Page 3 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

"Like what?"

"Interested." She takes her glasses off. "Fair warning. He's the most sociable man in this valley. Talks to every soul who comes through that tasting room, remembers all their names, asks after their mothers." She lets that sit. "That was not that."

I pick up the car and put it in my coat pocket. Tell myself it's because I need the address for the file.

"My grandfather," I say. "What did he plant?"

"Apples," Hettie says. "Nine acres of them. And then the council voted his water out from under him, and he never spoke to this town again."

two

Orrin

The tasting room's empty in the flat hour before the market crowd rolls up from town. Long room, west windows, the bar running the whole right-hand wall in fir I pulled out of a barn in Lister and planed myself. Four tables. Stove in the corner, lit since Tuesday. Behind me the cellar door's propped open and cold's coming up the stairs, so the room is warm at your face and cool at your ankles, which is my favourite thing about it and the only interior design decision I've ever made on purpose.

Her rental car pulls into the gravel at four.

She comes up the porch steps in a wool coat that has never been near a farm and boots that are new, and I watch her clock the room in about four seconds.

"Alright, like I said: I'm not here to be lobbied," she says.

"Noted."

"I'm here because your fence line encroaches eighteen inches onto the parcel on the northeast corner and I need it disclosed before Friday."

"Eighteen inches." I set the tulip glass on the bar. "That's the tightest excuse anybody's ever used to walk through that door."

She doesn’t laugh. She doesn't take her coat off. I like that she doesn't pretend.

I pour the dry single-varietal. It’s called the Northern Spy, the third year I've made it, the one that finally came out the way I heard it in my head. I set it in front of her, and I lean on the bar.

"Tell me what you taste," I say.

"That's a sales technique."

"It's a question."

She picks it up. She's humouring me, and she knows I know it, and she does the thing people do when they're humouring you, which is to swirl it once like they've seen someone do on television. Then she puts her nose in the glass and stops.

I watch her stop.

She drinks. She holds it. Her eyes go somewhere else — past me, past the window, out to the poplars on the parcel that are going gold from the top down.

"Autumn," she says.

The word comes out of her before she's checked it. I see the checking arrive afterward, a half-second late, her mouth closing on the end of it like she's caught something on its way out and couldn't hold the door.

I've handed that glass to maybe four hundred people. I've had crisp. I've had not too sweet. I had a man from Calgary tell me it tasted like a hayride, and I've dined out on that for two years.

Nobody has ever told me the truth by accident before.

"Yeah," I say. My voice comes out wrong. Too quiet for a tasting room. "That's what it is."

She sets the glass down and her hand isn't entirely steady, and she looks at it like her hand has betrayed her personally.

"It's just fermented fruit," she says.

"It's nine varieties off four farms, and two of those farms will be subdivisions in a decade, and the one that won't is Harding Orchards, and Rourke Harding is forty years old and has no one behind him." I straighten up. "So yeah. It's fermented fruit."