8. Daniel
eight
Daniel
Next October...
There's frost on the truck in the morning for the first time this season, a good hard one, and I stand in the yard with two mugs and let her sleep the extra ten minutes.
The cabin's got a second chair at the table now and a knife block on the counter and a rack of her clogs by the door, and there's a house in town we've been circling since August that neither of us has said a serious sentence about yet.
It has a garage that would take four drying screens easy. I've measured it in my head twice.
She comes out onto the porch in my wool socks with her hair wrecked and takes the mug out of my hand without a word.
"Frost," she says.
"First one."
"So the trumpets are two weeks out."
"Give or take."
She drinks her coffee and looks at the ridge, and I look at her looking at it, and it doesn't get old, and I've had a year to test that.
I hand her the basket. The flat one, mesh through the bottom, the one that's been the spare for eleven years and hasn't been the spare since last October.
"Come on," I say. "Time to teach you what's not a chanterelle again."
"I know what's not a chanterelle."
"Prove it."
She's already got her boots on. She had them on before she came out, which means she'd decided before I did, which is the way most things go around here now.
"How long have we got up there?" she asks.
"Light's gone by six."
"So we're back by four." She hands me the empty mug and takes her time about the handoff, fingers over mine, and there's nothing accidental anywhere in it. "Because I've got plans for you and the stove and about two hours, and I'd like them in that order."
"Get in the truck, Lena."
We go up the switchback with the heater roaring and the light coming grey-gold over the shoulder of the mountain, and I park at the pullout, and the ground is stiff and silver and starting to let go.
She's fifteen paces ahead of me before I've got the tailgate shut. Straight up the bench, no map, no hesitation, into ground she named herself last November.
She stops. Goes down on one knee in the moss.
I hear her say it before I get there — quiet, to the ground, not to me.
"There you are."