2. Holt
Holt
I hear her car on the access road before I see it. Billings plate. Practical SUV, not new. I'm at the woodpile, and I keep splitting. I don't stop. I don't look over.
I notice when she gets out.
She stands in the yard and looks at the cabin the way I'd expect, but then her chin comes up, and she walks to the porch and puts her hand on one of the posts. She's feeling the wood, running her palm along the grain, and she does it the way I'd do it, which is not what I was expecting.
I set down the maul.
Up close, she is gorgeous. Dark hair coming loose in the heat.
Curves her clothes aren't trying to hide.
Shoes that are completely wrong for this ground, and she knows it, and she's here anyway.
She turns around when she hears me and looks me straight in the face without moving back, and that's when I understand the situation I'm in.
I've been on this mountain thirteen years. I know what it feels like when something big is about to happen. You feel it before you can name it. I look at her and I feel it before I can name it, and I'm thirty-seven years old and too set in my ways to pretend otherwise.
I tell her about the pump, the roof, the culvert.
She pushes back on the logic of the pump — not my property — and I can see her trying to find the flaw in it and not quite getting there, and something about watching her work through it quietly is more interesting than it should be.
She listens and doesn't fill the pauses.
When I say my name she gives me hers — Sloane.
I walk back to my cabin before I stand there staring at her any longer than I already have.
***
I'm twenty minutes late to the mill.
Denny's waiting at the gate with a coffee and the look he gets when he's decided not to say something. Nine years he's worked with me. He knows the difference between me having a problem and me having a thing on my mind that isn't his business. "Blade tension on the primary," I say.
"Already checked it. Delivery manifest needs a sign-off."
He hands me the clipboard. I look at it. I sign it. Denny takes it back, glances at my signature, and says nothing. He's a smart man.
I run the floor. Walk the lumber yard. Check the drying stacks.
Every part of my job that involves my hands and not my head, because my head is somewhere else and has been since seven this morning.
I pick up a two-by-eight from the drying stack and run my thumb along the grain without seeing it. Set it back.
At two o'clock Denny finds me at the saw. "You want to tell me why you signed off on the Ridgemont load going to Missoula?"
I straighten up. "I didn't."
He holds out the manifest. I look at my own handwriting next to the wrong box. There's a pause. "New neighbor," I say. Damn, I really am distracted by her.
Denny looks at me for a long moment. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Takes the clipboard back to fix it, which is the correct decision and one I appreciate.
I drive home at five. Her SUV is still in the yard.
I sit in my truck for a moment longer than I need to, engine off, looking at the two cabins side by side — mine dark and settled, hers lit up from inside, the particular warm glow of someone moving through a space and making it theirs.
I can hear her through the open window from here.
Footsteps. The drag of furniture. The sound of a tape measure snapping back.
I get out.
I go to my woodpile and pull my shirt over my head and split what's left. The heat is still thick at five o'clock in July, the kind that sits on your shoulders, and I work through it. I'm not thinking about anything in particular. I'm thinking about her. These are not contradictory statements.
She comes out eventually. I hear the screen door and I don't look up — I set my feet and bring the maul down clean and stack the split pieces and reach for the next round.
She's changed into sensible boots and she's got a notepad.
She stops in the yard and tips her head back to look at the roofline.
I wait. She writes something. Studies it. Writes something else.
I carry an armload to the woodshed and come back and she's still at it, circling around to the east side now, shading her eyes. She doesn't ask me anything. She's working, the same way I'm working, and we're doing it in the same yard, and neither of us is making anything of it.
I wash up at the outdoor tap. The water runs cold over my hands and forearms and I feel her attention on me the same way you feel the sun move — a shift in warmth, a change in direction. When I look up she's looking at the roofline again, very focused, notepad in hand.
"The soft spot," I say. "Six inches south of the ridge cap. You can see where the pitch changed."
She looks where I'm pointing, and her eyes track along the line of the roof. "Someone patched it from the inside," she says.
"Your uncle. About four years ago. He knew what he was doing."
She nods, writes it down. "What was he like?"
I didn't expect that question. Most people ask about the property — the age of the roof, what the foundation's sitting on, whether there's a survey.
She's asking about the man. "Quiet," I say.
"Particular about his work. Had opinions about cedar he'd share if you asked and not otherwise. " I pause. "Good neighbor."
She looks up from her notepad. There's something in her face that isn't pity — something quieter than that, more careful.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't know him well.
I should have visited more." She says it plainly, without looking for anything back from me, and I don't say anything because there's nothing that makes that easier, and she doesn't need me to try.
We stand there for a moment in the long evening light. A hawk cuts across the sky above the ridge, and she watches it until it drops below the tree line.
"Pump fitting," I say. "I'll leave one on your step. I have an extra."
She stares at me. Then the corner of her mouth moves, testing whether it's going to turn into something more, deciding not yet. "Do you always communicate like this, or is it a special occasion?"
"Like what?"
"Like you're being charged per word. Like every sentence costs you something and you're budgeting carefully."
I consider that. "Well needed to work," I say. "That's why I ordered it. That's the whole story."
She laughs and turns back to her notepad. "Okay," she says. "Thank you. For the part."
I go inside. I make dinner and eat it standing and wash up and tell myself I'm done for the day, which I believe for about an hour.
After dark I take the fitting off the truck and walk it to her porch and set it on the step.
I'm turning to go when her door opens. She's changed into a soft t-shirt, hair down from whatever she'd had it pinned in, and she looks at the fitting and then at me with an expression I can't fully read — something between surprised and not-surprised-at-all.
"You didn't have to bring it over tonight," she says.
"I was up."
"It's nine-thirty."
"I know what time it is."
She leans against the doorframe, arms loosely crossed, looking at me with the unhurried attention she seems to give everything.
The porch light is off and it's just the warm dark and the stars and the tree line and her standing in her doorway in a t-shirt with her hair down, and I am aware of all of this with my whole body.
"I would have found it in the morning," she says.
"I know."
"So you just… wanted to bring it over?"
"Seemed like the right thing to do. It’s dark, though. I’ll have to install it tomorrow."
She tilts her head a little, studying me. "I'm starting to figure out how you work," she says. "It's taking me longer than it usually does with people."
"Most people talk more."
"Most people do," she agrees. "I'm not sure that's worked out well for me.
" She glances up at the sky — the full spread of it, which never gets less remarkable even after thirteen years — and something in her face relaxes, opens up.
"You don't get skies like this in Billings," she says. Not to me, exactly. Just out loud.
"No," I say. "You don't."
She looks back at me. We're standing maybe six feet apart; the night is warm, and the pines are dark around us.
She is looking at me with those eyes that are always doing more than looking, and I think about the way her palm read the cedar grain on that porch post this morning like she already knew what she was going to find.
We look at each other in the warm dark, and neither of us moves, and neither of us looks away. The moment goes on long enough that it stops being accidental and starts being a choice that we’re both making.
"Goodnight," I say.
"Goodnight, Holt."