3. Lena
three
Lena
Daniel is talking to the ground and not me. "There you are."
He's on his knees in a bed of needles under a stand of pine. What comes out is white and firm and dense as a fist, nothing like the delicate gold I've spent four days learning.
He holds the mushroom under my nose.
It hits the back of my throat before it hits my brain. Cinnamon, hot and red. Then, underneath, something that has no business being in the same room as cinnamon — feet, laundry left in the machine, a locker room in August.
"Oh," I say. "Oh, that's filthy."
"That's four hundred dollars a kilo in Vancouver if I grade them right."
"For that smell?"
"For that smell." He turns it in his hand, checking the veil. "This one's a number three. Cap's already broken. The buyers want them closed, the size of your thumb, before they know they're mushrooms."
"That's insane. This one has actual flavour. The baby ones are all texture."
He looks up at me from the ground with an expression I'm starting to be able to read, which is a thing I couldn't do on Saturday.
"Say that again," he says.
"The closed ones are texture. The open ones are flavour. If I were cooking these I'd want the ugly ones."
"Twenty years I've been shipping the good ones away and eating the ugly ones," he says. "And in twenty years nobody has said that to me out loud."
I have been in professional kitchens since I was twenty.
Six years of them. Two at Marchand, on Hamilton Street, where Yves put me on sauté at twenty-three and sous at twenty-five and where a service ran on the understanding that whoever wanted it least got to leave first. I was very good there.
In fact, I was excellent, and I was proud of being excellent, and I stayed on the line with a burn on my forearm the size of a business card because leaving to run it under water would have been a thing people remembered about me.
And then in April I stood at my station during a Saturday second seating and looked at a plate of scallops I'd cooked perfectly and felt exactly nothing. Not pride, not relief. The dial was gone. I put the plate up. I put up two hundred more plates.
In May the guy I'd been with for two years, who worked as a manger four feet away from me and had never once asked me a question about my day that wasn't about the walk-in, told me I'd become impossible to be around, and he wasn't entirely wrong.
In June I asked for a leave and Yves gave it to me without a second thought. Six weeks unpaid, starting the eighth of September, once the summer menu was through. Sous chef, same station, same kitchen, waiting for me on the twentieth of this month.
I have not once, in five days on this mountain, thought about a plate of scallops.
I've thought about a man with mud to his elbows saying there you are to a mushroom.
"Why do you do that?" I ask.
He's brushing needles off the matsutake, unhurried. "Do what?"
"Talk to them. You name everything out loud. All day. You said good morning to a raven on Tuesday."
"That raven's been on this bench longer than I have."
"Daniel."
He sits back on his heels. The rain isn't in yet but the light's gone thin and grey and the whole draw smells like wet bark.
"My abuela taught me to pick," he says. "Rosaria.
Down in the Okanagan, when I was six, seven.
She walked slow. She had bad hips by then and she used to make me go ahead and come back and report.
" He turns the mushroom over. "She named everything she saw.
Out loud, the whole walk. Trees, birds, weeds, the ones we weren't picking. I thought it was for me. Teaching."
"It wasn't?"
"She did it alone too. I caught her at it once from the porch, out in the yard, no one within a mile of her.
" He shrugs, one shoulder. "She'd say — if you know what it's called, you can't walk past it.
That's the whole trick. You look at a hillside, you see a hillside.
You know eleven things on it by name, you can't see a hillside anymore.
You see all eleven, every time. She thought that was the best thing that could happen to a person. "
"She sounds like she was right."
"She died when I was nineteen. There's no house left, no land, my mother sold the lot in ninety-nine." He says it plainly, no weight added. "What I've got left is the habit. It's the only part of her that's still doing anything."
I don't say anything. This is a skill I've acquired from him.
"So I say the names," he says. "Out loud. In an empty forest. It's the least strange thing I do."
"What's the strangest?"
"Bringing a stranger up here."
I feel that deep in my heart.
We work the draw until the light starts to fade.
Daniel's got the tailgate down, sorting into flats by grade, headlamp on. I've been given the number twos. I sort them because I like the sorting and because it means standing eight inches from him in the dark, and I have entirely stopped pretending otherwise.
"You're cooking these?”
"The lodge lets me in the kitchen after nine. I've been doing chanterelles in butter every night since Saturday and eating them standing at the counter like a raccoon. Last night I did the ugly ones sliced raw and thin with lemon and salt and a scrape of the good butter and I nearly cried."
"Raw."
"Raw. You should try it before you ship the rest of your life away in a cooler."
He turns his head, and the headlamp beam goes across my face and off, and he reaches up and shuts it off so we're standing in the blue of the last light.
"Sorry," he says. "That was in your eyes."
I didn’t mind.
I can hear the creek from here, and I am close enough to see the grain of the stubble along his jaw and the wet at his collar, and neither of us is sorting anything anymore.
He lifts his hand to the strap of my jacket, where it's twisted at my shoulder, and he straightens it with two fingers, slowly, like the strap is a thing that has been bothering him for hours.
His knuckles touch the side of my neck. The warmth makes my breath catch.
"It’s supposed to rain Sunday night," he says, and his voice has dropped to somewhere it hasn't been all week. "Sunday and Monday both. Monday's the bad one."
"You said."
"I've got a cabin up the road. Ten minutes past the second switchback." He takes his hand back. It takes him a while to do it. "There's a stove in it. If you come out Monday, you'll want somewhere to put your clothes."
I suppose that’s Daniel’s way of inviting me back to his place. Wet socks. Pretty romantic for a mushroom forgager, I think.