Page 6 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

"You counted them too."

"Every spring." He pulls a bruised one out and lobs it into a second bin without turning. "Eighteen-foot spacing, north-south, which is wide for the old standards. He was planning for a tractor he didn't own yet."

"You could have told me that yesterday. In the office. In front of Hettie."

"I could have."

"Why didn't you?"

He straightens up. Wipes his forearms on a rag hanging off the bin.

"Because you'd have heard it as a pitch," he says. "You had to go stand on it."

He's got apple pulp dried up his forearms to the elbow and there's a smear of it along his jaw where he's pushed his hair back with the back of his wrist. I have a very unhelpful thought about the size of his hands on the bin and how easily he lifted it.

That's the moment I stop being able to manage this.

Not the cider. Not the ledger. This — a man who wanted something badly enough to spend two years on it, choosing to lose ground in a negotiation rather than hand me a fact I hadn't earned.

"I still have a buyer with cash," I say.

"I know." He picks up the bin, hoists it against his hip like it weighs nothing, and holds the shed door with his boot. "Come see the press. It's not a pitch. It's the only thing I've got to show anybody."

The tank room is cold and smells like bread and orchard and something faintly sour underneath, and he walks me down the row of stainless tanks with his hand flat on each one as he passes, and he tells me what's inside them by touch and temperature, and he doesn't look at me once.

I stand at the far end, near the open cellar stairs, and watch a man be entirely himself in a building he built, and there's a pull under my sternum with a hook on the end of it.

He turns around at the bottom of the row.

Stops. Looks at me down forty feet of concrete floor.

And doesn't say anything at all.

He comes back up the row. Takes longer over it than the distance requires. When he reaches me he doesn't stop at the polite distance — he stops inside it, close enough that I have to tip my head to keep his eyes, close enough that I can smell apple and cold metal and the faint sweetness that lives in his jacket, and the concrete is doing something to the sound of both of us breathing.

He reaches past my shoulder.

I don't move. I have an entire second to understand that I'm not going to move.

He pulls the cellar door shut behind me, and the latch drops, and the cold stops coming up the stairs.

"Draft," he says.

"Right."

Neither of us steps back.

Then somebody's tires come up the gravel outside. A delivery, a neighbour, somebody who has no idea — and he says he should get that, and he does.

I stand in a cold room with my hand flat on a stainless tank and take four steadying breaths I'm glad nobody witnessed.

four

Orrin

Last two glasses go in the rack, both towels over the tap rail, front door bolted, and the room's mine again with the stove ticking down and the cellar breathing cold up the stairwell.

She's still on the third stool. She's been on the third stool for two hours, which is one hour and forty minutes longer than an eighteen-inch encroachment discussion requires.