Page 14

“Go to bed.”

She tips her face up, grinning. “Devastating.”

I kiss her on her lit porch until she’s boneless and laughing and pushing me off, telling me she has to sleep. I watch her go in. I wait for the lock to turn and the porch light to go dark before I walk back to my truck, and the whole drive up the mountain to my place I’ve got the shape of her against me still, printed in.

I don’t sleep much. I lie in the dark in the cabin with my hands behind my head and run it back. All of it—the mug and the shim and the fire and the stump and the sky. Underneath every piece of it is the same steady certainty that showed up three days ago and hasn’t shifted an inch.

Her. It’s her. I’ve never been surer of one thing in my life, and I’ve built my whole life on being sure.

The regional’s at dawn. I’ve pointed my entire fall at it. Two-time defending, the whole valley in the stands, the title that’s supposed to be the thing that matters most to me this time of year.

I lie there and I can’t make it matter. It’s a saw and a log and a crowd, and she’s asleep three streets back from Prospect with bark scrapes on her shoulders from a tree I put her against. If I had to choose between the title and her opening morning, it’s not a contest. I’d hand somebody else the saw and go pour cider.

That’s the thing I should tell her. I just don’t have a way to say it.

Because here’s what I keep circling at two in the morning. She needs to hear it. Out loud. In words, before I go. She told me herself at the fire—the people worth being seen by are the ones who back away from her. And a man who’s gone before she’s even awake, no goodbye, no word left behind, is going to look like exactly one more person backing off.

She’ll wake and reach across town for me and find me already gone. That’s the shape of the thing she’s most afraid of, and I’m about to build it for her with my own two hands.

So say it, then. Wake her. Stand on her porch at four in the morning and say it out loud.

I lie there and try to build the sentence and I can’t. Every version of it in my head sounds like my father’s kitchen. You’re the one. I’ve never been surer. I’ll be back before you know it.

Every version of it sounds like my father in the kitchen. You’re the one. I’ve never been surer. Back before you know it. Dad could say things like that in his sleep. He said them for years, easy, warm, meaning every one right up until Monday came and proved he’d meant none of it. Talk was the thing he was best at and the thing he did the most damage with.

So I stopped believing anybody’s words, my own included, and started believing what someone actually did. Now the one time it matters I’ve got a mouthful of the exact thing my father was so good at, and I don’t trust it enough to hand it to her.

So I’ll do what I trust. I’ll show her.

It makes sense at four in the morning. It makes all the sense in the world, lying alone in the dark with the certainty humming in me and no way to say it that I believe. I don’t have the words. But I have two hands and a maul and a truck, and I have a woman who runs a kettle daily and will burn through a quarter cord a week. I can give her the thing that means I’ll be back in the only language I’ve ever trusted to keep its promises.

I’m up before the sky grays.

I drive down quietly, parking at the mouth of the alley behind Prospect so the diesel won’t wake the street. I work in the dark by the light off my phone. I split a good stack off the rounds I bucked from her own pine—forearm lengths, dry at the cut ends, kettle-sized. I lay them up in a tight cross-hatch at the back corner of her canopy where she found the first stack, where she’ll see it the second she gets in.

Enough for opening day and the weekend both. Enough that she won’t run short while I’m gone. Enough, I think, working in the cold with my breath ghosting, that she’ll know. She’ll see the wood and she’ll know I was here, that I came before dawn, that I thought about her kettle before I thought about my own title.

The wood says it. The wood says back soon and I’ve got you and this is real better than my mouth ever could.

I stand back and look at it in the gray light coming up. A tidy stack of split pine at the corner of a staked-down canopy. It’s the truest thing I know how to say.

I almost go to her house.

I stand in the alley, maul in my hand, the sky going pale. I almost drive the three streets over, almost knock, almost wake her to try, one time, to make the words come. My keys are already in my hand. Her porch is a four-minute drive. The whole rest of it turns on this and some animal part of me knows it, tugs at me, go, say it, don’t leave her the wood and a cold spot, she needs the words, not the pine⁠—

The regional horn is at seven. Matt’s got my lineup. The crew’s meeting me at the grounds at 6:30. Deacon’s already texted twice. I have a title to defend, a two-hour drive ahead of me, and a woman asleep three streets over who needs her rest before the biggest day of her season. Waking her to stammer out something I don’t even trust would be the selfish move, the thing that serves me instead of her.

The wood serves her. The wood’s already said it.

I tell myself that. I set the maul in the truck bed. I take one last look at the stack, pale and solid in the dawn, and I get behind the wheel and point the truck down the valley toward the grounds, toward the title, toward the thing that’s supposed to matter.

Three streets over, she’s likely still asleep. I haven’t said one word to her that she can hear.

I drive. The mountain lightens behind me. And somewhere around the second switchback, with Prospect gone from the mirrors, the certainty that’s been so steady for three days picks up a thin new sound underneath it. Quiet, insistent. A sound I don’t have a name for yet and won’t until it’s too late to do anything but turn the truck around.

I keep driving. I’ve said it in the wood.

That’s enough.