the register. Drew insisted.
The fire district contract was my first client. Holt signed off on it the same week I filed my business license. Drew was right about that. The captain didn’t hesitate.
Now I’ve got the district, two resort partnerships, a summer guiding calendar that fills up by March, and a waiting list for private terrain consultations.
I turned down a franchise offer in April.
Corporate called, if you can believe that.
The same company I spent two years begging for permission.
They wanted to license my terrain consulting model for their mountain locations.
I said no. Politely. But no.
Jani squirms and I set her down. She toddles to the kids’ corner I set up by the window. A basket of board books, a few stuffed animals, and a tiny pair of hiking boots she can’t wear yet but likes to carry around. She grabs the boots and puts one on each hand like mittens.
The bell over the door rings.
Drew fills the doorway the way he’s filled every doorway since the first time I saw him.
Broad, tattooed, taking up space like the room wasn’t built for someone his size.
He has a drill in one hand and a mounting bracket in the other.
He’s still in his station tee and turnout pants, suspenders hanging loose at his hips.
“Straight from a call?” I ask.
“Structure fire on the pass. Small one.” He sets the drill down, strips off the turnout pants by the door, and kicks them aside. Station pants underneath. He holds up the mounting bracket. “Told Holt I had a sign to hang.”
He crosses the shop and bends down to kiss me.
His free hand lands on my stomach, which is just starting to round under my shirt.
Fourteen weeks. We found out the morning after Jani’s birthday, sitting on the bathroom floor at five a.m. while she slept down the hall.
He pulled me to my feet and held me and told me he loved me, and I believed him the same way I believed him the first time.
All the way through, no hesitation, no qualifier.
“Hey, Jani-bear,” he says.
Jani holds up her boot-mittens. “Shoes.”
“Those are shoes. Good work.”
He kisses the top of her head and goes to the window.
I watch him measure, mark, drill. He’s methodical about it.
Patient. He does everything that way now.
The guy who transferred to Copper Peak with nothing but a truck and a fear that he’d never belong is gone.
He’s been gone for years. Drew belongs here.
To the crew, to the town, to this mountain, to us.
He stopped being the new guy sometime in that first year, and Holt told me once over coffee at Lea’s that the station is better for having him.
The drill stops. He steps back.
“Come look.”
I pick up Jani and walk to the window. The sign is level, centered, exactly where it should be. Cross Country Outfitting. My name on a building on Prospect Street in the town where I found everything I was afraid to want.
Drew puts his arm around me. Jani pats the window with her boot-mitten. The morning light hits the green letters and turns them gold.
“It’s perfect,” I say.
He pulls me closer. “Yeah. It is.”
He’s looking at me when he says it.