5. Daniel
five
Daniel
"You back on the ladder the third or the tenth?" my foreman wants to know. "Because I've got the church re-deck and I've got the two rentals on Cedar and I can't do both with the kid and half a crew."
"Third." I'm sorting number twos into a flat with the phone jammed against my shoulder. "November third. Same as every year."
"You sound weird."
"I sound like a man holding a phone with his face."
He laughs and hangs up, and that's the whole conversation, because that's what I am to those guys — the estimator who disappears for October and comes back in a rain jacket with dirt under his nails and doesn't talk about it.
Eleven years on that crew. Not one of them has ever heard me say the word mycorrhizal.
Not one of them has ever seen me kneel down in the duff and say hello to a mushroom.
It's Wednesday morning and I've been on this mountain since six and I have thought about Monday night maybe forty times — not the whole of it, one part, the same part, over and over. Her hand on the back of my neck afterward. The way she said come here when she'd already had me.
A man can want something so specifically it starts operating like a warning.
I don't go up the mountain with her the next day.
I text her at five-forty in the morning — heading out early, big day, catch you after — and then I go out and work a draw I've never taken her to, and I don't catch her after.
I know exactly what I'm doing.
Three years ago there was a woman who came up from Kamloops in September and by the first of November had stopped answering, and the truth of it was I'd gone quiet first and let her fill in the rest. Seven years ago, the same shape with different hair.
Both times I told myself October did it — that no one's going to hold still while a man vanishes into a forest for thirty-one days a year, that it's the work, that it's the season, that it's nobody's fault.
Both times, I started leaving in the second week. And now, I'm in the second week.
Lena comes up the road at four in the afternoon with the light already going amber, and I hear the car before I see it, and I stand in the yard with a flat of matsutake in my arms like a man who's been caught.
She shuts the car door and leans back against it and folds her arms.
"You're not sick," she says. "You're not behind. You're not anything you said in the text."
"No."
"Okay." She nods slowly. "I want to say the thing and then I want to go, because if I stay I'll start apologising for it, and I'd rather not."
I set the flat down on the tailgate. "Say it."
"You're leaving before I do." Her voice is perfectly level.
The yard is very quiet. There's a raven going over, high up, working the ridge line.
"You have a story about October," she says.
"I've never heard it, but I know it's there, because you told me on Monday I was the first person you wanted to bring up here, which means there were other people up here, which means they left, and you've decided that's what October does.
" She pushes off the car. "So you got ahead of it.
Five days early. That's efficient, actually. That's good line work."
"That's not—"
"It is." She holds a hand up. "It's what I do too. I got ahead of my whole relationship by six months and then acted amazed when it ended."
I don't have anything. That's the truth. Twenty years of being the man who knows what everything is called, and I'm standing in my own yard with no name for what I've done.
"Here's the part you're not going to like," she says. "I don't have an answer for you either."
"Lena."
"No, listen, because this is the honest version and you deserve it more than the version where I'm brave.
" She comes three steps closer. "The offer's in my inbox.
Sous, same station, and a line in the email about how the summer taught him some things about how the kitchen runs and he'd like to talk about it when I'm back. "
"Do you believe him?"
"No." She laughs, short. "Maybe. That's the problem.
Two years of that man's approval built most of the inside of my head.
And walking back into that kitchen on Monday morning, whole, on time, not broken — do you understand how badly I want to be someone who did that?
Everyone who watched me leave gets to see me not fail. "
"And on the other side of it," she says, "is a man I've known for ten days and a forest with two weeks of season left in it.
So no. I haven't decided. I haven't emailed him back.
I'm not going to stand in your driveway and promise you something to make you feel safe, because that would be a lie, and you'd know it by the weekend. "
"I didn't ask you to."
"You didn't ask me anything. You went quiet." She says it without heat.
"Then say what you want from me."
"I want two days of you not managing the ending.
" Her hands come up and drop. "I have got a decision to make that is going to change my whole life and I would like to make it with the actual man, not the polite version who texts at five-forty in the morning.
Because if I decide to stay here — and I might, Daniel, I genuinely might — I need to know whether what I'd be staying for is a person or a season. "
She’s to the point. I appreciate that.
"That's fair," I say.
She gets back in the car.
I take one step off the porch. "Lena."
The window's down. She waits.
"I don't know how to do the next part," I say. "That's not an excuse. It's a fact about me."
"I know." Something in her face gentles. "Learn it fast. The market closes on the twenty-sixth."
She backs down the drive and turns onto the road and I stand there until I can't hear her engine over the creek.
Then I go inside and I don't turn a light on.
You're leaving before I do.
I sit down at the table in the dark with my coat still on.
She's right, and it's worse than she thinks, because it isn't only women.
It's why I've never had a picker with me.
It's why eleven years of crew know a version of me that's about forty percent of the total.
It's not that people leave. It's that I've built a life where nobody's ever close enough to.
And a woman who has been in this valley for twelve days walked into it and said the name of it out loud, in my yard, in the middle of the afternoon.
Abuela's whole trick. You can't walk past a thing once you know what it's called.
I get up at some point and light the lamp and stand at the drying screens with my hands behind my back, and I say them out loud, low, the way I always do.
"Chanterelle. Hedgehog. Trumpet."
And then, because it's true, and because there's nobody here to hear it:
"Lena."